Most Obvious Quotes

#1. That something so obvious as the vanity of the world should be so little recognized that people find it odd and surprising to be told that it is foolish to seek greatness; that is most remarkable.

Blaise Pascal

#2. 10. Comparison is the root of all feelings of inferiority. The moment you begin examining other people's strengths against your most obvious weaknesses, your self-esteem starts to crumble!

James C. Dobson

#3. Still, most of those effects occur in the context of harmless play and it is patently obvious that children are not normally turned into aggressive little monsters by TV or video games, since most children do not become aggressive little monsters.

Hugh Mackay

#4. Eating smart is all about having an awareness of your body. The most obvious way to do that is by seeing it. So when you're trying to lose weight, spend more time wearing less. I don't think I could eat a plate of nachos naked - could you?

Marisa Miller

#5. There are no 'perfect liars' in the world; there are only 'perfect believers' who believe in even the most obvious lies!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#6. One of the things I like about doing science, the thing that is the most fun, is coming up with something that seems ridiculous when you first hear it but finally seems obvious when you're finished.

Fischer Black

#7. Since God has a will for us, He must want us to know it. If so, then we could expect Him to communicate it to us in the most obvious way.

John F. MacArthur Jr.

#8. The power of the Web is obvious and undeniable. We diminish it at our peril. But what if the most potent social effect to spread outward from the Internet turns out to be disinhibition, the breaking down of personal restraints and the endless elevation of oneself? It may be already.

Daniel Henninger

#9. When something seems 'the most obvious thing in the world' it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.

Bertolt Brecht

#10. First and most obvious, bring out the three old warhorses of competition - cost, quality, and service - and drive them to new levels, making every person in the organization see them for what they are, a matter of survival.

Jack Welch

#11. The late W. Edwards Deming, guru of Quality management, once declared, 'The most important things we need to manage can't be measured.' If that's true of what we need to manage, it should be even more obvious that it's true of what we need to teach.

Alfie Kohn

#12. They criticize me for harping on the obvious; if all the folks in the United States would do the few simple things they know they ought to do, most of our big problems would take care of themselves.

Calvin Coolidge

#13. One of the most obvious characteristics of the very stupid is that they need to ask the same question multiple times whenever the answer doesn't match their preconceived judgement. They think that it's easier to impose their lie than accepting the truth.

Robin Sacredfire

#14. Experience teaches, that men are often so much governed by what they are accustomed to see and practice, that the simplest and most obvious improvements ... are adopted with hesitation, reluctance, and slow gradations.

Alexander Hamilton

#15. I've made a career writing about fictitious anti-heroes. To create these worlds, I've spent a lot of time with active members on both sides of the law. And if I had to pick the most interesting of the two, the choice is obvious - we all love the guys in black.

Kurt Sutter

#16. The most obvious clue was sartorial: cleantech executives were running around wearing suits and ties. This was a huge red flag, because real technologists wear T-shirts and jeans.

Peter Thiel

#17. I feel like in a world where we all try to figure out our place and our purpose here, your passions are one of your most obvious guides.

Nick Woodman

#18. IN MOST FAMILIES, there is a favorite child. Parents deny it and maybe they truly don't see it, but it's obvious to the children. Unfairness bothers children greatly. It's hard to always come in second.

Karen Joy Fowler

#19. To state the obvious, romantic comedies have to be funny and they have to be romantic. But one of the most important things, for me anyway, is that they be about two strong people finding their way to love.

Nora Ephron

#20. Most Christmas carols have no obvious religious content, or at least that's noticeable to most people. I mean, it is almost by definition, a cultural phenomenon, all these songs, even though they point to this very religious holiday. They're not religious songs in effect anymore.

Howard Dean

#21. As a bubble you cannot change the world, this is obvious, but you can still make a child happy! Even the most worthless things can achieve very noteworthy things!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#22. I've always found music that is carnal very attractive but not in the most obvious way.

Brian Molko

#23. Los Angeles for many years had operated with a police department that was far smaller than other police departments had in areas of comparable or larger size, New York and Chicago being the most obvious examples.

Scott Turow

#24. Yet, it ought to be obvious that good music generally occupies a higher plane that mere politics. Great writers can express moods through melody and capture experiences we share most powerfully - love, lust, longing; joy, rage, fear; triumph, yearning and confusion.

