Top 100 Quotes About Obscurity
#1. The cold war was the longest war in United States history. Because of the nuclear capabilities of our enemy it was the most dangerous conflict our country ever faced. Those that won this war did so in obscurity. Those that gave their lives in the cold war have never been properly honored.
Harry Reid
#2. The thing about adolescence is that you are emerging from a state of obscurity. You are coming out into the world from your family. Your family can seem normal because it is your family and all you know, but in fact it is a mess.
Meg Rosoff
#3. I'd rather live long in obscurity than die young with fame.
Rick DeStefanis
#4. I guess I didn't feel confident enough to be searching in a big public way. I was very content at the time to toil in obscurity on things that I thought might point me in certain directions or teach me certain things - not knowing what that would be.
Steven Soderbergh
#5. I guess I just always imagined that I was going to die, like, somehow on top. I was going to, like, go out in some sort of blaze of glory. I never thought about sort of fading into obscurity. And I've worked so hard at having a life, an identity, in obscurity and finding peace with that.
Steve-O
#6. Donald had reached its further edge, and could hear the rush of the stream from the deep obscurity of the abyss below, when there rose from the opposite side a strain of the most delightful music he had ever heard.
Hugh Miller
#7. You need a platform upon which to release an orchestral record, otherwise it's just going to be an obscurity.
Elvis Costello
#8. I smirk a little. I did it, I put that expression on his face. I am not the perfect Abnegation child, doomed to be swallowed by the system and dissolved into obscurity. Instead, I am the first Abnegation-Dauntless transfer in more than a decade.
Veronica Roth
#9. A method involving apparent obscurity is surely justified when it is the clearest, the simplest, the only method possible of saying in full what the writer has to say
Richard Hughes
#10. So the story of Wild Fox Kang's attempted coup and murder of Cixi lay in darkness and obscurity for nearly a century, until the 1980s, when Chinese scholars discovered in Japanese archives the testimony of the designated killer, Bi, which established beyond doubt the existence of the plot.
Jung Chang
#11. The obscurity is more often in the passions and prejudices of the reasoner than in the subject.
Alexander Hamilton
#12. There was only one road back to L.A. - U.S. Interstate 15. Just a flat-out high speed burn through Baker and Barstow and Berdoo. Then onto the Hollywood Freeway, and straight on into frantic oblivion. Safety. Obscurity.
Hunter S. Thompson
#13. What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.
Marcel Proust
#14. When I wrote about the French Revolution, I didn't choose to write about aristocrats; I chose characters who began their lives in provincial obscurity.
Hilary Mantel
#15. No papers, no money; no family, no friends, no sense of who you are. The obscurest of the obscure, so obscure as to be a prodigy.
J.M. Coetzee
#17. I had a great time on News Radio, I got to make tons of money in relative obscurity and learn a lot about the TV biz and work on my standup act constantly. It was a dream gig.
Joe Rogan
#18. How had so large a population of Americans disappeared into a largely unrecorded oblivion of poverty and obscurity?
Douglas A. Blackmon
#19. The human mind is indeed a cave swarming with strange forms of life, most of them unconscious and unilluminated. Unless we can understand something as to how the motives that issue from this obscurity are generated, we can hardly hope to foresee or control them.
Charles Horton Cooley
#20. Some people find clarity threatening. They like muddle, confusion, obscurity. So when somebody does no more than speak clearly it sounds threatening.
Richard Dawkins
#21. Rest and quiet are the comforts of those who have been content to remain in obscurity.
Anthony Trollope
#22. He who would reproach an author for obscurity should look into his own mind to see whether it is quite clear there. In the dusk the plainest writing is illegible.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#23. Many things prevent knowledge, including the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life
Protagoras
#24. Who are you, Mr. Knight? Are you my knight in shining armor? Or a dark prince, riding into obscurity? Whoever you are, you better reply to me. I need you. I need this.
Alexandra Iff
#25. Piracy is not the problem, obscurity is.
Seth Godin
#26. As a minority author going against the trend, I have only one wish: Should my work fade into obscurity, let it be because my talents are found lacking.
Yi Zhu
#27. I never knew how good it is to be unknown until now. The last time I was unknown I was too busy trying to become known to realize the advantages of obscurity.
Alec Guinness
#28. Despite its obscurity, probably no element on the periodic table has as colorful a history as antimony. Money, madness, poison, linguistics, charlatanism, sex - pretty much every theme that runs through the periodic table can be found in Element 51.
Sam Kean
#29. It may be hard to monetize fame, but it is impossible to monetize obscurity.
Cory Doctorow
#30. Now, in our opinion no author should be blamed for obscurity, nor should any pains be grudged in the effort to understand him, provided that he has done his best to be intelligible. Difficult thoughts are quite distinct from difficult words. Difficulty of thought is the very heart of poetry.
Alice Meynell
#31. Obscurity is a bigger problem for authors than piracy.
