Shallowness Quotes

The level of 'acceptable' dishonesty we Christians allow to avoid facing uncomfortable truths betrays our ideals as shallowly held. ~ Jamie Arpin-Ricci

Yes, I'm shallow, I don't mind admitting it. Perhaps I should admit that there's no end to the depths of my shallowness. ~ Franny Billingsley

I think that it's a space that there are a lot of projections onto - the soon-to-be sexualized and already-sexualized young woman. There are so many outside perceptions grafted onto her, that she feels all at once completely blank and completely full. I noticed that a lot in your book, as well, this repetition of a shallowness. But there is also depth in the constant repetition of this shallowness. ~ Tamara Faith Berger

This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself. ~ Joan Didion

She didn't give a damn about some of them, but she had grown to learn that inattention can be a stratagem to avoid pain, and that it is often misread as shallowness and indifference. ~ Thomas Harris

It is important to realize that a person with the gift of discernment can often tell the difference between what is of God and what is not. Such a person can often point out false teachings or false teachers - he has an almost uncanny ability to perceive
hypocrisy, shallowness, deceit, or phoniness. ~ Billy Graham

The lack of mystery in our modern life is our downfall and our poverty. A human life is worth as much as the respect it holds for the mystery. We retain the child in us to the extent that we honor the mystery. Therefore, children have open, wide-awake eyes, because they know that they are surrounded by the mystery. They are not yet finished with this world; they still don't know how to struggle along and avoid the mystery, as we do. We destroy the mystery because we sense that here we reach the boundary of our being, because we want to be lord over everything and have it at our disposal, and that's just what we cannot do with the mystery…. Living without mystery means knowing nothing of the mystery of our own life, nothing of the mystery of another person, nothing of the mystery of the world; it means passing over our own hidden qualities and those of others and the world. It means remaining on the surface, taking the world seriously only to the extent that it can be calculated and exploited, and not going beyond the world of calculation and exploitation. Living without mystery means not seeing the crucial processes of life at all and even denying them. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

George Orwell on lefty/liberalism :-
"the emotional shallowness of a left intelligentsia that lives in a world of ideas not reality, severed from the common culture of the country. ~ George Orwell

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the "brain" of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of "other people," which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people ~ Philip Roth

These forays into the real world sharpened his view that scientists needed the widest possible education. He used to say, "How can you design for people if you don't know history and psychology? You can't. Because your mathematical formulas may be perfect, but the people will screw it up. And if that happens, it means you screwed it up." He peppered his lectures with quotations from Plato, Chaka Zulu, Emerson, and Chang-tzu.

But as a professor who was popular with his students - and who advocated general education - Thorne found himself swimming against the tide. The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon. In this climate, being liked by your students was a sign of shallowness; and interest in real-world problems was proof of intellectual poverty and a distressing indifference to theory. ~ Michael Crichton

Thus the little mermaid learned her world's greatest paradox: that their currency was beauty, and their coin was body parts. ~ Esther Dalseno

Fine," Connor tells him. "Think about stuff until your head explodes. But the only thing I want to think about is surviving to eighteen."
I find your shallowness both refreshing and disappointing at the same time. Do you think that means I need therapy? ~ Neal Shusterman

It is often said that in today's modern and postmodern world that the forces of darkness are upon us. But I think not; in the Dark and the Deep there are truths that can always heal. It is not the forces of darkness but of shallowness that everywhere threaten the true, and the good, and the beautiful, and that ironically announce themselves as deep and profound. It is an exuberant and fearess shallowness that everywhere is the modern danger, the modern threat, and that everywhere nonetheless calls to us as savior. ~ Ken Wilber

Your Crystal Clear vision should provide you a glimpse of a new universe and turn your excuse for failure into purposes for progress. The shallowness of your previous failures has become a deep well of resources for success. ~ Farshad Asl

A new generation of Christians is being called to help build a world in which God's gift of life is welcomed, respected and cherished-not rejected, feared as a threat and destroyed. A new age in which love is not greedy or self-seeking, but pure, faithful and genuinely free, open to others, respectful of their dignity, seeking their good, radiating joy and beauty - a new age in which hope liberates us from the shallowness, apathy and self-absorption that deaden our souls and poison our relationships. ~ Pope Benedict XVI