Tony Snow

#25. All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

George Orwell

#26. When we see something like this we forget the most important and most obvious thing ... those butterflies will never fly again."
"It's unnatural, and yet it's so seductive ... "
"That's exactly the effect that death has on some individuals. That's why serial killers exist.

Donato Carrisi

#27. If I said to most of the people who auditioned, 'Good job, awesome, well done,' it would have made me actually look and feel ridiculous. It's quite obvious most of the people who turned up for this audition were hopeless.

Simon Cowell

#28. The old idea, or rather the old prejudice, that women are protected by men was so deeply ingrained in that society that they overlooked what was the most obvious, that is, that the weakest and the disadvantaged are the most exposed.

Ruth Kluger

#29. It's amazing how constant repetition can make even the most obvious truths irritating enough to disagree with.

Richard K. Morgan

#30. Life is precious, Jacob thought. The most important of all thoughts, and the most obvious, and the most difficult to remember to have. How different my life would have been if I could have had that thought before I was forced to.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#31. For obvious reasons, I never told you about my notebook, with a cover as green as mansions long ago, which I use as a commonplace book, a phrase which here means 'place where I have collected passages from some of the most important books I have read.

Lemony Snicket

#32. People ask me to describe how I play, and the most obvious answer is that I'm a jazz influenced guitar player. But I'm not a jazz guitar player. Wes Montgomery was a jazz guitarist, Joe Pass was a jazz guitarist (laughs).

Larry Carlton

#33. Property is not the natural and obvious and inevitable concept that most people think it is.

Robert A. Heinlein

#34. President Obama has repeatedly urged Congress to let the Bush tax cuts expire for those earning more than $250,000 a year. Increasing rates on top earners is an obvious way to raise revenue from those who can afford it most.

Christina Romer

#35. The most obvious characteristic of science is its application: the fact that, as a consequence of science, one has a power to do things. And the effect this power has had need hardly be mentioned. The whole industrial revolution would almost have been impossible without the development of science.

Richard P. Feynman

#36. He winks at me, and the surge of butterflies in my stomach is so strong I think I may throw up right there. I need something to calm my nerves. The most obvious remedy is more alcohol. They don't call it liquid courage for nothing.

Hannah Harrington

#37. The most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

David Foster Wallace

#38. I think you have to be much more secure and much less angry to trust the simple. You've got to be in a pretty good place to trust those simple, obvious answers and, most important, to use them.

Spencer Johnson

#39. We wonder how people can't see the most obvious things about themselves, yet we forget those people are us.

Ezra Bayda

#40. Different directors offer you different things, and it's not necessarily the most obvious things.

Malcolm McDowell

#41. There are many ways to drown, only the most obvious wave their arms as they're going under.

Nick Flynn

#42. It is obvious that the greatest and most important service that is required of our agriculture under existing conditions is an enlarged production of the staple food crops.

David F. Houston

#43. Sometimes the most important job advertising can do, is to clarify the obvious.

Jay Chiat

#44. The nutritional composition of beef provides much-needed protein, vitamins and iron.... Let us also not gloss over what is beef's most obvious benefit: Livestock take inedible and untasty grains and convert them into a protein-packed food most humans love to eat.

Jayson Lusk

#45. It seems now that the place where you see
the most obvious censorship is on college campuses
the precise place where you would expect to see the least.

Alan Charles Kors

#46. 'Obvious' is the most dangerous word in mathematics.

E. T. Bell

#47. He believes the world populated by obvious monsters. The most dangerous of us are the least obvious. He relies on his skill as a lie detector, reading and judging the conflicting emotions of others.

Karen Marie Moning

#48. But it seems that the most beautiful women always go for the most horrible shits, the most obvious fakes.

Charles Bukowski

#49. Not believing in what you have to sell This is blindingly obvious but perhaps is the number one reason why many salespeople do not succeed. Not even the most accomplished actor can consistently get away with selling something they fundamentally don't believe in.

Simon Bozeat

#50. The problem with improvisation is, of course, that everyone just slips into their comfort zone and does sort of the easy thing to do, the most obvious thing to do with your instrument.

Brian Eno

#51. I wonder: instead of retreating and hiding, instead of pining for the way it was, what if I accept the way it is? This strikes me as both the most obvious thing in the world and the most profound.

