A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and still be a forcible speaker; but without these nothing will avail... Fluency, grace, logical order, and the like, are merely the decorative surface of oratory.
Charles Horton Cooley

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
Vladimir Nabokov

A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.
Robert Smithson

After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared.
Arthur Erickson

After about 20 years of marriage, I'm finally starting to scratch the surface of what women want. And I think the answer lies somewhere between conversation and chocolate.
Mel Gibson

After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.
Edward Hopper

Although when Christianity appeared the total population of the planet was only a fraction of that of the twentieth century, most of the earth's surface was quite outside the Mediterranean world, Persia, India, and China.
Kenneth Scott Latourette

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.
Janet Malcolm

And a lesson in this movie is dig beneath the surface. And so with my words, with my character, I purposely created a character that was away from how you've known me thus far in my career.
Shemar Moore

And learn that when you do make a mistake, you'll surface that mistake so you can get it corrected, rather than trying to hide it and bury it, and it becomes a much bigger mistake, and maybe a fatal mistake.
Sanford I. Weill

And that format was - we'd been using that format, I guess, since the late '70s, and it was starting to get very predictable. In other words, certain songs would surface in the same points in the set every so often; it was like rotation.
Phil Lesh

As one looks across the barren stretches of the pack, it is sometimes difficult to realise what teeming life exists immediately beneath its surface.
Robert Falcon Scott

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.
Andy Goldsworthy

At Adaptive Path, we've been doing our own work with Ajax over the last several months, and we're realizing we've only scratched the surface of the rich interaction and responsiveness that Ajax applications can provide.
Jesse James Garrett

Balls should be good for at least six sets, and for more for the average player. But if the rallies are long, they do not last as long as this. There is a fuzz on the surface that wears off on the hard court.
Helen Wills Moody

Bats drink on the wing, like swallows, by sipping the surface, as they play over pools and streams.
Gilbert White

Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.
Michael Caine

Beauty is only skin deep. If you go after someone just because she's beautiful but don't have anything to talk about, it's going to get boring fast. You want to look beyond the surface and see if you can have fun or if you have anything in common with this person.
Amanda Peet

Beauty, like ice, our footing does betray; Who can tread sure on the smooth, slippery way: Pleased with the surface, we glide swiftly on, And see the dangers that we cannot shun.
John Dryden

Because I actually find the next take after they've controlled it a little bit and repressed the laughter is actually a really interesting take, because that's still going on underneath the surface. That struggle to maintain composure becomes part of the joy of the scene.
Jay Roach