Tim O'Reilly
#32. If the sculptor uses stone and if the road builder also uses stone, the first uses it in a way that it is not used, consumed, negated by usage, but affirmed, revealed in its obscurity, as a road that leads only to itself.
Maurice Blanchot
#33. Public opinion, - a tyrant, sitting in the dark, wrapt up in mystification and vague terrors of obscurity; deriving power no one knows from whom ... - but irresistible in its power to quell thought, to repress action, to silence conviction ...
Harriet Martineau
#34. I did what I could to inflate the rumor I was on my way to stardom. What I was on my way to, by any mathematical standards known to man, was oblivion, by way of obscurity.
Tallulah Bankhead
#35. You have available to you, right now, a powerful supercomputer. This powerful tool has been used through-out history to take people from rags to riches, from poverty and obscurity to success and fame, from unhappiness and frustration to joy and self-fulfillment, and it can do the same for you.
Brian Tracy
#36. DYER. No, I am not of your Mind, for the Dialogue was fitted up with too much Facility. Words must be pluckt from Obscurity and nourished with Care, improved with Art and corrected with Application. Labour and Time are the Instruments in the perfection of all Work.
Peter Ackroyd
#37. I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they'd read or understood.
Walter Kirn
#39. As the world grows older there is loss and gain - let us not with modern insolence and blindness imagine it all gain; [...] but neither must we with neo-pagan obscurity of thought imagine it all loss.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#40. Science fiction offers an intensely bracing angle of view for writers to adopt, especially in a time of constant innovation and crisis, and it is a scandal that in 1999 so many writers have written it and continue to write it in obscurity.
John Clute
#41. Regardless of Bill Clinton's politics or personal life, he grew up in obscurity and was elected to the presidency - twice. Don't take that away from him, because then you take it away from every other kid in America sitting out there in a school bus with a big dream.
Mike Huckabee
#42. Never underestimate the ridiculous things that have been done in the name of religious-semantic obscurity.
Kate Griffin
#43. If we abide by the principles taught in the Bible, our country will go on prospering and to prosper; but if we and our posterity neglect its instructions and authority, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us and bury all our glory in profound obscurity.
Daniel Webster
#44. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
Carl Sagan
#45. When I started out in the late '80s, my act was pretty terrible, and for years, I kind of toiled in obscurity. I don't believe in a hierarchy in comedy; I feel that a person deserves respect the first time they get onstage, and after that, they just have to be funny and get more consistent.
Andy Kindler
#46. I wanted to drag Shakespeare from obscurity. I've been a fan my whole life.
Joss Whedon
#47. As a student in Beijing in 1996, I sometimes marveled at the sheer obscurity of the movies that somehow made it onto pirated discs in China.
Evan Osnos
#48. The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.
Ernest Gellner
#49. Obscurity and a competence - that is the life that is best worth living.
Mark Twain
#50. For a long time, I didn't think I wanted to live in the Ozarks or write about the region. It seemed to be a sure recipe for obscurity, and to be obscure was not my conscious ambition.
Daniel Woodrell
#52. Who is to blame for this most recent of sports disgraces in America? The culture that flings young athletes like Tyson up out of obscurity, makes millionaires of them and watches them self-destruct?
Joyce Carol Oates
#53. Philosophical reflection could not leave the relation of mind and spirit in the obscurity which had satisfied the needs of the naive consciousness.
Wilhelm Wundt
#54. Books are influential in proportion to their obscurity, provided that the obscurity be that of inexpressible Realities. The Bible is the most obscure book in the world. He must be a great fool who thinks he understands the plainest chapter of it.
Coventry Patmore
#55. An awful sense of her deadness, of her soul-blighting selfishness, began to dawn upon her as something monstrous out of dim, gray obscurity.
Zane Grey
#56. The public easily confuses him who fishes in troubled waters with him who draws up water from the depths.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#57. On dope he sometimes thought that all the televisions on Calchalk Street were softly cackling about Richard Tull: news flashes about his most recent failures, panel discussions about his obscurity, his neglect.
Martin Amis
#58. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#59. This was a splendid life. Splendid in its obscurity and humility, splendid in its strength and charity, splendid in its achievements.
Robert Mortimer
#60. Well has he lived who has lived well in obscurity.
Ovid
#61. Obscurity, indeed, is painful to the mind as well as to the eye; but to bring light from obscurity, by whatever labour, must needsbe delightful and rejoicing.
David Hume
#62. As the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#63. My first movie ever was 'Breaking Away.' I stumbled into an incredible part in a movie that was incredible to be a part of. Peter Yates, the director, became a lifelong friend. He sort of plucked me from obscurity and gave me a life.
Daniel Stern
#64. The problem for most artists isn't piracy, it's obscurity.
Tim O'Reilly
#65. The glory of ancestors sheds a light around posterity; it allows neither good nor bad qualities to remain in obscurity.
[Lat., Majorum gloria posteris lumen est, neque bona neque mala in occulto patitur.]