Ann Kidd Taylor

#52. (Mike) Schmitty provided what the relief pitchers need most, home runs and great defense. He's the best third baseman that I ever played with, and maybe of all-time. Obvious Hall of Famer, even then. He retired while on top of his game. I thought for sure he was going to hit 600 home runs.

Steve Carlton

#53. The tough thing is how to cultivate a life where the paramecium of happiness gets a lot of chances to get out and swim and make more paramecia. That seems like an obvious universal goal for most humans.

Leigh Newman

#54. When it comes to ourselves, we often have a blind spot. That is, we fail to see ourselves as others see us. We fail to recognize our most obvious traits: our strengths, weaknesses, mannerisms.

Mark Link

#55. The simplest and most obvious cause which can there be assigned for any phenomena, is probably the true one.

David Hume

#56. Wealth is an inner feeling. More precisely, wealth is an outlook, an attitude, a belief. And the most obvious measurement of wealth is gratitude.

Bo Sanchez

#57. I think the job of leadership is to expand what can be talked about and to get consensus on the nature of the problem, and that is most of the job. Because once you do that, once you have diagnosis, treatment options are obvious.

Jim Cooper

#58. No one is without troubles, without personal hardships and genuine challenges. That fact may not be obvious because most people don't advertise their woes and heartaches. But nobody, not even the purest heart, escapes life without suffering battle scars.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#59. Here was someone who had dismissed most of what I had just been saying as too obvious to even discuss; yet apparently it wasn't obvious enough. I realized that he was the living embodiment of one of the greatest paradoxes of human behavior:

Common sense is not common action.

Shawn Achor

#60. Indeed, the UNGA has acquired perhaps its most obvious significance as a protest forum for dissatisfied would-be nations (such as the Palestinians since 1970s).

Jussi M. Hanhimaki

#61. The full extent of the problem of hunger is not obvious to most of us. We see the homeless, but there are a great number of working poor, struggling to survive, who don't have enough money to put adequate food on the table. We must find a solution to this ever-increasing problem - and quickly.

Scott Glenn

#62. most obvious application of functions is defining new vocabulary. Creating new words in regular, human-language prose is usually bad style. But in programming, it is indispensable.

Marijn Haverbeke

#63. Markus's mind jumped straight to the most obvious explanation: Is the president nuking people again?

Neal Stephenson

#64. When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence. Let it be the most obvious fabrication and you will still believe whatever truth is in it, because you can not deny truth no matter how shabbily it is dressed.

Orson Scott Card

#65. Drugs are merely the most obvious form of addiction in our society. Drug addiction is one of the things that undermines traditional values.

Christopher Lasch

#66. The most obvious drawback of social media is that they are aggressive distractions.

Bill Keller

#67. Those things that are the most obvious are the very things we've most likely to overlook.

Pittacus Lore

#68. You're alive!" Fezzik cried.
The man in black sat immobile, like a ventriloquist's dummy, just his mouth moving. "That is perhaps the most childishly obvious remark I have ever come across ...

William Goldman

#69. It happens all the time. Sometimes the most obvious choices are the hardest to see.

Jessica Brody

#70. What is particularly intriguing, in fact, is that whereas many peoples tend to locate this experience (of the sacred) in certain unusual, if not 'supernatural' moments and circumstances ... the Oriental focus is upon mystery in the most obvious, ordinary, mundane-the most natural-situations of life.

Conrad Hyers

#71. He was a genius - that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities.

Robertson Davies

#72. Had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians. These people, whose origins

George Orwell

#73. Let's begin with a simple assumption. Since God has a will for us, He must want us to know it. If so, then we could expect Him to communicate it to us in the most obvious way. And how would that be? Through the Bible, His revelation.

John F. MacArthur Jr.

#74. A long night spent with your most obvious weakness
You start shaking at the thought you are everything I want
Because you are everything I'm not

Taking Back Sunday

#75. That's the thing about great artists: They find the thing that's most obvious to themselves, what's most conscious and natural, and they put it out there and the audience comes.

Steve Vai

#76. The constant assertion of masculinity is always the most obvious tell of a fake. You do not constantly assert what you know you have.

Matt Bondurant

#77. Remember: if the most unique ideas were obvious to everyone, there wouldn't be entrepreneurs. The one thing that every entrepreneurial journey has in common is that there are many, many steps on the road to success.

