Quotes About Obscure

#1. Do they [the publishers of Murphy] not understand that if the book is slightly obscure it is because it is a compression and thatto compress it further can only make it more obscure?

Samuel Beckett

#2. Bob Dylan has always sealed his decisions with the unexplainable. His motives for withholding the release of the magnificent 'Basement Tapes' will be as forever obscure as Brian Wilson's reasons for the destruction of the tapes for 'Smile.'

Jon Landau

#3. Happiness comes from living in the moment, this moment, now, right here. If you are in obscure states of mind, you won't see what this moment is. You won't realize its beauty.

Frederick Lenz

#4. The next time you need a piece of apparently obscure information, try asking a science fiction writer. You might be surprised.

Alastair Reynolds

#5. We do not adopt a belief because it is true (they are all true), but because some obscure power impels us to do so. When this power leaves us, we suffer prostration and collapse, a tete-a-tete with what is left of ourselves.

Emil Cioran

#6. If I am ever obscure in my expressions, do not fancy that therefore I am deep. If I were really deep, all the world would understand, though they might not appreciate. The perfectly popular style is the perfectly scientific one. To me an obscurity is a reason for suspecting a fallacy.

Charles Kingsley

#7. I think kids in Europe have developed a deeper knowledge of music and of black music in particular. You go to Europe, and these kids know about all this obscure funk and soul that kids over here wouldn't know. I think it's getting better in the States, though, with the age of the Internet.

Lenny Kravitz

#8. If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece. Line

Vladimir Nabokov

#9. A wise God shrouds the future in obscure darkness.

Horace

#10. I never learned how to tune a harp, or play upon a lute; but I know how to raise a small and obscure city to glory and greatness ... whereto all kindreds of the earth will pilgrim.

Themistocles

#11. I felt like a lonely cat, an aging tom ridden by obscure rage, looking for torn-ear trouble. I clipped that pitch off short and threw it away. Night streets were my territory, and would be till I rolled in the last gutter.

Ross Macdonald

#12. A charlatan makes obscure what is clear; a thinker makes clear what is obscure.

Hugh Kingsmill

#13. Years ago I realized that maybe I made mistake, politically, when I turned a lot of that stuff down. I would go off to obscure places and make movies that six people went to see.

Mickey Rourke

#14. To be continually subject to the breath of slander, will tarnish the purest virtue, as a constant exposure to the atmosphere will obscure the brightness of the finest gold; but in either case, the real value of both continues the same, although the currency may be somewhat impeded.

Charles Caleb Colton

#15. I can't let you go now. I want to go places with you; obscure little places, just to be able to say: here I came with her.

Anais Nin

#16. Law has been called a bottomless pit, not so much because of its depth, as that its windings are so obscure nobody can see the end.

George Pope Morris

#17. Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
And has the nature of infinity.

William Wordsworth

#18. if you paid enough attention to your past, it would grow and grow, obscure your present as well as your future.

Aline Ohanesian

#19. To plant a family! This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do. The truth is, that, once in every half century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#20. Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves obscure our truths.

Ken Liu

#21. Being horrible in a big film is a quicker nosedive than doing an obscure film and making no money.

Renee Zellweger

#22. Yes, he just wanted her to want to be a mom, in the same way that he felt, with all of his blood, that he was a dad first, and everything else in the world an obscure, unfathomably distant second.

J. Ryan Stradal

#23. The whole purpose of propaganda is to make the obvious seem obscure, or offensive

Stefan Molyneux

#24. She may hide it, but Clinton is a policy nerd. Ask about microfinance, and she'll talk your ear off. Mention early childhood interventions, and she will gush about obscure details of a home visitation experiment in Elmira, N.Y., that dramatically improved child outcomes.

Nicholas Kristof

#25. Its upper part is not bright, and its lower part is not obscure.

Lao-Tzu

#26. Now she has lived long enough to know that cutting up women is a sport older than cricket but just as popular and equally full of obscure rituals and intricate rules that everyone seems to know except her.

Mohammed Hanif

#27. Writing about writing is a bit like talking about a conversation you are having; it tends to obscure desperation about where the next word is coming from.

Renata Adler

#28. Solitude, as I understand it, does not signify an unhappy state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more or less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity.

Jean Genet

#29. [O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#30. Astronomy is useful because it raises us above ourselves; it is useful because it is grand; ... It shows us how small is man's body, how great his mind, since his intelligence can embrace the whole of this dazzling immensity, where his body is only an obscure point, and enjoy its silent harmony.

Henri Poincare

#31. Every writer must find a way of writing that tells the reader: This is me and no one else. The Voice can be idiosyncratic, but it cannot be obscure. It is a blend of style and content and intent and rhythm and pure personality.

Jeff Lindsay

#32. Other men are known to posterity only through the medium of history, which is continually growing faint and obscure; but the intercourse between the author and his fellow-men is ever new,
active, and immediate.

