Quotes About Obscurity

#1. Therefore if we realize that our nature and destiny are what they should be, we will have no anxiety and will be at ease with ourselves in the face of life or death, prominence or obscurity, or an infinite amount of changes and variations, and will be in accord with principle.

Guo Xiang

#2. Unfortunately for our esteem, societies of the West are not known for their conduciveness to the surrender of pretensions, to the acceptance of age or fat, let alone poverty and obscurity.

Alain De Botton

#3. The mystery of the universe, and the meaning of God's world, are shrouded in hopeless obscurity, until we learn to feel that all laws suppose a lawgiver, and that all working involves a Divine energy.

Alexander MacLaren

#4. How often the highest talent lurks in obscurity.

Plautus

#5. To morrow, I believe, is to be an eclipse of the sun, and I think it perfectly meet and proper that the sun in the heavens, and the glory of the Republic should both go into obscurity and darkness together.

Benjamin F. Wade

#6. Ignorance seldom vaults into knowledge, but passes into it through an intermediate state of obscurity, even as night into day through twilight.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#7. But it is true that sometimes an enveloping darkness aids one to clearer vision; as in a panorama building, for example, where the obscurity about the entrance prepares one better for the climax, and gives the scene depicted a more real and vivid appearance.

Pierre Loti

#8. Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.

James Thurber

#9. No true love is possible, Lewis demonstrates, until we abandon our claims, our rights, our grievances. Until then we will be trapped in the obscurity of our heart's mixed motives, our will to possess, to control, to be our own gods.

Michael D. O'Brien

#10. The enemy of a writer is not controversy but obscurity.

William P. Young

#11. People newly emerged from obscurity generally launch out into indiscriminate display.

Jean Ingelow

#12. It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years.

J.D. Salinger

#13. So many people make a name nowadays, that it is more distinguished to remain in obscurity.

Thomas Hardy

#14. What is popular is not necessarily vulgar; and that which we try to rescue from fatal obscurity had in general much better remain where it is.

William Hazlitt

#15. Alexander the Great once said that 'I would rather live a short life of glory than a long one of obscurity!' What a great illusion is this! Wise man is he who always chooses to live longer and he who blesses the obscurity!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#16. You are in obscurity when you are still needed but no one cares a lot what you say or think, or even where you are working from. You have no voice or presence that makes you relevant. Grow your voice.

Archibald Marwizi

#17. And also those to whom these commandments were given, might have power to lay the foundation of this church, and to bring it forth out of obscurity and out of darkness, the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth ...

Joseph Smith Jr.

#18. He started low and remained there, sure that safety embraced felicity on a mattress of obscurity. He knew that vertical activity invited dazzling exposure, and that to seek is to be sucked. He recognized loneliness as the mother of virtues and sat in her lap whenever he could.

David Ohle

#19. There is a sort of consolation at the contemplation of the yawning abyss, at the bottom of which lie darkness and obscurity. Edmond

Alexandre Dumas

#20. Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.

W. H. Auden

#21. The Lord chose Joseph Smith, called upon him at fourteen years of age, gave him vision, and led him along, guided and directed him in his obscurity.

Brigham Young

#22. For the most part, executions happen in obscurity. If people did hear about executions, if they were publicized, even televised, I fear more would enjoy them than be repelled by them.

Wendy Kaminer

#23. In the future, everyone will have fifteen minutes of fame. Followed by fifteen minutes of legal problems, fifteen minutes of ridicule from late-night TV hosts, fifteen minutes of obscurity, and fifteen minutes of "Where are they now?".

Dan Piraro

#24. The sublime signals the limits of rationality - the 'sleep' of reason - and was best communicated by obscurity. So in the same spirit as the recipes 'to make a romance', 'seven types of obscurity' could be proposed for a Gothic novel:

Nick Groom

#25. We hear the ambient noise of children singing. We hear lions and tigers roar. Hyenas laugh. Some jungle bird or howler monkey declares its existence, screeching a maniac's gibberish. Our entire world, always doing battle against the silence and obscurity of death.

Chuck Palahniuk

#26. One of the worse state to be in, is to be ignored. Obscurity like insecurity, kills!

Bernard Kelvin Clive

#27. All that belongs to human understanding, in this deep ignorance
and obscurity, is to be sceptical, or at least cautious, and not
to admit of any hypothesis whatever, much less of any which is
supported by no appearance of probability.