No scientific theory touches on the mysteries that the religious tradition addresses. A man asking why his days are short and full of suffering is not disposed to turn to algebraic quantum field theory for the answer. The answers that prominent scientific figures have offered are remarkable in their shallowness. ~ David Berlinski

You can come to your friends with a problem and they will most usually blurt out a set of orders based entirely upon their own lives, which they believe you should follow. There is no thought process that goes into it, no internalization, no ingestion of your own pain into their own stomachs. I believe this is why, about a million people come to me with their problems rather than turning to their closest friends and family members; because I'm like that ancient tree with protruding roots, you can sit under my branches and as you cry I will soak your tears into me. We don't actually need humans with their many thoughtless advices. We need to be sitting under trees, asking roots to share in our pains. ~ C. JoyBell C.

People want poetry and need it - we need what's not honored by the corporate mentality that has taken over. It gives people a language for responding to the violence, the shallowness, the near-nothings, the toys we're all supposed to want. It's a way for people to be able to connect with themselves. ~ Joan Larkin

Very" is the most useless word in the English language and can always come out. More than useless, it is treacherous because it invariably weakens what it is intended to strengthen. For example, would you rather hear the mincing shallowness of "I love you very much" or the heart-slamming intensity of "I love you"? ~ Florence King

Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and comercials. ~ Neil Postman

The world is falling down around our ears, and all these people care for is talking about fucking to women in short skirts and men with their shirts hanging open ~ Stephen King

Quentin Schultze says that we have become like tourists who are so enamored by our mode of transportation that we cruise through nation after nation largely indifferent to the people and the cultures around us. We have our passports filled with the little stamps telling people just how many places we've been, but what is the purpose of being in places if we have not experienced them? And what is the purpose of knowing people if we do not care to know them on anything more than a surface level? The trend today is toward these fleeting, surface-level interactions ~ Tim Challies

I've always wondered why women are expected to deny their true age. Why? To be a woman of 50 and up is a badge of triumph - a hard-earned certificate that says you survived the shallowness, the violence, the meanness, and the caprice of a male-dominated society without losing your mind! ~ Psyche Roxas-Mendoza

Don't waste your life trying to fill up a hollow or a hollow be filled up because it not only makes your life shallow but your conscious hollow. ~ Amit Abraham

Society takes upon itself the right to inflict
appalling punishment on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of
shallowness, and fails to realise what it has done. When the man's punishment
is over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at the
very moment when its highest duty towards him begins. It is really ashamed
of its own actions, and shuns those whom it has punished, as people shun a
creditor whose debt they cannot pay, or one on whom they have inflicted
an irreparable, an irremediable wrong. ~ Oscar Wilde

The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called "merely cultural," not even living in the traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived! ~ Wallace Stegner

Hiding some people's possessions would reveal the depth of their shallowness. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realised is wrong. ~ Oscar Wilde

As for the fashion world, the one thing I respect is its shallowness: it's so deep - it's so serious. It can be hard to get that kind of shallowness because of its depth and seriousness. ~ Nikki S. Lee

The canyons of our minds and hearts are so deep and so full of mystery that we try at all costs to avoid entering them deeply. We avoid journeying inward because we are too frightened: frightened because we must make that journey alone; frightened because we know it will involve solitude and perseverance; and frightened because we are entering the unknown. Aloneness, suffering, perseverance, the unknown: All these frighten us. Our own depths frighten us! And so we stall, distract ourselves, drug the pain, party and travel, stay busy, try this and that, cling to people and moments, junk up the surface of our lives, and find any and every excuse to avoid being alone and having to face ourselves. We are too frightened to travel inward. But we pay a price for that, a high one: superficiality and shallowness. So long as we avoid the painful journey inward, to the depth of our caverns, we live at the surface. ~ Ronald Rolheiser

I relax by catching up with my friends and family. When I am at home in Ibiza, I find the contrast of living on a divided island relaxing - with beauty and tranquillity in the north and a sense of fun, shallowness and celebration in the south. ~ James Blunt

