Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
Only around 2% of the earth's surface is cultivatable land.
As with all my work, whether it's a leaf on a rock or ice on a rock, I'm trying to get beneath the surface appearance of things. Working the surface of a stone is an attempt to understand the internal energy of the stone.
I have always wanted to know what's going on under the surface.
From behind the Iron Curtain, there are signs that tyranny is in trouble and reminders that its structure is as brittle as its surface is hard.
For me, the teen years were all about searching for a place for myself, wondering why I seemed so different than everyone else, wondering especially why no one could look past the surface and figure out who I really was underneath.
I think I brush the surface of being involved politically with the issues and the personalities in the news.
I did not know how to paint a mural. I did not know how to prepare the surface. There was nobody from the Renaissance around who could advise me, and I did the best I could.
On the surface, you think you wouldn't have to think at all about being asked to play Bilbo in 'The Hobbit.' It's not prison; it's a good gig. But you know it's going to take a long time, and it does. There are times when you thought: 'Gee, I've not seen my house for months.'
That result at the French was a big break for me. I had been playing quite well up until that point but nobody really expected me to do well on clay - it was my worst surface. I had had some success on the clay but I was a set and a break up in the semi-final against Jausovec and maybe the enormity of the occasion got to me.
I've been taking my time now between projects looking for stuff that has a little bit more substance, that isn't surface. Some of the films that I've done in the past really were surface.
Scratch the surface of what's socially normal. I suppose in some way all of us have something we display to the public and things we feel too ashamed of or uncomfortable with to reveal to other people.
In the shallow parts of many Swiss lakes, where there is a depth of no more than from 5 to 15 feet of water, ancient wooden piles are observed at the bottom sometimes worn down to the surface of the mud, sometimes projecting slightly above it.
The toilet from time to time imparted to the boat the scent of a cholera hospital and could be flushed only when the U-boat was on the surface or at shallow depths, lest the undersea pressure blow material back into the vessel.
Analysts keep having to pick away at the scab that the patient tries to form between himself and the analyst to cover over his wounds. The analyst keeps the surface raw, so that the wound will heal properly.
Behavior which appears superficially correct but is intrinsically corrupt always irritates those who see below the surface.
The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.
For a whole generation after the battle of Pydna, the Roman state enjoyed a profound calm, scarcely varied by a ripple here and there on the surface.
For years, I've been wondering what could happen to nuclear submarines when they dive and disappear from the surface of the earth for months, without a trace. No one really knows where they are.
The more complete the despotism, the more smoothly all things move on the surface.
Two-thirds of the Earth's surface is covered with water. The other third is covered with auditors from headquarters.
As a novelist, you deepen your characters as you go, adding layers. As a reporter, you try to peel layers away: observing subjects enough to get beneath the surface, re-questioning a source to find the facts. But these processes aren't so different.
We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.
In the contemporary world, we think of politeness as surface behavior, like frosting - it's sweet and attractive and finishes off the cake. But 19th century nobility and the enlightened thinkers and stoics before them viewed manners in a very different way. To them, manners are an outward expression of an inward struggle.
Well, actually I don't care what surface I'm playing on.
As one looks across the barren stretches of the pack, it is sometimes difficult to realise what teeming life exists immediately beneath its surface.
No one can pretend to say that a fish is ever killed by heat, for many kinds of fish, in the middle of summer, and in the burning heat of the sun, do either play, as it were, on the surface of the water, or hide themselves under the leaves, weeds, or other substances at the bottom.
The rocks, to a great extent, look swept clean. It's a much cleaner surface than what we had a right to hope for.
One who hates is a man holding a magnifying-glass, and when he hates someone, he knows precisely that person's surface, from the soles of his feet all the way up to each hair on the hated head.
When we consider the fact that nearly three-quarters of the surface of the globe is covered by oceanic water, we begin to realise that the molecular scattering of light in liquids may possess an astronomical significance, in fact contribute in an important degree to the observed albedo of the earth.
A lot of the bikes are carbon wheels now, and you don't have as good a braking surface on a carbon wheel in the wet weather as you do on the old aluminium rims.
I'm just starting to scratch the surface of what really makes me happy and it's taken me a while to admit that acting like a little child and being a jerk and a punk is fun.
Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.
For me music is a vehicle to bring our pain to the surface, getting it back to that humble and tender spot where, with luck, it can lose its anger and become compassion again.
Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so.
I'm lucky enough that directors sometimes seek me out for little projects that people don't even know about, that just surface later on.
