Quotes About Obtuse

#1. I imagine explaining a work of art to my grandmother in five minutes, and if I can't explain it in five minutes, then it's too obtuse or esoteric.

Shea Hembrey

#2. The issue isn't gun control but state control
obtuse and arbitrary state control, state control run amok ... Forget guns. If Dr. Hudson, Mr. Turnbull, Dr. Gingrich and others end up in jail it won't be for their guns but our liberties.

George Jonas

#3. A vertical line is dignity. The horizontal line is peaceful. The obtuse angle is action. That's universal, it is primary.

Janet Collins

#4. I have a thirst - it's an awful word, but I'm thirsty for knowledge. I like knowing things, the odder the better, the more obtuse the better.

Nicholas Haslam

#5. Rather than following a [genealogical] 'line', I find myself drawn to all the people I encounter, including those who, only by the most obtuse reckoning, can be thought of as relatives. Every life deserves telling; none is without drama and change.

Alison Light

#6. I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.

Jewel

#7. I am not being obtuse. You are being paranoid.

Iain Banks

#8. There are moments in which stupid people say clever things, obtuse people say sharp things, and good-natured people say ill-natured things.

Anthony Trollope

#9. Everyone is so desensitised that the potency of artfully deployed italics has long been lost. It was good enough for H. P. Lovecraft, but apparently it isn't good enough for the modern world, filled as it is with obtuse bastards.

Jonathan L. Howard

#10. Man hovers between Paradise and the Pit," Gordinus told her cheerfully. "Sometimes rising to one, sometimes swooping to the other. To ignore his capacity for evil is as obtuse as blinding oneself to the heights to which he can soar.

Ariana Franklin

#11. Men are obtuse. You have to beat them over the head with a frying pan to get them to notice things.

Jaci Burton

#12. Sure
love is cruel
and selfish
and totally obtuse
at least, blinded by the light,
young love is.

William Carlos Williams

#13. It is a dull and obtuse mind, that must divide in order to distinguish; but it is a still worse that distinguishes in order to divide.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#14. In all ages of the world this eminently plausible fiction has lured the obtuse infant to financial ruin and disaster.

Mark Twain

#15. I think there's a fine line between being so obtuse that you lose the reader completely, which is the intention for some writers, though it isn't mine. I work hard at grounding the world as much as possible in the world we do recognize.

Laurie Foos

#16. Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse

T. S. Eliot

#17. Superiority and success doesn't favor good effort or self-esteem ... The mentally precise and physically fit win, while the mediocre and obtuse take solace in hopeful cliches.

Bobby Knight

#18. If you can do something that doesn't rely on a major melody but still sounds immediate rather than being obtuse and devoid of anything to catch onto, that's great.

Alexis Taylor

#19. 'As Long As I Know I'm Getting Paid' is a satire. Lyrically, I want to be direct. With my history in Fall Out Boy, there's some expectation that I'm going to be lyrically obtuse. But that song is a straight-faced satire of consumerism.

Patrick Stump

#20. There are some people as obtuse in recognizing an argument as they are in appreciating wit. You couldn't drive it into their heads with a hammer.

Douglas William Jerrold

#21. Everybody knew gentlemen could be obtuse, especially when it came to matters of the heart. Everybody knew, as well, that gentlemen needed to believe they were in charge. Therefore, ladies had to learn ways of communicating the obvious without being obvious about it.

Loretta Chase

#22. The English are, I think the most obtuse and barbarous people in the world

Stendhal

#23. A child's stories are simpler to understand because the language has not been developed to the point of high abstraction. An adult tells stories far more obtuse in nature.

John S. Savage

#24. Not easily placated
by outdated
platitudes
used to soothe
or mask
the obtuse.
Take your nonsenses-
leave.

Cheri Bauer

#25. Artemisia maintained a reserved silence for as long as she could, but by the time they entered the tranquillity of the park her amicability had reasserted itself. Besides, she concluded that there was no point in ignoring a person when they were so obtuse as to not realise they were being ignored.

D.G. Rampton

#26. Were we all, the whole upper crust of Russian society, so totally insensitive, so horribly obtuse, as not to feel that the charmed life that we were leading was in itself an injustice and hence could not possibly last?

Nicolas Nabokov

#27. The dream unites the grossest contradictions, permits impossibilities, sets aside the knowledge that influences us by day, and exposes us as ethically and morally obtuse.

Sigmund Freud

#28. Well, we'll have to agree to disagree." I hated that phrase. It was code for, "I know you're too obtuse to ever see how I right I am, so to get any satisfaction out of this discussion, I'm going to pretend to be more reasonable than you. Oh, and get the last word in.