And sociopaths are noted especially for their shallowness of emotion, the hollow and transient nature of any affectionate feelings they may claim to have, a certain breathtaking callousness. They have no trace of empathy and no genuine interest in bonding emotionally with a mate. Once the surface charm is scraped off, their marriages are loveless, one-sided, and almost always short-term. If a marriage partner has any value to the sociopath, it is because the partner is viewed as a possession, one that the sociopath may feel angry to lose, but never sad or accountable. ~ Martha Stout

Dinner was a disaster. Brent introduced himself while staring at my bulge, and I was glad to be shown to our table so that we were seated with a table between us, forcing him to look me in the eye. Apparently, my eyes have moved down to my pecs, though, as that's where he decided to fix his attention throughout dinner. ~ Brett Kiellerop-Morris

Sorrow burns up a great amount of shallowness. ~ Oswald Chambers

Lots of people do not feel and do not care, deeply. They're the sea creatures who were born to swim in the shallows. And I think that they look at those of us who come from the parts of the ocean that's pitch black and deeper than the core of the planet and they feel fascinated. They're fascinated in the way we are fascinated with eagles or with vampires. They think we're unabashedly deep and beautiful and they feel like they want to try being that way, too. It's like a fascination for a mystical creature. But I have watched these kinds of people burn out before they ever reach that depth (not even close). They burn out because they just get so exhausted! You only have the set of lungs designed for the depths of the ocean, if you are the type of creature who was born in those depths. It's not a regimen, it's not a list of rules, it's not a succession of steps to get there. It's about anatomy. There are creatures for the shallows and creatures for the deep. It is nature's designer plan. And when these people burn out, they will have these outbursts wherein they lash out at you, as if they are exasperated at why you're a mermaid in the black of the seas, and if they could, they'd drag you into a glass tank and chain you up because they don't want that kind of beauty around them, outshining them. Feeling and living in the depths of life (caring so much it hurts, feeling so much it becomes painful) is a mystical, beautiful thing but it cannot be copied and it shouldn't be copied. ~ C. JoyBell C.

The true answer to seduction is to open people's eyes to the shallowness of the "beauty" on offer. The ~ Iain M. Duguid

Knowledge cannot lose when it bets against unawareness.
Insight cannot lose when it bets against obliviousness.
Intellect cannot lose when it bets against shallowness.
Wisdom cannot lose when it bets against ignorance.

Truth cannot lose when it bets against deceitfulness.
Sight cannot lose when it bets against blindness.
Virtue cannot lose when it bets against sinfulness.
Light cannot lose when it bets against darkness.

Patience cannot lose when it bets against hastiness.
Joy cannot lose when it bets against unhappiness.
Faith cannot lose when it bets against fickleness.
Mercy cannot lose when it bets against vengefulness.

Humility cannot lose when it bets against insolence.
Kindness cannot lose when it bets against callousness.
Dignity cannot lose when it bets against uncouthness.
Love cannot lose when it bets against bitterness.

Innocence cannot lose when it bets against unrighteousness.
Patience cannot lose when it bets against intolerance.
Trust cannot lose when it bets against doubtfulness.
Purity cannot lose when it bets against hatefulness.

Existence cannot lose when it bets against unconsciousness.
Time cannot lose when it bets against impermanence.
Life cannot lose when it bets against existence.
Eternity cannot lose when it bets against coincidence. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

I know he's rich. He knows he's rich, too. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

He studied the woman before him, not as lovely as she once was, ordinary in appearance, scarred by living, abandoned by many, breathtakingly to be near and altogether unforgettable. "I have no friends," she spoke forth hauntingly. "I am alone." He couldn't believe it. But then he could for the rare creature near enough to touch was out of their league. She wasn't envied for the shallowness of appearance or the superficiality of status or possessions; she was envied for being uncommon and for possessing indomitable strength, something only a lifetime of suffering could shape. ~ Donna Lynn Hope

I understand what it is like to rely on beauty and know the shallowness of it ... Yet, it is impossible to say if you would have caught my attention the first time had you been plain and wrapped in brown. Thus remains the endless dilemma of beauty's impressionable curse. ~ Anne Mallory

Ideas are not in textbooks and journals, Ideas are more deeper than the shallow written works of men. You are the idea that comes like an idea. ~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Your shallowness or greatness of the soul shows up in your aura. ~ Harbhajan Singh

Am I shallow? she asks the mirror. Yes, I am shallow. The sun shines on the ripples where it's shallow. Deep is too dark. ~ Margaret Atwood

People will love people
no matter what
terrible shit they do.