Washington Irving

#33. Mme. de Gallardon, who could never stop herself from sacrificing her greatest social ambitions and highest hopes of someday dazzling the world to the immediate, obscure, and private pleasure of saying something disagreeable.

Marcel Proust

#34. Seldom, if ever, has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.

Edward R. Murrow

#35. A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.

Wendell Willkie

#36. An appellate court which reverses the judgment of a popular author's contemporaries, the appellant being his obscure competitor.

Ambrose Bierce

#37. Life never ceases. Life is an overflowing source, and death is only an obscure effect of illusions.

Andre Luiz Moreira

#38. Nothing can compare in beauty, and wonder, and admirableness, and divinity itself, to the silent work in obscure dwellings of faithful women bringing their children to honor and virtue and piety.

Henry Ward Beecher

#39. Calamities that are not the result of purely natural phenomena usually have their origins, distant and obscure though they may be, in common human failings.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#40. for that great and singular movement of a heart which begins to love is a very obscure and a very sweet thing. Poor old man, with a perfectly new heart!

Victor Hugo

#41. The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private languages and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.

Gregory Maguire

#42. If the testimony by which the Jews were assured of the salvation of their posterity is taken away from us, the coming of Christ would have the effect of making God's grace more obscure and less well attested to us than it was to the Jews before us.

John Calvin

#43. The obscure unease that Pluto has always inspired, a dog owned by a mouse, daily confronted with the mutational horror of Goofy.

Michael Chabon

#44. When God wanted to defeat sin, His ultimate weapon was the sacrifice of His own Son. On Christmas Day two thousand years ago, the birth of a tiny baby in an obscure village in the Middle East was God's supreme triumph of good over evil.

Charles W. Colson

#45. When the situation is obscure, attack

Heinz Guderian

#46. I went for endless auditions for tiny parts in obscure plays, and never got one job until I was in 'Four Weddings'.

Anna Chancellor

#47. I keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is.

Matthew Arnold

#48. An obscure flesh-and-blood Gascon, forgotten by History, transformed into a legendary giant by the novelist's genius

Arturo Perez-Reverte

#49. The Apollo pictures of the whole Earth conveyed to multitudes something well known to astronomers: On the scale of the worlds - to say nothing of stars or galaxies - humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal

Carl Sagan

#50. That man lives happy and in command of himself, who from day to day can say I have lived. Whether clouds obscure, or the sun illumines the following day, that which is past is beyond recall.

Horace

#51. The life of famous men was more glorious in antiquity; the life of obscure men is happier with the moderns.

Madame De Stael

#52. The library was still giving trouble: a few books in some of the more obscure corners of the stacks retained some autonomy, dating back to an infamous early experiment with flying books, and lately they'd begun to breed. Shocked undergraduates had stumbled on books in the very act.

Lev Grossman

#53. Our true nature is bliss. That bliss is like the sun that always shines. It remains ever present, but the events in life and clouds of worry and even emotions like happiness may obscure it like storm clouds obscure the sun.

Debra Moffitt

#54. In a series of articles beginning on Oct. 2, 1966, I wrote about the long-forgotten history of the Liberty Tree. To call attention to how obscure the site had become, I interviewed waitresses at the Essex Delicatessen below the plaque on Washington Street. None knew what the Liberty Tree was.

Ronald Kessler

#55. The greatest danger in any argument is that real issues often clouded by superficial ones, that momentary passions may obscure permanent realities.

Mary Ellen Chase

#56. The success of my rule does not rely on my ability to recite obscure Latin verse.

Sherry Thomas

#57. I like what's obscure.

Steven Klein

#58. I sometimes wonder if I'm built from old videotape. I feel archaic, worn from overuse and increasingly obscure. One day I'll get caught up in the grinding wheels of my own life and unravel.

David Thomas Moore

#59. All men are naturally included to obscure the morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity.

Reinhold Niebuhr

#60. Faith is obscure. By faith a man moves through darkness; but he moves securely, his hand in the hand of God. He is literally seeing through the eyes of God.

Walter Farrell

#61. Wherever we go we carry this burden of our personal consciousness and wherever we step we open it out over our heads like a great baleful cotton umbrella to obstruct the prospect and obscure the light of heaven.

Henry James

#62. The problem of how we finance the welfare state should not obscure a separate issue: if each person thinks he has an inalienable right to welfare, no matter what happens to the world, that's not equity, it's just creating a society where you can't ask anything of people.

Jacques Delors

#63. When the artist ... intends from the beginning to be obscure and take obscurity as his objective or goal for its own sake and wishes to astonish, shock, and seem mysterious, that is a swindle.

Tawfiq Al-Hakim

#64. Not to create confusion in what is clear, but to throw light on what is obscure.

Horace

#65. Aiming at brevity, I become obscure.