David Hume

#28. Nothing helps an artist's career more than a little death and obscurity.

Dan Simmons

#29. Who knows that he is profound strives for clearness; he who would like to appear profound to the multitude strives for obscurity.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#30. The lowest people are generally the first to find fault with show or equipage; especially that of a person lately emerged from his obscurity. They never once consider that he is breaking the ice for themselves.

William Shenstone

#31. It is not a question of skimming the surface of the art, it must be probed to its depths, for to seize upon superficial things only is to degenerate into mediocrity and obscurity.

Jean-Georges Noverre

#32. Obscurity can be a fire of ambition in those who have stalwart souls.

Taylor Caldwell

#33. Out of obscurity I came, to obscurity I can easily return.

Charlotte Bronte

#34. Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.

Thomas Hardy

#35. It is human nature to instinctively rebel at obscurity or ordinariness.

Taylor Caldwell

#36. Maybe some people are better off in obscurity than trying to keep on expanding.

Erika M. Anderson

#37. What is thy body but a swallowing grave,
Seeming to bury that posterity
Which, by the rights of time, thou needs must have
If thou destroy them not in dark obscurity?
If so, the world will hold thee in disdain,
Sith in thy pride so fair a hope is slain.

William Shakespeare

#38. I think it's important to have had at least a few years of obscurity, where people treat you like everybody else.

Robert De Niro

#39. Men seek fame and high places only to learn that they were happier in obscurity

Vance Havner

#40. My words like eyes that flinch from light, refuse And shut upon obscurity; my acts Cast to their opposites by impatient violence Break up the sequent path; they fly On a circumference to avoid the centre.

Stephen Spender

#41. Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about rafters?

Henry David Thoreau

#42. This is what I see, and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and everywhere I see nothing but obscurity. Nature offers me nothing that is not a matter of doubt and disquiet.

Blaise Pascal

#43. 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

#44. The darkest light is one which is only registered by those who understand its true obscurity.

Suzanne Steele

#45. The obscurity of a writer is generally in proportion to his incapacity.

Quintilian

#46. I would rather live a short life of glory than a long one of obscurity.

Alexander The Great

#47. Still, the change is nearly indescribable - going from total obscurity to walking down a street in New York and having everybody turn and look; to feel the temperature of a room change when I walked in.

Matt Damon

#48. Don't be deceived by the thoughts of obscurity that lingers around your head. Go and shine the light in you.

Israelmore Ayivor

#49. Well, nothing helps an artist's career more than a little death and obscurity, I always say.

Dan Simmons

#50. The origins of poetry are clearly rooted in obscurity, in secretiveness, in incantation, in spells that must at once invoke and protect, tell the secret and keep it.

Mary Ruefle

#51. I mean, you hear the word 'globalization' over and over and over again. Globalization, globalization, globalization. Rarely has a word gone so directly from obscurity to meaninglessness without any intervening period of coherence.

Robert Reich

#52. The theory of interest was wrapped in utter obscurity, until Hume and Smith dispelled the vapor.

Jean-Baptiste Say

#53. The past is a great darkness, and filled with echos. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

Margaret Atwood

#54. Obscurity often brings safety.

Aesop

#55. We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.

Tom Stoppard

#56. if the sublimest Truths of faith are still, for us, wrapped in impenetrable obscurity, the reason for this is because we have up to the present dissolved the connection between God, nature, and man.

Karl Von Eckartshausen

#57. Celebrity is just obscurity biding its time.

Carrie Fisher

#58. I felt condemned to obscurity and to celibacy. But when one is driven by passion, one can live on almost nothing, and I was driven by passion for writing. One does not starve in modern, Western societies, and one can do without such amenities as the telephone, a car, entertainment.

Alain Robbe-Grillet

#59. If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.

Randall Jarrell

#60. When you grew up in a small town ... obscurity was a luxury that didn't exist.

Katie Ganshert

#61. I was by birth a gentleman, living neither in any considerable height nor yet in obscurity.

Oliver Cromwell

#62. I entirely agree with you about the obscurity of Mrs Browning's line about the stars. It is far-fetched. She wanted to express something which she found beyond expression.