We forgive people, even when
they don't ask for forgiveness.

When there is no
atonement,
no penance.

Why do we love people?
Why do we forgive evil?
Stupidity -
Shallowness -
the darkest motives.
We forgive
because we are attached,
we have known them a long time,
we have put them into the
category of family or friend.
We want to have sex with them.
Because they entertain us.

We even forgive child molesters
if they make good movies.

The unspeakable truth
is that we need written laws
that have mystic origins -
with weapons to keep
them upheld.

Because we are too
forgiving of our friends
and family. We take their side,
even when we know
they are wrong, and lying.

The world would collapse
into chaos without law
not because we are
savage beasts, but because
we are so forgiving. ~ Noah Cicero

Shallowness and ignorance have been our lot in the mass consumer societies we inhabit, where we were too distracted to act politically, apart from periodically deputing political elites to take life-and-death decisions on our behalf. ~ Pankaj Mishra

[O]ne of the fatal errors of conceptual theology has been the separation of the acts of religious existence from the statements about it. Ideas of faith must not be studied in total separation from the moments of faith. If a plant is uprooted from its soil, removed from its native winds, sun-rays and terrestrial environment, and kept in a hothouse - will observations made of such a plant disclose its primordial nature? The growing inwardness of man that reaches and curves toward the light of God can hardly be transplanted into the shallowness of mere reflection. Torn out of its medium in human life, it wilts like a rose pressed between the pages of a book. Religion is, indeed, little more than a desiccated remnant of a once living reality when reduced to terms and definitions, to codes and catechisms. It can only be studied in its natural habitat of faith and piety, in a soul where the divine is within reach of all thoughts. ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel

You don't know how shallow you are, or how narcissistic, until you acquire a facial scar. On the plus side, it's so situated as to make me look tough and worldly. On the downside, I'm never kissing my dog again. ~ Rodney Ulyate

Yes, Cinderella won a real prize - a man who couldn't see her true worth until she fitted in the shoe properly. ~ Lily Morton

The decline in the influence of religion has been due, in the main, not to religion itself, but to the very shallowness of many practitioners. People who are indoctrinated and mistake implanted obsession for faith, are themselves destroyers of the very thing which they imagine themselves called upon to try to protect.

In fact, of course, they have no such call: and their capacity to protect something which is other than their imaginings makes for a comical situation. ~ Idries Shah

We've got so much in this life that all we know how to do is want more. So we concentrate on the wrong things
things we can see
as being the measure of a person. We think if we win something big or buy something snazzy it'll make us more than we are. Our hearts know that's not true, but the eyes are powerful. It's easier to fix on what we can see than listen to the still, small voice of a whispering heart. ~ Joan Bauer

Beneath all the rhetoric about relevance lies a profoundly disturbing possibility - that people may base their lives upon an illusion, upon a blatant lie. The attractiveness of a belief is all too often inversely proportional to its truth ... To allow "relevance" to be given greater weight than truth is a mark of intellectual shallowness and moral irresponsibility. ~ Alister E. McGrath

Quite often, too, a writer who has for a time been believed to possess a great store of ordinarily profound ideas, and who is expected to exercise an extraordinary and serious influence in the progress of society, in the end betrays such shallowness and insipidity of his fundamental idea that no one is sorry when he succeeds in writing himself out too soon. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