Horace

#66. In labouring to be concise, I become obscure.

Horace

#67. How often does it happen that an obscure line finds its way into a periodical ... is requoted in every book that comes out during the next three months, and sleeps again!

Samuel Laman Blanchard

#68. If you alter or obscure the Biblical portrait of God in order to attract converts, you don't get converts to God, you get converts to an illusion. This is not evangelism, but deception.

John Piper

#69. I want my books to sell, to be read. I'm not interested in being obscure.

Vikram Seth

#70. Many people are trying to recover a field of vision that is basically human in scale, and extricate themselves from dependence on the obscure forces of a global economy.

Matthew B. Crawford

#71. You are likely to see no general reformation till you procure family reformation. Some little obscure religion there may be in here and there one; but while it sticks in single persons, and is not promoted by these societies, it doth not prosper, nor promise much for future increase.

Richard Baxter

#72. My favorite type of music to sing to would be rock and roll, Tenacious D, Led Zeppelin, some Queen - I love all of them. I love singing to them because they're all just great voices. I love listening to very obscure jazz.

Casey Abrams

#73. Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.

G.K. Chesterton

#74. I strive to be brief but I become obscure.

Horace

#75. Inheritance and culture obscure people's higher capacities.

Idries Shah

#76. But where do they find these lines in nature? I can only see luminous or obscure masses, planes that advance or planes that recede, reliefs or background. My eye never catches lines or details.

Francisco Goya

#77. Between knowledge of what really exists and ignorance of what does not exist lies the domain of opinion. It is more obscure than knowledge, but clearer than ignorance.

Plato

#78. Being obscure in acronyms is great. I think I'll start making up my own ... INYM - I'm Not Your Momma.

Paul Vixie

#79. Words that defy reality are ominous. And it's ominous reality that confronts those who would obscure the wise and worthy.

Mencius

#80. Facts can obscure the truth.

Maya Angelou

#81. When I struggle to be terse, I end by being obscure.

Horace

#82. Everybody uses pop culture as a shorthand. You might make an obscure reference to Monty Python or Iron Eagle that only some people will get, but if they do it conveys a world of meaning.

Ernest Cline

#83. This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.

Dylan Thomas

#84. Initially, I thought problems on how the brain works to be the most interesting. But it was necessary to be practical and concentrate on less obscure matters when I entered Washington State College. Besides, there were no courses given in neurobiology.

Irwin Rose

#85. If I had never touched Holmes, who has tended to obscure my higher work, my position in literature would at the present moment be a more commanding one,

Arthur Conan Doyle

#86. If you want to study one of these strange organisms, you had better have a good justification. It's not good to study gene organisation in some obscure insect that no one's ever heard about.

Thomas R. Cech

#87. When I started writing comics, 'comics writer' was the most obscure job in the world! If I wanted to be a celebrity, I would have become a moody English screen actor.

Alan Moore

#88. I've never been good at self-promotion. And my URL is really obscure. And for years and years, there was nothing about me on my website.

David Rees

#89. Instrumental music was only tolerated, on account of the times and of the people. But in gospel times, we must not have recourse to these, unless we wish to destroy the evangelical perfection, and to obscure the meridian light, which we enjoy in Christ our Lord.

John Calvin

#90. We all would like to think that there are clear boundaries that separate truth from lies and reality from fantasy. I used to think that but I don't anymore. I've found that those boundaries can be vague, obscure, and frequently changing.

Dana Caldarone

#91. The more obscure and mysterious things remained, the more interested I became in them. I even looked for mystery where there was none.

Patrick Modiano

#92. Rock & roll is not obscure, it's really easy to understand. So is my painting.

Grace Slick

#93. The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.

Edward R. Murrow

#94. Without precise meanings behind words, politicians and elites can obscure reality and condition people to reflexively associate certain words with positive or negative perceptions. In other words, unpleasant facts can be hidden behind purposely meaningless language.

Ron Paul

#95. It was not merely that his brother was dead. His brain, too young to realize the full paradox, wondered with an obscure self- pity why it was that the pulse of his brother's fear went on and on, when Francis was now where he had always been told there was no more terror and no more
darkness.

Graham Greene

#96. From exam grading to health education to professional training to democratic participation, paths towards self-realization and success in the world are often daunting and obscure: journeys only the privileged feel confident setting off along.

Tom Chatfield

#97. I'd rather be not the light in your life
The bright day might make me obscure
I'd rather be the cold darkness
For it remains, unseen, uncertain and unsure

Sanhita Baruah

#98. I talked to a guy who has old cars, and there are parts that don't exist any more. So he makes radio dial knobs for obscure cars.

Bre Pettis

#99. I understand there are some men who are only half here. Let's not say men. Let's say people. People who are more or less obscure at times.

Don DeLillo

#100. Human affairs are so obscure and various that nothing can be clearly known.

Desiderius Erasmus