Surface Level Understanding Quotes

It is possible to live the Christian life just on the surface, knowing only enough to carry on an intelligent conversation in the church foyer with another equally uninformed believer, but when that happens you are vulnerable to the attack of the deceiver.

One should not search for anything behind the phenomena. They themselves are the message.

An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply

The man [President Woodrow Wilson] has no sense of things that penetrates below the surface. With him the rhetoric of a thing is the thing itself.

There are men who can think no deeper than a fact.

The internet has spawned people for whom knowingness is more important than knowledge. It equips you with the illusion of offering knowledge instantly - and quite easily - so you can read a few articles on a few subjects and feel well informed but not actually know any of those subjects in any depth.

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.

A mere index hunter, who held the eel of science by the tail. Index-hunter is a term used mockingly, meaning one who acquires superficial knowledge merely by consulting indexes. The '[holding] the eel of science by the tail' allusion was used in 1728 by Alexander Pope (q.v.).

I don't dig beneath the surface for things that don't appear before my own eyes.

When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles. The other students in the class interrupt me: "We *know* all that!" "Oh," I say, "you *do*? Then no *wonder* I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.

I think that we live in a moment in time where people have a lot of information about a lot of people kind of instantly, but it's all sort of surface information and it doesn't really mean anything.

People will have an altered idea of who you are unless they really take time to get to know you, which of course they don't. They just get what they see, and they take that to the bank.

I understand how a first impression is often just that: a quick snapshot that, on its own merit, is meaningless.

Love not the flower they pluck and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names.

Yes, there's something dangerous about turning people into token social activists. I was thinking about this recently with our pop-culture feminism, when feminism is such a buzzword in the media now. We're covering it in a way that we haven't before, but also in a way that's way more surface level. And while I think that there's some danger in that, I also think it's a great gateway for some people.

The speeding reader guts a book the way the skillful clean fish. The gills are gone, the tail, the scales, the fins; then the fillet slides away swifly as though fed to a seal.