"In Science, all tends to stir, to change, to form fresh surfaces. All denies, destroys, creates, replaces all. What was ground yesterday is put into the hopper again today. The colossal machine, Science, never rests. It is never satisfied; it is insatiable for improvement, of which the absolute knows nothing." (Victor Hugo, "William Shakespeare", 1864)
"Phenomena may well be suspected of anything, are capable of anything. Hypothesis proclaims the infinite; that is what gives hypothesis its greatness. Beneath the surface fact it seeks the real fact. It asks creation for her thoughts, and then for her second thoughts. The great scientific discoverers are those who hold nature suspect." (Victor Hugo, "The Toilers of the Sea", 1866)
"Paradox is the poisonous flower of quietism, the iridescent surface of the rotting mind, the greatest depravity of all." (Thomas Mann,"The Magic Mountain", 1924)
"Escape, God how we all need escape from this tiny here. The need for it has motivated just about everything man has ever done in any direction other than that of the satisfaction of his physical appetites; it has led him along weird and wonderful pathways; it has led him into art and religion, ascetism Exploration and Adventure [sic] and astrology, dancing and drinking, poetry and insanity. All of these have been escapes because he has known only recently the true direction of escape - outward, into infinity and eternity, away from this little flat if rounded surface we’re born on and die on. This mote in the solar system, this atom in the galaxy." (Fredric Brown, "The Lights in the Sky Are Stars", 1953)
"A few moments earlier the water had seemed cool and inviting, but now had become a closed world, the barrier of the surface like a plane between two dimensions." (James G Ballard, "The Drowned World", 1962)
"The present, as every schoolboy knows, is only the surface of the space-time sea, and a living spacewhale can dive beneath this surface and sojourn in times past, can return, if it so desires, to the primordial moment when the cosmos was born." (Robert F Young, "Starscape with Frieze of Dreams", 1970)
"'It bedevils me sometimes why I am the only one to notice the analogy between historical geology and depth psychology', Terrence Burdock mused as they grew lightly profound around the campfire. 'The isostatic principle applies to the mind and the under-mind as well as it does to the surface and? undersurface of the earth. The mind has its erosions and weatherings going on along with its deposits and accumulations. It also has its upthrusts and its stresses. It floats on a similar magma. In extreme cases it has its volcanic eruptions and its mountain building.'" (Raphael A Lafferty, "Continued on Next Rock", 1970)
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