Tory Burch

#78. Automated call centers are only the most obvious way speech recognition will be used. The software is now becoming sophisticated enough to identify speakers through 'voiceprints,' akin to fingerprints, eventually reducing the need for personal identification numbers.

Alex Berenson

#79. The most common misconception about privacy is that it's about having something to hide. "If you aren't doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide," the saying goes, with the obvious implication that privacy only aids wrongdoers.

Bruce Schneier

#80. As soon as something seems the most obvious thing in the world,it means that we have abandoned all attempts to understanding it.

Bertolt Brecht

#81. Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious.
If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.

James Williams

#82. I think it's pretty obvious to most people that Napster is not media specific, but I could see a system like Napster evolving into something that allows users to locate and retrieve different types of data other than just MP3s or audio files.

Shawn Fanning

#83. A widespread meticulous consistency causes a bigger suspicion than the most obvious inconsistency does!

Pawan Mishra

#84. When I read students' attempts at creative writing it is obvious immediately that most of them have not read much or widely. The aspiring writer must read everything he or she can to appreciate the myriad ways words are used and to what effect.

Julius Lester

#85. The most obvious, most absurdly recognizable phenomena in day-to-day life often become the hardest to remain consciously aware of.

Chris Matakas

#86. Peace is one of the most obvious earmarks of the authority of Christ.

Beth Moore

#87. I didn't want to do the obvious role that you see in Hollywood most of the time, which is the heartbroken girl who's waiting to be rescued by the guy, blah, blah, blah. I wanted to do something different.

Gal Gadot

#88. Most straight people, and many gay people, especially those who came of age more recently, don't understand how momentous and difficult coming out was to men and women of this generation. It seems so obvious now, so banal.

Christopher Bram

#89. The same thing. I feel like such a fool to discover it only now. So blatantly obvious, right in front of my face. Another of Henri's adages: Those things that are most obvious are the very things we're most likely to overlook. But Henri knew.

Pittacus Lore

#90. Your guess [about the future of technology] is as good as mine. The only thing I'm sure of is (a) most of the predictions I hear are almost certainly wrong, and (b) the things that will turn out to be important will come as a surprise, even though in hindsight they'll seem perfectly obvious.

Steve Krug

#91. That the reason life is so strange is that we have simply no idea what is around the next corner, and it was an obvious idea but one most of us had learned to forget.

Colum McCann

#92. The main reason why it is profitable to establish a firm would seem to be that there is a cost of using the price mechanism. The most obvious cost of 'organizing' production through the price mechanism is that of discovering what the relevant prices are.

Ronald Coase

#93. I don't believe novels should carry an obvious message. I don't want to write characters you can immediately say are good or bad; as in life, most people are a mixture.

Christopher Koch

#94. A man who lives apart, not to others but alone, is exposed to obvious psychological dangers. In itself, the practice of deception is not particularly exacting; it is a matter of experience, of professional expertise, it is a facility most of us can acquire.

John Le Carre

#95. If the proof starts from axioms, distinguishes several cases, and takes thirteen lines in the text book ... it may give the youngsters the impression that mathematics consists in proving the most obvious things in the least obvious way.

George Polya

#96. I take office during the most difficult moment in the country's recent history. The country can be saved - it's up to us. I think it is obvious for those who support this government to undertake the commitment and ensure that our country's euro membership is not endangered.

Lucas Papademos

#97. It would be unthinkable to have a top-ten list of multiple narrative novels that doesn't include David Mitchell. 'Cloud Atlas' is the most obvious choice, but I have opted for Mitchell's slightly lesser known debut, 'Ghostwritten.'

Susan Barker

#98. For the most part, the only contact that most Quebecers have with the world of Islam is through these images of violence, repeated over and over: wars, riots, bombs, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Boston marathon ... The reaction is obvious: We'll have none of that here!

Jacques Parizeau

#99. Because: Love Never Dies, What is Within is More Important than What is Without, The Best is Not Always the Most Obvious and Once You've Loved Truly, Thor, then You Know the Way

Cressida Cowell

#100. Men are naturally most impressed by diseases which have obvious manifestations, yet some of their worst enemies creep on them unobtrusively.

Rene Dubos