Obscure Quotes - Page 8

• A great many people think that polysyllables are a sign of intelligence and refinement so they think they will impress others with their command of obscure words.

  Barbara Walters

  Thinking, People, Great Men

  "How to Talk With Practically Anybody About Practically Anything". Book by Barbara Walters, 1970.

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• The modification of prejudice takes a long time, and occurs as the result of a thousand things that happen to the prejudiced person - things he sees and hears and reads, people he talks to, and places he visits. Any given reformer must be content to take a small and obscure place in a chain of cumulative pressures.

  Margaret Halsey

  Long, People, Prejudice

  Margaret Halsey (1946). “Color blind: a white woman looks at the Negro”

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• Nature has a counterpart, a representation of every interior mood and obscure perception of man.

  Mary Butts

  Nature, Men, Perception

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• Even when men approve of the same arrangements, it must be asked whether they approve of them because they exist or because they are desirable in themselves. The common resistance to the collectivist tide should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the belief in integral freedom is based on an essentially forward-looking attitude and not on any nostalgic longing for the past or a romantic admiration for what has been.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Attitude, Men, Past

  "The Constitution of Liberty". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Postscript: Why I Am Not a Conservative, 1960.

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• In the career of female fame, there are few prizes to tie obtained which can vie with the obscure state of a beloved wife or a happy mother.

  Jane Porter

  Mother, Beloved Wife, Careers

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• The origins and travels of our purchases remain matters of indifference, although to the more imaginative at least a slight dampness at the bottom of a carton, or an obscure code printed along a computer cable, may hint at processes of manufacture and transport nobler and more mysterious, more worthy of wonder and study, than the very goods themselves.

  Alain de Botton

  Hints, May, Matter

  "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2008.

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• Jazz is not a game of chance. Its sonorous disorder is only an appearance. It is an organized force obeying obscure laws, conforming to a secret technique, codified or not, and we discover that no one can become a virtuoso on the spur of the moment in this orchestra of 'noisemakers.

  Wanda Landowska

  Music, Law, Games

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• The easiest books are generally the best; for, whatever author is obscure and difficult in his own language, certainly does not think clearly.

  Bill Vaughan

  Book, Thinking, Doe

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• I got the breaks. Starting from nowhere in the corn belt, I helped edit a country weekly, then was jack-of-all-departments on an obscure daily, so that when I arrived in a big city everything I tackled in the line of column conducting and syndicate peddling and playwriting had to bring promotion, because I had no social standing which could be endangered, no reputation to toss away and no pride which might suffer a setback. Everything I acquired had to be velvet. You cannot lose your silver spoon if you are brought up on pewter.

  George Ade

  Country, Pride, Cities

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• We refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation

  Thomas Merton

  Imagination, Kind, Humiliation

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.51, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.

  Billy Collins

  Kind, Rudeness

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• However inadequate our ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wide of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have it, than the Automatists are when they say they haven't it. As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysical criticism all causes are obscure. But one has no right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only . . . whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never been born.

  William James

  Cat, Night, Ideas

  William James (2007). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.137, Cosimo, Inc.

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

  Andre Luiz Moreira

  Life Is, Illusion, Source

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• To impress your offer on the mind of the reader or listener, it is necessary to put it into brief, simple language...No farfetched or obscure statement will stop them. You have got to hit them where they live in the heart or in the head. You have got to catch their eyes or ears with something simple, something direct, something they want.

  John Caples

  Eye, Heart, Simple

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• Aiming at brevity, I become obscure.

  Horace

  Brevity

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• A wise God shrouds the future in obscure darkness.
  [Lat., Prudens futuri temporis exitum
  Caliginosa nocte premit deus.]

  Horace

  Wise, Future, Darkness

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• In trying to be concise I become obscure.

  Horace

  Trying, Concise

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• Merit is never so conspicuous as when coupled with an obscure origin, just as the moon never appears so lustrous as when it emerges from a cloud.

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Moon, Clouds, Merit

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• Our early days - our audiences were always very sparse. We played very obscure places in very obscure parts of the world, mainly Kansas. We played frat parties, we played high school proms, we played clubs.

  Phil Ehart

  Party, School, Kansas

  Reddit AMA, www.reddit.com. February 25, 2015.

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• The most brilliant flashes of wit come from a clouded mind, as lightning leaps only from an obscure firmament.

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Mind, Lightning, Brilliant

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• I used to wonder how a man of birth and spirit could endure to be wholly insignificant and obscure in a foreign country, when he might live with lustre in his own.

  Jonathan Swift

  Country, Travel, Men

  Jonathan Swift (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Jonathan Swift (Illustrated)”, p.1546, Delphi Classics

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• 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

  Expression, Appreciate, Style

  Charles Kingsley (1877). “Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life”, p.56

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• ... All questions concerning the rise of Christianity are one: How was it done? How did a tiny and obscure messianic movement from the edge of the Roman Empire dislodge classical paganism and become the dominant faith of Western civilization? Although this is the only question, it requires many answers - no one thing led to the triumph of Christianity.

  Rodney Stark

  Civilization, Atheism, Empires

  Rodney Stark (1996). “The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History”, p.3, Princeton University Press

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• It wasn't my childhood fantasy to work with Truffaut or be in obscure films. I like Midnight Run better than I like The Bicycle Thief. It was films like Die Hard and Bladerunner that made me want to be an actor.

  Ben Affleck

  Running, Childhood, Midnight

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• Amid the welter of vague political abstractions ... where meanings shift so quickly and so subtly, not only following changes of thought, but often manipulated artificially by political practitioners so as to obscure, expand, or distort ... a certain broad consistency in its relations to other kindred terms is the nearest approach to definition which such a term as Imperialism admits. Nationalism, internationalism, colonialism, its three closest congeners, are equally elusive, equally shifty, and the changeful overlapping of all four demands the closest vigilance.

  J. Allan Hobson

  Political, Consistency, Definitions

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