Shallow Living Quotes

I see people allowing their lives to diminish, to become shallow, so they can't enjoy the deep wells of experience. Maybe it's always been this way, when the heart tends to shut down. If only the heart shut down and there were no repercussions, it would be O.K., but when the heart shuts down, the whole system goes into a kind of despair that is intolerable.

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.

And, I think: I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence. Of the millions, I, too, was potentially everything at birth. I, too, was stunted, narrowed, warped, by my environment, my outcroppings of heredity. I, too, will find a set of beliefs, of standards to live by, yet the very satisfaction of finding them will be marred by the fact that I have reached the ultimate in shallow, two-dimensional living — a set of values.

May not the inadequacy of much of our spiritual experience be traced back to our habit of skipping through the corridors of the Kingdom like children in the market place, chattering about everything, but pausing to learn the value of nothing.

To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.

There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.

Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.

We now demand glamour and fast-flowing dramatic action. A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals...The tragic results of this spirit all all about us: shallow lives, hollow religious philosophies...the glorification of men, trust is religious externalities....salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit. These and such of these are the symptoms of an evil disease.

Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything, making everything vulgar, and every truth false.

Anybody can lead a frivolous life. A frivolous writer, however, must have taste and intelligence.

They chatter together like birds on Cypress Hill, but all they say is 'Live, live, live, live, live!' It's all they've learned, it's the only advice they can give.

People who see life as anything more than pure entertainment are missing the point.

To live for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.

The strange thing - and this is one of the advantages of being incredibly shallow and superficial - is that wherever I am, that's sort of home.

Life can be very deep, but I'm trying to stay at the shallow end.

There are sordid souls that eat and drink and breed and die, and imagine they have lived.