There is a time sometime, and a place where in the perfect stillness of the evening within the sunset serenity we unite in the glow... Blissful paradise divinity, brilliancy glassy deepness, shallowness slow and smooth... We forever are eternal wholeness only intimacy between us... Thorough adoration pleasure deep in souls with melodies slowness as we breathe...skin on skin with tenderness emotions... There is a time sometime, when I dream of you, feel caressing kissing across my eyes and hands...and a place where old memories fade away and I'm with you again locked tight in your embrace, hearing your laughter and seeing jolly smiles upon your face... Music of the reverberating mind waves crashes on the shore of my aching heart... There is a place I'm in a different time sometime...with you in the perfect stillness... ~ Oksana Rus

Many men on their release carry their prison about with them into the air, and hide it as a secret disgrace in their hearts, and at length, like poor poisoned things, creep into some hole and die. It is wretched that they should have to do so, and it is wrong, terribly wrong, of society that it should force them to do so. Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishment on the individual, but it also as the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realise what it has done. When the man's punishment is over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins. It is really ashamed of its own actions, and shuns those whom it has punished, as people shun a creditor whose debt they cannot pay, or one on whom they have inflicted an irreparable, an irremediable wrong. I can claim on my side that if I realise what I have suffered, society should realise what it has inflicted on me; and that there should be no bitterness or hate on either side. ~ Oscar Wilde

It's easy not to be disappointed when you're always wading in the shallow end of feelings. ~ Maurene Goo

I'm not that shallow, asshole. I don't need money. It's way more important for them to be good-looking. ~ Chelsea Handler

Trivial participation ultimately bores you, leaves behind a sense of shallowness, contributes little to your deeper sense of life. Significant participation, on the other hand, engages you, enthralls and satisfies you, it contributes to the meaning of your life ~ Henryk Skolimowski

Perhaps the most flagrant testimony to the intellectual shallowness of statism is that the typical statist believes that the fantastically hypothetical threat of a corporation monopolizing the supply of water is a devastating objection to libertarianism, but the painfully real threat of a state methodically exterminating tens of millions of individuals is not a devastating objection to statism. ~ Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

Damen said, with helpless honesty, "Laurent, I am your slave."

The words laid him open, truth exposed in the space between them. He wanted to prove it, as though, inarticulate, he could make up for what divided them. He was aware of the shallowness of Laurent's breath, it matched his own; they were breathing each other's air.

He reached out, watching for any hesitation in Laurent's eyes. The touch he offered was accepted as it had not been last time, fingers gentle on Laurent's jaw, thumb passing over his cheekbone, soft. Laurent's controlled body was hard with tension, his rapid pulse urgent for flight, but he closed his eyes in the last seconds before it happened. Damen's palm slid over Laurent's warm nape; slowly, very slowly, making his height an offering, not a threat, Damen leaned in and kissed Laurent on the mouth.

The kiss was barely a suggestion of itself, with no yielding of the rigidity in Laurent, but the first kiss became a second, after a fraction of parting in which Damen felt the flicker of Laurent's shallow breathing against his own lips.

It felt, in all the lies between them, as if this was the only true thing. It didn't matter that he was leaving tomorrow. He felt remade with the desire to give Laurent this: to give him all he would allow, and to ask for nothing, this careful threshold something to be savoured because it was all Laurent would let himself have. ~ C.S. Pacat

Emotional exhaustion follows fast on the footsteps of physical and mental depletion. I feel my lifeblood draining away in an oily spigot of inner turmoil. Questions abound and personal survival hinges upon sorting through possible solutions and selecting the most fitting answers. Is my pain real or simply an illusion of a frustrated ego? What do I believe in? What is my purpose? I aspire to discover a means to live in congruence with the trinity of the mind, body, and spirit. Can I discover a noble path that frees me from the shallowness of decadent physical and emotional desires? Can I surrender any desire to seek fame and fortune? Can I terminate a craving to punish other persons for their perceived wrongs? Can I recognize that forgiving persons whom offended me is a self-initiated, transformative act? Can I conquer an irrational fear of the future? Can I accept the inevitable chaos that accompanies life? Can I find a means to achieve inner harmony by steadfastly resolving to live in the moment free of angst? Can I purge egotisms that mar an equitable perception of life by renunciation of the self and all worldly endeavors? Can I live a harmonious existence devoid the panache of vanities? ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Good conversation is the enemy of falsity, facade, and shallowness. It chases the truth of things, it demolishes the flimsy foundation of facade and it penetrates the depths so as to soar into unfolding possibility. ~ John O'Donohue

