Closer Inspection Quotes & Sayings

It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner. — Anne Fadiman

Yes, genuine pain and loss coexisted with the deliverance, but it did not have the last word. Its power to hurt him was weakened because he could see the bigger things God was doing in, for, and through him. You can probably find similar events in your life. Hard things persisted, there was no apparent deliverance, but, with closer inspection, you notice a deliverance that went much deeper. And these are eleventh-hour deliverances on this side of death and eternity. Imagine if you gradually developed the spiritual skill to see beyond the immediate moment and catch a glimpse of the glories to come. The basic outline is clear: if you have thrown your lot in with Jesus, everything he has is yours, even the kingdom itself. It would be impossible to ask for more. Those who imitate Abraham's faith are always pushing the last minute farther out until it comes even after physical death. Such a person is fearless. A — Edward T. Welch

I passed what I thought was a Halloween parade, which was disorienting since I was fairly sure this was May. When I stopped on the corner of Sixteenth Street and made a closer inspection it turned out to be something called a "Gay Pride Parade," which made my stomach turn. — Bret Easton Ellis

On closer inspection, the hero status accorded to Abraham, Moses and David in the Old Testament (and echoed in the New Testament) is rooted not in their moral perfection but in their uncompromising dedication to the cause of Yahweh and their rugged trust in the promises of God rather than lapsing into the idolatry of many of their contemporaries. — Paul Copan

It often turns out on closer inspection that acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise. — Richard Dawkins

Parcifal is one of those corkscrew artifact of culture in which you get the subjective sense that you've learned something from it, something valuable or even priceless; but on closer inspection you suddenly begin to scratch your head and say Wait a minute. This makes no sense. — Philip K. Dick

All the worth of some people lies in their name; upon a closer inspection it dwindles to nothing, but from a distance it deceives us. — Jean De La Bruyere

Throughout history we have believed that markets determine worth and that bubbles are eternal, despite ample evidence to the contrary. In the midst of each bubble, we believe that this time it will last forever. We have all been complicit in our own deluding." The professor paused. "It's all bullcrap. There is no market. The market is people, and people are dolts. Even the smartest people are moronic. — Jade Chang

Planning. Short-term memory. Attention. At first glance, these three frontal lobe functions can seem like diverse activities that just happen to be packed into the same brain region. But on closer inspection it turns out that they are facets of the same basic phenomenon of 'restraint'. Planning restrains our brains from wandering from a chosen path of activity. Short-term memory retrains sensory cortex from moving on to different imagery. Attention constrains the kind of sensory data admitted to sensory cortex. — Robert Jourdain

I think I'm losing control all over again. This is because I've registered two things above and beyond his hypnotic green eyes and rock star hot voice.
1. His perfectly square chin has one of those little divots dead center.
2. He's taller, and wider across the shoulders than I'd thought.
My heart ramps into some sort of a private hailstorm.
My list won't stop.
3. His hair is still shower damp. It's made up of little inky-black curls - an amazing amount of them.
4. The dumb eyes aren't simply green. They're like an exploded rainbow of greens and gold and browns. On closer inspection, he's ... he's simply overall amazing and ... I'll just say it again:
HOLY. HOLY. WOW. — Anne Eliot

Julian is bluff and sturdy, royal; he possesses a gracefully muscular, equine beauty so natural it suggests that beauty itself is a fundamental human condition and not a mutation in the general design. — Michael Cunningham

I didn't want to just rally at the baseline, even though that happened a lot. — Tracy Austin

Many times we refer to people who express hate or behave in a barbaric, savage 'inhuman' way as 'animals', but on closer inspection we can clearly see that this is in fact, an insult to animals. — Christina Engela

The big bang, the most cataclysmic event we can imagine, on closer inspection appears finely orchestrated. — George Smoot

Haiti is the kind of place that grabs your heart, and never lets go ... When you arrive in Port-au-Prince, the first thing that strikes you is how vibrant the colors are. Buses, buildings, fences, clothing, everything is brightly painted in primary hues. On closer inspection, you see the reality behind this brightly colored landscape: a dark, grinding poverty, the worst in the Western hemisphere. — Andrea Mitchell

