David Byrne Quotes

Sometimes you have to shove all the surface stuff to the side in order to see what's underneath.

People look at you, and they think they know you. They think they can place you in a certain category by what they think they know about you. But there's so much more to all of us than what we know and what we see at face value.

You don't ask about what can be seen.

Spurn not a seeming error, but dig below its surface for the truth.

Behind all seen things lies something vaster; everything is but a path, a portal or a window opening on something other than iteself.

Everything we see… is just the visible part of reality.

The surface of things is not where attention should rest.

There's so much visible stuff around now, we're tempted to forget that it's usually the invisible that matters most.

There's always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline.

There's nothing wrong with enjoying looking at the surface of the ocean itself, except that when you finally see what goes on underwater,you realize that you've been missing the whole point of the ocean. Staying on the surface all the time is like going to the circus and staring at the outside of the tent.

I'm hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.

There is more going on beneath the surface than we think, and more going on in little, finite moments of time than we would guess.

The vulgar herd catches at the gross apparent fact, but the man of insight knows what lies on the surfaces does lie.

The thing that is important is the thing that is not seen.

To understand matters rightly we should understand their details; and as that knowledge is almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect.

The modern world’s tech-giddy control and facilitation makes us stupid. Awareness atrophies. Dumb gets dumber. Lists are everywhere – the five things you need to know about so-and-so; the eight essential qualities of such-and-such; the 11 delights of somewhere or other. We demand shortcuts, as if there are shortcuts to genuine experiences. These lists are meaningless.

I don't know a critic who penetrates the center of anything.

Later, however, I came to recognize the objective nature of these dreams or fantasies ... Thus it was that I gradually came to acknowledge that such fantasies or dreams are neither meaningless nor purely arbitrary but rather convey a sort of "second meaning" of the terms applied.

All good art is about something deeper than it admits.

My theory is - we don’t really go that far into other people, even when we think we do. We hardly ever go in and bring them out. We just stand at the jaws of the cave, and strike a match, and ask quickly if anybody’s there.

I believe there's a landscape that exists underneath everything that we can see in present-day stuff. And I think that makes life kind of a detective story.

You can't be deep without a surface

I still can't believe it . . . him comin' here everyday, nobody realizin'. Still, that's life: lotta stuff happens under the waterline.

It is necessary, in order to know things well, to know the particulars of them; and these, being infinite, make our knowledge eversuperficial and imperfect.

I think that I'm always trying to get beyond the surface appearance of things, to go beyond what I can just see.