Sallust
#66. The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
Adrienne Rich
#67. It always seems as though the definition of love will remain debatable by an opinionated world.
Criss Jami
#68. Notoriety wasn't as good as fame, but was heaps better than obscurity.
Terry Pratchett
#70. I grew up in an age where women's tennis did not have similar prizes to men, and they played in complete obscurity, really, compared to the men's game.
David Stern
#71. Obscurantism is the academic theorist's revenge on society for having consigned him or her to relative obscurity - a way of proclaiming one's superiority in the face of one's diminished influence.
David Lehman
#72. Pure geometrical regularity gives a certain pleasure to men troubled by the obscurity of outside appearance. The geometrical line is something absolutely distinct from the messiness, the confusion, and the accidental details of existing things.
T. E. Hulme
#73. A government official is a man who has risen from obscurity to something worse.
Pat Robertson
#74. We should blunt our sharp points, and unravel the complications of things; we should attemper our brightness, and bring ourselves into agreement with the obscurity of others.
Lao-Tzu
#75. We may not always know exactly why we do what we do, choose what we choose, or feel what we feel. But the obscurity of our real motivations doesn't stop us from creating perfectly logical-sounding reasons for our actions, decisions, and feelings.
Dan Ariely
#76. The spirit is often concealed within matter to such an extent that few people are generally capable of perceiving it.
Wassily Kandinsky
#77. The soul languishing in obscurity contracts a kind of rust, or abandons itself to the chimera of presumption; for it is natural for it to acquire something, even when separated from any one.
Quintilian
#78. Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity.)
Bruce Bawer
#79. Kennedy's guy had never been the same. Quit the Service, divorced, finished his human existence in obscurity in some rat's hole in Mississippi,
David Baldacci
#80. He that is pushing his predecessors into the gulf of obscurity, cannot but sometimes suspect, that he must himself sink in like manner, and, as he stands upon the same precipice, be swept away with the same violence.
Samuel Johnson
#81. Obscurity is Japan's outermost defense. The country doesn't want to be understood.
David Mitchell
#82. She swallowed the ridicule & washed it down with criticism, It was far sweeter than the taste of obscurity.
C.E. O'Grady
#83. In this digital age you have to pay to play in the game to succeed if not you will stay in obscurity
Bernard Kelvin Clive
#84. I've been very fortunate, because I've been involved in things that very often lead to obscurity. I was in some pictures that were not successful whatsoever. I think people admire persistence. People notice that I'm still there.
Christopher Walken
#85. It's better for the whole world to know you, even as a sex star, than never to be known at all.
Marilyn Monroe
#86. There is nothing wrong with "women's studies" that studying the right women can't cure, but feminist literary scholars have a penchant for dragging the rivers of deserved obscurity for third-rate neurotics.
Florence King
#87. Obscurity is a good thing. You can fail in obscurity. It removes the fear of failure.
Jason Fried
#88. Anything could happen here and who would know? It was a new place to me, but timeless in its own right. Regn had never stood here. All these years since and we'd been so close to 'this' obscurity. Its hidden proximity is what disquieted.
Wheston Chancellor Grove
#89. Deep to me connotes intellectual rigor, not fashionable obscurity or the unnecessarily academic.
Alex Payne
#90. What kind of ministry is that, just talking to people? Criticism directed at Francis Schaeffer's plan to open an obscure spot in the Swiss Alps to those who came with questions.
Nancy Pearcey
#91. Fame is a devil; obscurity is an Angel! Stay away from me, Devil; Come near to me, Angel!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#92. We should accept indiscriminately all His dispensations, whether obscurity or illumination, fruitfulness or barrenness, weakness or strength, sweetness or bitterness, temptations, distractions, pain, weariness, or doubtings; and none of all these should, for one moment retard our course.
Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon
#93. You may be serving in obscurity in some small place, feeling unknown and unappreciated. Listen, God put you were you are for a purpose! ... He will let you know if he wants you somewhere else.
Rick Warren
#94. There is an enduring freshness in what remains strange and obscure which the cliches of greatness can only evoke nostalgia for.
Bauvard
#95. ...To see your life flow in obscurity among the treasures of the heart and of nature, happy in your anonymity, and to occasionally lose yourself in reading or in the pleasure of being a sensitive admirer of the fine arts; that's the image of modern life you're looking for!
Paul Amadeus Dienach
#96. If I could I would always work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results.
Emily Bronte
#97. It was an elevating, transforming vision: a new, fresh, vigorous, and above all morally regenerate people rising from the obscurity to defend the battlements of liberty and then in triumph standing forth, heartening and sustaining the cause of freedom everywhere.
Bernard Bailyn
#98. Besides the obscurity arising from the complexity of objects, and the imperfection of the human faculties, the medium through which the conceptions of men are conveyed to each other adds a fresh embarrassment.
James Madison
#99. Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting.
Edmund Burke
#100. Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.
Thomas Merton