Marie Corelli

#63. Wir tappen im Labyrinth unsers Lebenswandels und im Dunkel unserer Forschungen umher: helleAugenblicke erleuchten dabei wie Blitze unsernWeg. We grope about in the labyrinth of our life and in the obscurity of our investigations; bright moments illuminate our path like flashes of lightning.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#64. Big shots are only little shots that keep shooting. I can see your sun rise out of obscurity. Keep shooting

Ikechukwu Joseph

#65. When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#66. I have gone from local obscurity to national obscurity to international obscurity. Once I learn how to monetize obscurity, I will be rich.

Ernie J Zelinski

#67. Enjoy your obscurity while it lasts. Use it.

Austin Kleon

#68. Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.

Frantz Fanon

#69. Obscurity is dispelled by augmenting the light of discernment, not by attacking the darkness.

Socrates

#70. 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

#71. Nominee. A modest gentleman shrinking from the distinction of private life and diligently seeking the honorable obscurity of public office.

Ambrose Bierce

#72. Leave bands, go back to obscurity if I choose to, without a great sense of loss of security because it's all been based on the fact that I did it on my own or was doing, enjoying doing it on my own in the first place.

Eric Clapton

#73. You cannot be buried in obscurity: you are exposed upon a grand theater to the view of the world. If your actions are upright and benevolent, be assured they will augment your power and happiness.

Cyrus The Great

#74. I am always willing to run some hazard of being tedious, in order to be sure that I am perspicuous; and, after taking the utmost pains that I can to be perspicuous, some obscurity may still appear to remain upon a subject, in its own nature extremely abstracted.

Adam Smith

#75. Obscurity and Innocence, twin sisters, escape temptations which would pierce their gossamer armor, in contact with the world.

Nicolas Chamfort

#76. Call it wine, call it Quinn-sniff induced obscurity

Penny Reid

#77. Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Joseph Addison

#78. O how many noble deeds of women are lost in obscurity!

Seneca.

#79. The street to obscurity is paved with athletes who can perform great feats before friendly crowds.

George Allen, Sr.

#80. Speech is highly elliptical. It would scarcely be endurable otherwise. Ellipsis is indispensable to the writer or speaker who wants to be brief and pithy, but it can easily cause confusion and obscurity and must be used with skill.

Bergen Evans

#81. Maybe the truth of it all is that we're just too fearful to give our faith enough running room to realize that this precariously thin path that led us to the end of this life is dwarfed to obscurity by the infinitely vast byway that begins immediately on the other side.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#82. Writing felt like it justified, barely, my existence -- this extremity of obscurity I had chosen.

William Finnegan

#83. Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#84. The biggest threat to authors in this age is not plagiarism or poverty, it's obscurity

Bernard Kelvin Clive

#85. First you're an unknown, then you write one book and you move up to obscurity.

Martin Myers

#86. College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#87. God's extraordinary work is most often done by ordinary people in the seeming obscurity of a home and family.

Neal A. Maxwell

#88. I know he is
sensitive
on some points, Detective, but you must bear in mind how hard it is for an honest man to do his work in relative obscurity, while dishonest men attain wealth and renown. That is why corruption is so pernicious. It breaks the will of good men.

Jed Rubenfeld

#89. Virtue in obscurity is rewarded only in heaven.

Sonia Sotomayor

#90. My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned language.

Edward Gibbon

#91. No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe.

William Kingdon Clifford

#92. I want to be famous so I can be humble about being famous. What good is my humility when I am stuck in this obscurity?

David Budbill

#93. Don't be a writer; it's a terrible way to live your life. There's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don't expect anything from anybody.

Paul Auster

#94. If we were not in Vietnam, all that part of the world would be enjoying the obscurity it so richly deserves.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#95. Obscurity is just obscurity. There's no romance in obscurity.

Daryl Hall

#96. Afflictive passion and the veil upon cognition - The cure for their obscurity is emptiness. How then shall they not meditate on this Who wish for swift attainment of omniscience?

Santideva

#97. Not everyone can be as successful a performer as myself, who gave 10 great performances the first time I ever did comedy, and then toiled in obscurity for years.

Scott Aukerman

#98. The changes in the human condition are uncertain and frequent. Many, on whom fortune has bestowed her favours, may trace their family to a more unprosperous station; and many who are now in obscurity, may look back upon the affluence and exalted rank of their ancestors.

Alexander Hamilton

#99. There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition

Blaise Pascal

#100. I seem to have emerged from the relative obscurity of TV.

Peter Webber