You don't have to be beautiful to be shallow. You needn't be small or weak to be a coward. Shitty personalities come in surprising packages and anybody can be an asshole. So value the good ones, whoever they are. Recognize them when you see them and don't let them go. ~ Jennifer DeLucy

Small talk is like the air that shatters the stalactites into dust again. I do not participate. I wait. I laugh. I am aware that shallowness disintegrates the deeper undercurrents everyone seeks. The underground rivers of dreams, of deeper and deeper selves running underneath. I prefer my submarine region. ~ Anais Nin

A narcissist, on the other hand, is the exact opposite of an empath. Emotionally, narcissists are like brick walls who see and hear others but fail to understand or relate to them. As a result of their emotional shallowness, narcissists are essentially devoid of all empathy or compassion for other people. Lacking empathy, a narcissist is a very destructive and dangerous person to be around. ~ Mateo Sol

If you value knowledge,
you will hate ignorance.
If you value understanding,
you will hate shallowness.
If you value intelligence,
you will hate imprudence.
If you value wisdom,
you will hate foolishness.

If you value hope,
you will hate gloominess.
If you value faith,
you will hate anxiousness.
If you value joy,
you will hate cheerlessness.
If you value love,
you will hate spitefulness. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

The amateur has a long list of fears. Near the top are two: Solitude and silence. The amateur fears solitude and silence because she needs to avoid, at all costs, the voice inside her head that would point her toward her calling and her destiny. So she seeks distraction. The amateur prizes shallowness and shuns depth. The culture of Twitter and Facebook is paradise for the amateur. ~ Steven Pressfield

Remember that the fool in the eyes of the gods and the fool in the eyes of man are very different. One who is entirely ignorant of the modes of Art in its revolution or the moods of thought in its progress, of the pomp of the Latin line or the richer music of the vowelled Greeks, of Tuscan sculpture or Elizabethan song may yet be full of the very sweetest wisdom. The real fool, such as the gods mock or mar, is he who does not know himself. I was such a one too long. You have been such a one too long. Be so no more. Do not be afraid. The supreme vice is shallowness. Everything that is realised is right ~ Oscar Wilde

I slide my feet onto the seat next to him, my ankle brushing against his thigh. "No shallowness of breath? No rapidly beating heart?"
He rests one hand on my foot as he continues to mess with his phone. His eyes meet mine in amusement. "Are those the indicators? I might have an issue after all. ~ Kasie West

At this very moment, the thumb of Ricardo's hovering shadow jabbed her in her left eye, revealing for all the world the shallowness of her water table. Rice could have been planted at that instant on the terraces of her flesh and sprouted in strength and beauty in the floods that overwhelmed her from that moment on through all the afternoon. ~ Grace Paley

In the city, human beings celebrated and enjoyed material conditions and comforts, but were caught in the labyrinths and knots of spiritual shallowness and psychological confusion. In the city human beings wrestled with the demands of survival and profit but fled from life's imperatives of honesty and moderation. In the city man was afraid to confront his own face. ~ Isa Kamari

The shallow of the highs and the depths of the lows ~ Dean Cavanagh

The path to ignorance is wide.
The path to shallowness is smooth.
The path to understanding is bumpy.
The path to wisdom is narrow.
The path to ignorance is steep.

The path to vice is wide.
The path to pleasure is smooth.
The path to integrity is bumpy.
The path to innocence is narrow.
The path to paradise is steep.

The path to fear is wide.
The path to assurance is smooth.
The path to hope is bumpy.
The path to valor is narrow.
The path to faith is steep.

The path to sorrow is wide.
The path to desire is smooth.
The path to patience is bumpy.
The path to gratitude is narrow.
The path to humility is steep.

The path to strife is wide.
The path to indifference is smooth.
The path to peace is bumpy.
The path to joy is narrow.
The path to harmony is steep.

