While love ceaselessly strives toward that which lies at the hiddenmost center, hatred only perceives the topmost surface . . .
There's the media-driven universe, in which the public perceives you in a superficial way. Then there's the universe that you actually inhabit, where you have to get up even if you didn't sleep so well, and you feel like crap and your face is swollen.
People think I'm as shallow and superficial as I look, and it's a surprise when they find out, sure enough, I am.
I felt like people only knew me as a singer who dated pretty girls.
Many Americans think of the rest of the world as a kind of Disneyland, a showplace for quaint fauna, flora and artifacts. They dress for travel in cheap, comfortable, childish clothes, as if they were going to the zoo and would not be seen by anyone except the animals.
When people look only at the surface and that satisfies them and they think from that surface they see, that is to be truly blind.
He that lives by the sight of the eye may grow blind.
The great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.
People seem to think I got where I am because of the clothes that I wear. That's unfair to me and unfair to all of my accomplishments.
Judgements prevent us from seeing the good that lies beyond appearances.
Where's the superficial? I was, and therefore am, dim, gloomy, a drag, unfashionable, unfanciable, and awkward. This doesn't seem like superficial to me. These aren't flesh wounds. These are life-threatening thrusts into the internal organs.
We can see, so we are always blind to things deeper than skin.
People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.
I don't much like being a public figure, because so often how people appear is not how they really are, and I think one of the issues about our society is that we make judgments about people on the basis of very flimsy evidence.
If I perceive in another person mainly the surface, I perceive mainly the differences,that which separates us. If I penetrate to the core, i perceive our identity, the fact of our brotherhood. This relatedness from center to center - instead of that from periphery to periphery - is 'central relatedness'.