Jess Lourey

#29. It was all the things I wanted my music to be, but yet it wasn't grand and it wasn't obtuse - it wasn't overshooting, it wasn't undershooting, it was precise. The lyrics and the way that I was able to extract and excavate emotion within me.

Justin Vernon

#30. If you can't be unconventional, be obtuse. Be deliberately obtuse, because there are 5 billion people out there thinking in train tracks, and thinking what they have been taught to think.

James Dyson

#31. But you can live in the most democratic country on earth, and if you're lazy, obtuse or servile within yourself, you're not free.

Ignazio Silone

#32. Were you always such a stubborn, blind, obtuse girl?"
"Are you calling me stupid?"
"Yes, but in a more poetic way!"
"Well, here's a poem for you. Get lost!

Colleen Houck

#33. Tsars and slaves, the intelligent and the obtuse, publicans and pharisees all have an identical legal and moral right to honor the memory of the deceased as they see fit, without regard for anyone else's opinion and without the fear of hindering one another.

Anton Chekhov

#34. Then he just blurted it out, with no preparation. 'The truth of it is that whether your mother arranged our marriage, or whether it was all an illusion, I must be horribly obtuse, because I can't talk myself out of being in love with you.

Eloisa James

#35. The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly; light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding.

Gretel Ehrlich

#36. But that's the function I expect of you, cousin. It's why I chose you. I'll make it official. I will give you a new name. From this moment, you'll be called Breaking of the Habit, which in our tongue is Harq al-Ada. Come, cousin, don't be obtuse. My mother taught you well. Give me your Sardaukar.

Frank Herbert

#37. I have often been accused of being obtuse, however one must dig well below the top-soil to get my drift".

~R. Alan Woods [2012]

R. Alan Woods

#38. A good book is a kind of paper club, serving to rouse the slumbrous and to silence the obtuse.

Edward Abbey

#39. A writer friend who was born in England summed up her feelings for the semicolon in a remark worthy of Henry James: "There is no pleasure so acute as that of a well-placed semicolon." I guess the opposite of that is that there is no displeasure so obtuse as that of an ill-placed semicolon.

Mary Norris

#40. Sanity is the lot of those who are most obtuse, for lucidity destroys one's equilibrium: it is unhealthy to honestly endure the labors of the mind which incessantly contradict what they have just established.

Georges Bataille

#41. A person who holds strong convictions might appear inflexible, impolite, or exceptionally obtuse, when they are merely direct.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#42. I was asked: "Why did you stop writing?" I would not know any more than I would know why I started writing. Try not to be as obtuse as you are.

William S. Burroughs

#43. Love is obtuse and reckless; it interferes.

Elizabeth Bowen

#44. I may be very obtuse, Holmes, but I fail to see what this suggests.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#45. The man for whom history is bunk is almost invariably as obtuse to the future as he is blind to the past.

J. Frank Dobie

#46. The idea that literary theorists killed poetry dead because with their shrivelled hearts and swollen brains they are incapable of spotting a metaphor, let alone a tender feeling, is on of the more obtuse critical platitudes of our time.

Terry Eagleton

#47. He had fought back with every weapon in his arsenal, being alternatively obtuse, evasive and pedantic, for it was wonderful how you could obscure an emotional issue by appearing to seek precision.

J.K. Rowling

#48. Honestly. He sometimes felt that humans simply had to be deliberately obtuse. What was so difficult about understanding civilized and excellently enunciated speech?

Jim Butcher

#49. Writers take words seriously - perhaps the last professional class that does - and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.

John Updike

#50. The learning we received only tended to obscure our vision. From the day we went to school we learned nothing; on the contrary, we were made obtuse, we were wrapped in a fog of words and abstractions.

Henry Miller

#51. Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, foolish, a dope. Disagree with someone on the left, and he is more likely to think you selfish, a sell-out, insensitive, possibly evil.

J.R. Miller

#52. Although, I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some backtalk
From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Lean incandescent
Out of kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then

Sylvia Plath

#53. One of the most obtuse superstitions is the superstition of the scientists who say that man can exist without faith.

Leo Tolstoy

#54. For a seer, I was remarkably obtuse.

Geraldine Brooks

#55. What I often do is just think of a completely obtuse thing to do, almost the wrong thing to do. That often works because you start a different approach, something no one has tried.

James Dyson

#56. As a librarian for 18 years at the Merck branch of the Trenton Public Library, I was sorely tested by the slow-witted and obtuse among the citizenry

Joyce Carol Oates

#57. Mindset seems obtuse for good reason. We aren't taught to think about mindset. We are taught to follow rules.

Mike Cernovich

#58. Verse should be as natural As the small tuber that feeds on muck And grows slowly from obtuse soil To the white flower of immortal beauty

R.S. Thomas