Superficiality Quotes

“As we may while away the long summer days of our lives and keep riding on people’s coattail of superficiality, finally becoming paralyzed by the annoying noise of shallow exhilaration, it can happen we encounter one-day privileged moments helping us wise up, meet the delight of stillness, and feel the depth and joy of inner vibrations. (“The Infinite Wisdom of Meditation“)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“The trick of the internet, I had learned, was not being unapologetically yourself or completely unfiltered; it was mastering the trick of appearing that way. It was spiking your posts with just the right amount of real... which meant, of course, that you were never being real at all.”
― Jennifer Weiner, Big Summer

“Most people will never learn the lessons meant for them in this lifetime, nor become the person they were meant to be, simply because they are too busy being someone else, or someone they are not.”
― Suzy Kassem

“the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

“When it came time for me to go to bed, my mother beckoned me to her, and kissed me, and whispered, "I know I'll never have another anxious moment with my own dear laddie." I pondered these words before I went to sleep. How could I reconcile this motherliness with the screeching fury who had pursued me around the kitchen with a whip, flogging me until she was gorged with — what? Vengeance? What was it? Once, when I was in my thirties and reading Freud for the first time, I thought I knew. I am not so sure I know now. But what I knew then was that nobody— not even my mother— was to be trusted in a strange world that showed very little of itself on the surface.”
― Robertson Davies, Fifth Business

“If you could see how I see by penetrating the superficial, you'd see the grand scheme of those co called "powerful" officials. It's disgust and deception at its deepest descent and yes, all those involved, it's hell where all reside.”
― Jose R. Coronado, The Land Flowing With Milk And Honey

“The politics that enter the university are those that come from history, a retro politics, emptied of substance and legalized in their superficial exercise.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“Superficiality breeds insecurity, simplicity breeds contentment.”
― Abhijit Naskar, When Call The People: My World My Responsibility

“Deep sleep is when you are asleep but not dreaming. Paradoxical sleep is the sleep in which you dream. So, only paradoxical thought is the thought in which you think. Is there, by analogy, a paradoxical state of death - a deep death and a death with dreams?

It is evil that speaks evil: evil can ventriloquize.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“In the case of narcissistic personality disorder, it is an inability to form deep connections with others, superficiality, and a complete lack of a basic and necessary human quality: empathy.”
― Ramani Durvasula, Should I Stay or Should I Go?: Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist

“Superficiality results in vacillating inconsistency, and emotions for the narcissistic person range from intense to detached on a regular basis. A healthy relationship should feel like a safe harbor in your life. Life throws us enough curve balls in the shape of money problems, work issues, medical issues, household issues, and even the weather. Sadly, a relationship with a narcissist can be one more source of chaos in your life, rather than a place of comfort and consistency.”
― Ramani Durvasula, Should I Stay or Should I Go?: Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist

“The secret of Vegas is that money is boring.
Hence all the bluster.”
― Jace Clayton, Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture

“He has made a show of being a devoted family man but his life has been carefully arranged so that he spends as little time with his family as possible.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, DIS MEM BER and Other Stories of Mystery and Suspense

“What superficiality - and what stupidity - there is in trying to depict in a pretty manner things which one has thought pretty.”
― Osamu Dazai

“Everything in any way beautiful has its beauty of itself, inherent and self-sufficient: praise is no part of it.”
― Marcus Aurelius

“I barely understand people who spend years pondering unimportant things. They dedicate their time to fretting about superficialities, but the fact that death will soon rob them of everything, that they disregard. I am sad when I see the human heart which can be oversensitive to certain trifles, but at the same time be completely oblivious to its very own existence.”
― Tomáš Gavlas, Karlaz: The Way of Freedom

“Good morning. Is the sun a little brighter, there is Friendship? Is the air a little fresher? Is your home a little sweeter? Is your housework somewhat easier? Are the children- do you feel safer about them? Are their faces a little ruddier; are their legs a little sturdier? Do they laugh and play a lot louder in Friendship? Then I am content.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, At Last

“Love is the basis of all growth, all change, all healing, and all success. Everything else is the attempt to quell that thirst, with all the superficial desires that are mistaken for love.
— Drue”
― Drue Grit

“What did Kiyoaki mean by his question? If one were forced to hazard a guess, it would be that he was trying to say that he had no interest in anything at all. He thought of himself as a thorn, a small, poisonous thorn jabbed into the workmanlike hand of his family. And this was his fate simply because he had acquired little elegance. A mere fifty years before, the Matsugaes had been a sturdy, upright samurai family, no more, eking out a frugal existence in the provinces. But in a brief span of time, their fortunes had soared. By Kiyoake’s time, the first traces of refinement were threatening to take hold on a family that, unlike the court of nobility, had enjoyed centuries of immunity to the virus of elegance. And Kiyoake, like an ant that senses the approaching flood, was experiencing the first intimations of his family’s rapid collapse.

His elegance was the thorn. And he was well aware that his aversion to coarseness, his delight in refinement, were futile; he was a plant without roots. Without meaning to undermine his family, without wanting to violate its traditions, he was condemned to do so by his very nature. And this poison would stunt his own life as it destroyed his family. The handsome young man felt that this futility typified his existence.

(p13.)”
― Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow

“I'm used to being stared at, but this is different. He's not really looking at my face. It's like he's watching the air around me, the breath filling my lungs, and possibly even the thoughts swirling in my head. Like he sees me, really sees me, and maybe he sees through me a bit, too.”
― Josephine Angelini, Scions

“Brand names are so important to me nowadays, they help me distinguish reality from fantasy, humility from superficiality... the order of people priorities.”
― Efrat Cybulkiewicz

“I'm only gilt on the surface. Below that, it's darkness all the way down.”
― Nenia Campbell, Through a Glass, Darkly

“In death, there should be no more surfing. No skimming the superficial”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“I wear a ten dollar shirt with twenty dollar jeans, shoes and watch, because when you pay less attention to appearance, you can pay more attention to character.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Generation Corazon: Nationalism is Terrorism

“oh yes, cheers! he's looking good on the outside-
take an x-ray girl, you'll see you've been taken for a ride”
― Casey Renee Kiser, Escape from Narc Island

“We elect to reflect, run off superficial, distract, ID that ... culture.”
― Brian Spellman, We have our difference in common 2.

“If one focuses too much on the superficial appearances of life and loses touch with the underlying principles and figures, life will increasingly be experienced as a meaningless chaos, just like Lorenz's waterwheel.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“Poor minds are shallow, fearful of depths of knowledge, and satisfied with the laxity of superficiality.”
― Dr. Lucas D. Shallua

“I was taught to prioritize what's "important"; food, water, children (Being the eldest among our siblings, I was taught to watch out for the younger ones). I was taught that the important stuff wasn't shiny; it involved logistics, practicals, survival. Only the necessary stuff to get by.

Style, beauty, self-expression, affairs, superficiality — these are luxuries in my world. I could barely afford to eat lunch, much less buy clothes or get my hair styled in a salon. My family couldn't afford cable TV so I never watched MTV to learn the latest trends.

So when I started high school, I had no regard for appearances. This is how I learned, the hard way, that maturity has no place with teenagers who could afford to have fun.”
― John Pucay, Karinderya Love Songs

“If Kilgore really got to know him, he’d see Ambrose for his true self: a heartless porcelain doll, beautiful on the outside, but hollow within, splintered with well-hidden cracks.”
― Emily Brandish, Monsters & Mind Games