Death is the door from the superficial life, the so-called life, the trivial. There is a door. If you pass through the door you reach another life - deeper, eternal, without death, deathless. So from so-called life, which is really nothing but dying, one has to pass through the door of death; only then does one achieve a life that is really existential and active - without death in it.
Freud said that we are born as a tabula rasa. This is a model that simply is too superficial and inadequate.
How good it is for us when the Lord unsettles our lukewarm and superficial lives.
We wanted to have in Lotus Eaters something that looks really beautiful on the outside but is not necessarily on the inside. There's a lot of superficial references. I remember we were looking at Helmut Newton's photographs - they just look so glossy and beautiful, but you look closely and you can see the cellulite.
The truth seems. . . to be that in the ultimate and essential problem the economic factor is relatively superficial and unimportant.
If we don’t want to define ourselves by things as superficial as our appearances, we’re stuck with the revolting alternative of being judged by our actions.
Unless companies change these rules, any superficial re-organizations they perform will be no more effective than dusting the furniture in Pompeii.
At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose *your* self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I's. But in one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the elected. Only one--which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your *I*.
If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself, because this is too painful, he will remain superficial in his writing. . . If I perform to myself, then it’s this that the style expresses. And then the style cannot be my own. If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit.
Many people who say they're looking for love are merely looking for superficial comfort. They're not looking yet for the true romantic adventure. For that entails a readiness to die to who we were, in order to be born again prepared for love, truly worthy of the romantic heights.
Lazy and superficial men and women do not produce superior work.
It is not hard work that is dreary; it is superficial work.
Of two evils, had not an author better be tedious than superficial! From an overflowing vessel you may gather more, indeed, than you want, but from an empty one you can gather nothing.
Blaming and punishing others are superficial expressions of anger.
There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks.
A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.
The happiness which brings enduring worth to life is not the superficial happiness that is dependent on circumstances. It is the happiness and contentment that fills the soul even in the midst of the most distressing of circumstances and most bitter environment.
If women are differentiated only by superficial physical attributes, men appear more individual and irreplaceable than they really are.
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.
People are much more important than superficial environments.