The path to error is wide.
The path to delusion is smooth.
The path to discovery is bumpy.
The path to truth is narrow.
The path to certainty is steep. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

We're in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it's all gone. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

To immerse oneself in popular culture for any length of time is to wallow in an almost unbearable shallowness. ~ Douglas Murray

How often do we not scold or call ourselves to order? If our needs are utterly fulfilled, it may be that we still remain unsatisfied. By creating additional wants or artificial wishes, we generate a cascade of new desires that outshines our search for genuine needs. Through our loss of authenticity, we fade away in the vapor of pathetic shallowness or vanish into the flamboyance of trivial limelight. ("Consumers' Dream") ~ Erik Pevernagie

Satan is the illusive manipulator. He prances and dances and drinks in the adulation of his worshippers as he glimmers and shimmers, displaying all that glitters and all that attracts the shallowness of man. ~ Billy Graham

The Earth orbits round tables. ~ Ljupka Cvetanova

Let us look at the bright side of life and believe that God means us to be always ascending, always getting nearer to Himself, always learning something new about Him, always loving Him better and better...

It gives one such a conception of the seeming ills of life: to think of Him as our Physician, the ills all remedies, the deprivations only a wholesome regimen, the losses all gains... see how patiently and persistently He tries now this remedy now that, and how infallibly He cures the souls that submit to His remedies, I love Him so!

...I am so astonished that we are restive under His unerring hand! Think how He dealt with me. My soul was sick unto death, sick with worldliness and self-pleasing folly. There was only one way of making me listen to reason and that was just the way He took. He snatched me right out of the world and shut me up in one room, crippled, helpless, and alone and set me to thinking, thinking, thinking till I saw the emptiness and shallowness of all in which I had hitherto been involved. And then He sent you and your mother to show me the reality of life and to reveal to me my invisible, unknown Physician. Can I love Him with half my heart? ~ Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

Most of us seek security of some kind because our lives are an endless conflict, from the moment we are born to the moment we die. The boredom of life and the anxiety of life; the despair of existence; the feeling that you want to be loved, and you are not loved; the shallowness, the pettiness, the travail of everyday existence - that is our life. In that life there is danger, there is apprehension; nothing is certain; there is always the uncertainty of tomorrow. So you are all the time pursuing security, consciously or unconsciously; you want to find a permanent state, psychologically first and outwardly afterwards - it is always psychological first, not outward. You want a permanent state where you will not be disturbed by anything, by any fear, by any anxiety, by any sense of uncertainty, by any sense of guilt. That is what most of us want. That is what most of us seek outwardly as well as inwardly. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Lord, we know that you will come again in glory to raise the living and the dead. Resurrect us now from the death of comfort, complacency, sloth, and shallowness that we might witness to your love in life and death. Amen. ~ Shane Claiborne

The universe appeals to your sense, not your senselessness;
your understanding, not your shallowness;
your discernment, not your blindness;
your intellect, not your nonsense;
your rationale, not your recklessness;
your knowledge, not your ignorance;
your wisdom, not your imprudence;
your insight, not your brainlessness;
and your enlightenment, not your foolishness.

The universe also appeals to your enjoyment, not your sadness;
your courage, not your fearfulness;
your hope, not your bitterness;
your humility, not your arrogance;
your honesty, not your deceitfulness;
your mercy, not your ruthlessness;
your charity, not your stinginess;
your strength, not your weakness;
and your love, not your hatefulness. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

(Psychoanalysis, it seems, does wonders for a man's prose style: it renders it labyrinthine without subtlety.) There is no place, then, for human agency, except the kind that leads you to talk about yourself in the presence of another for twenty years. Shallowness can go no deeper. ~ Theodore Dalrymple

Beauty is always found in the profound and deepest actions of a person who does things from the heart not from the shallowness of materialism. ~ Paul Isaacs

The "No Excuses" Mindset is an investment in yourself, allowing you to turn your excuses for failure into purposes for progress. The shallowness of your previous failures has become a deep well of recourses for success. ~ Farshad Asl