The one in the glasses looks cute."
"He's a tool."
"But not that cute," Sally said quickly. "In fact, if you had let me finish before interrupting, you would have heard me say he looks cute, but, on closer inspection, he's obviously a tool. — Derek Landy

Think of it this way: if you wandered into a cave and saw scratched into the wall some markings which on closer inspection read "Gary woz ere", how would you think that they got there? Would you guess that a river had run through and eroded the wall into a shape? Would you think that perhaps a bear had been sharpening his claws on the rough surface? Or would you be sensible and immediately recognise that someone called Gary, who was probably a bit of a yob, had been through and wanted to leave a message for the world? — Lewis N. Roe

Modern civilization has no understanding of sacred matters. Everything is backwards. — Thomas Yellowtail

(At an intersection on the main road from Nyon to Geneva, for instance, there is a neat villa, window-boxes and all, that reveals itself on closer inspection to be a mighty stressed-concrete pillbox.) Military — Ian Fleming

at California's Monterey Bay Aquarium found a banana peel on the floor in front of the Shale Reef exhibit at 3 a.m. On closer inspection, the banana peel turned out to be a healthy, fist-size red octopus. The security officer followed the wet slime trail and replaced the octopus in the exhibit it had come from. But here's the shocking part: The aquarium didn't know it had a red octopus living in its Shale Reef exhibit. Apparently the octopus hitchhiked there as a juvenile, attached to a rock or sponge added to the exhibit, and grew up at the aquarium without anyone knowing it was there. — Sy Montgomery

Yet never once in his life had he experienced the unshakable certainty that he and he alone had arrived at a decision. He always had the sense that fate had forced him to decide things to suit its own convenience. On occasion, after the momentary satisfaction of having decided something of his own free will, he would see that things had been decided beforehand by an external power cleverly camouflaged as free will, mere bait thrown in his path to lure him into behaving as he was mean to. The only things that he had decided for himself with complete independence were the kind of trivial matters which, on closer inspection, revealed themselves to require no decision making at all. — Haruki Murakami

Although Customs and Border Protection analyzes cargo and other information to target specific shipments for closer inspection, it still physically inspects only a small fraction of the containers under its purview. — Mike Fitzpatrick

Yes, it's a lie, but the media repeated it, and a lie repeated becomes perception, and perception is reality. Perception is also very hard to change. — A.G. Riddle

She kind of accidentally bumped into his chest on the way out. Well, maybe not so accidentally. She saw his muscles through his shirt
they'd just needed a closer physical inspection. — Ophelia London

He found an electronics store and a teahouse and what on closer inspection turned out to be a very expensive brothel. — James S.A. Corey

Sometimes it's the case that when you hear the thing you have most wanted to hear, you cannot take it in. Hope is everyone's mirage and everyone who comes upon that green and grassy spot, the swaying date palms and the bubbling blue pool, is temporarily taken in, even people who have been there before and even when, upon closer inspection, the oasis is nothing but a reef of sand; even with grains of sand blowing lightly across our faces, we find ourselves standing on soft grass of a tenacious, unreasonable green. — Amy Bloom

When individuals blunder, it is unfortuante and their families go down. When rulers fail, it is a national tragedy — Gurcharan Das

We are mistaken when we compare war with "normal life." Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. — C.S. Lewis

The pedestal upon which women have been placed has all too often, upon closer inspection, been revealed as a cage. — Irin Carmon

Upon closer inspection I decided it was, like a lot of things, not as pretty up close as it seemed from a distance. — Ransom Riggs

I believe that the (distorting) mirror which is photography holds an intrinsic, even elemental, relation to writing. — Tod Papageorge

The truth is that Fate does not go out of its way to be dramatic. If you or I had the power of life and death in our hands, we should no doubt arrange some remarkably bright and telling effects. A man who spilt the salt callously would be drowned next week in the Dead Sea, and a couple who married in May would expire simultaneously in the May following. But Fate cannot worry to think out all the clever things that we should think out. It goes about its business solidly and unromantically, and by the ordinary laws of chance it achieves every now and then something startling and romantic. Superstition thrives on the fact that only the accidental dramas are reported. — A.A. Milne