I was delighted I had offended her upholstered sensibilities. ~ Pat Conroy

The '80s to me, more than anything else, represents a time of real criminal activity in the office of the president: an incredibly disparate economy in terms of the class distinctions and whatnot, and a tremendous shallowness - a lot of sort of bank robbery by executives. ~ Martha Plimpton

We must examine the ways in which we have attempted to turn our own ministries, workplaces, and mission fields into the playgrounds of our own personal struggles. We must search our hearts for the ways in which our own insecurities and wounded egos sabotage the gospel message that we have been entrusted with. We must become leaders who are deep in a society of the spectacle that produces shallowness. ~ Mark Sayers

The modern world has forgotten the necessity of encouraging men to be better. They speak of sick men or healthy men, of interesting people or uninteresting people; they never, or seldom, indicate that there is and must be an interior and spiritual improvement in man before any of the glowing coals of humanity can be reached. They have cultivated everything but the goodness of man. The result of such shallowness is everywhere apparent. ~ Francis Beauchesne Thornton

Life so far seemed like a kind of dance to him, and he was pleased to discover that he was pretty good at it. Lf there was something hollow underneath it all, a well of fear that sometimes seemed to pull everything else into it and leave him clutching the stone rim for fear of falling into himself, well, that was part of being human, he supposed. That's what the booze was for. ~ Nathan Ballingrud

True friends are not mirrors where we can always see ourselves reflected in a positive light. ~ Shannon L. Alder

Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Calumny... gives [Harry] a spiritual purity in the sense that it scours away any outward show, any wish to live by the impression he makes on others. It gives him a lonely independence, so that he is able to act from his own depth. As he goes on to fulfill "his true destiny", which as far as he knows is his death, he is able to walk, hidden from view, past the woman he loves, without speaking, without looking back. This ability to act alone contrasts him with Voldemort, who needs others. That need is apparent in Voldemort's possession of Quirrell.

Voldemort's shallowness is apparent in the way Pettigrew has to do his work for him and then has to carry him to his rebirthing. Above all, it is in his need to be encircled by Death Eaters. Yet Voldemort is not truly in relationship with any of these people. He is connected to them only by magic, manipulation and threats. To be truly in relation with others, he would need, like Harry, to be capable of acting from his own depth. He would need to be able to act WITHOUT them. Voldemort, who wants to be independent, cannot truly act alone. ... Voldemort lives outwardly, in his domination of others; Harry lives inwardly, in the purity of his own being. ~ Luke Bell

I learned that it's okay to feel the way I do: that my life has no meaning unless I have a boyfriend. A real man is like the perfect vampire-boy and all the perfect guys in Twue Wuv. ~ Jess C. Scott

If we are sowing lots of thoughts about shoes, cars, clothes, computer games, shopping, guns, and very few thoughts about things of the Lord, we will not reap spiritual maturity, spiritual priorities, greater desire for the Lord, or a closer relationship with the Lord. We will reap vanity, shallowness, and even greater spiritual disinterest and distance from the Lord. If we struggle with being uninterested in the things of the Lord, we need to consider that this is something we have actually done to ourselves. If we sow a desire to charm, amuse, or impress our friends, we will not reap relationships based on a selfless, sacrificial, Christ-like interest in our friend's spiritual welfare. We will reap self-serving, exploitive relationships that can actually drag our friends down. This is a life and death matter: what you are sowing in every little conversation that you have. Are you building up, edifying your friends? ~ Botkin

To be shallow is not a sign of being wicked, nor is shallowness a sign that there are no deeps; the ocean has a shore. ~ Oswald Chambers

MARGARETE. Yes, out of sight is out of mind. It's second nature with you, gallantry; But you have friends of every kind, Cleverer by far, oh much, than me. FAUST. Dear girl, believe me, what's called cleverness Is mostly shallowness and vanity. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The more I read, the less I admire modern theology. the more I study the productions of the new schools of theological teachers, the more I marvel that men and women can be satisfied with such writings. There is a vagueness, a mistiness, a shallowness, an indistinctness, a superficiality, an aimlessness, a hollowness about the literature of the 'broader and kinder systems', as they are called, which to my mind stamps their origin on their face. They are of the earth, earthy. ~ J.C. Ryle