Obscure Quotes - Page 11

• Solaristics, wrote Muntius, is a substitute for religion in the space age. It is faith wrapped in the cloak of science; contact, the goal for which we are striving, is as vague and obscure as communion with the saints or the coming of the Messiah.

  Stanislaw Lem

  Space, Goal, Age

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• I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the street car and the star sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities.

  Everett Ruess

  Stars, Tired, Sky

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• I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities. Do you blame me then for staying here, where I feel that I belong and am one with the world around me? It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty

  Everett Ruess

  Stars, Mean, Intelligent

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• To mystify, in the active sense, is to befuddle, cloud, obscure, mask whatever is going on, whether this be experience, action, or process, or whatever is "the issue." It induces confusion in the sense that there is failure to see what is "really" being experienced, or being done, or going on, and failure to distinguish or discriminate the actual issues. This entails the substitution of false for true constructions of what is being experienced, being done (praxis), or going on (process), and the substitution of false issues for the actual issues.

  R. D. Laing

  Clouds, Issues, Confusion

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• One can spend too much of one's life locked in stuffy rooms seeking out obscure truths, searching, researching, until one is too old to enjoy life.

  Jimmy Sangster

  Enjoy Life, Too Much, Rooms

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• Autumn clouds, vague and obscure; The evening, lonely and chill. I felt the dampness on my garments, But saw no spot, and heard no sound of rain.

  Bai Juyi

  Summer, Lonely, Rain

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• 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

  Greatness, Play, Cities

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• The perfect war is started for obscure reasons, is hopelessly murderous, and accomplishes nothing.

  Errol Morris

  War, Accomplish Nothing, Perfect

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• In any case, his religious teaching consisted mostly in more or less vague ethical remarks, an obscure mixture of ideals of English gentlemanliness and his favorite notions of personal hygiene. Everybody knew that his class was liable to degenerate into a demonstration of some practical points about rowing, with Buggy sitting on the table and showing us how to pull an oar.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Religious, Teaching

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.106, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• It's like all my life I've been this tower standing at the edge of the ocean for some obscure purpose, and only now, almost eighteen years in, has someone thought to flip the switch that reveals that I'm not a tower at all. I'm a lighthouse. It's like waking up. I am incandescent.

  Laini Taylor

  Ocean, Years, Towers

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• There are many things akin to highest deity that are still obscure. Some may be too subtle for our powers of comprehension, others imperceptible to us because such exalted majesty conceals itself in the holiest part of its sanctuary, forbidding access to any power save that of the spirit. How many heavenly bodies revolve unseen by human eye!

  Seneca the Younger

  Eye, Science, Power

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• Dog! When we first met on the highway of life, we came from the two poles of creation.... What can be the meaning of the obscure love for me that has sprung up in your heart?

  Anatole France

  Friendship, Dog, Heart

  Anatole France (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of Anatole France (Illustrated)”, p.1266, Delphi Classics

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• [They let] friendship with the leaders in China obscure our devotion to freedom and democracy when those kids set up in Tiananmen Square, and I think it was wrong.

  William J. Clinton

  Stupid, Humorous, Kids

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• At the very time that philosophers of the most enterprising benevolence were founding in Greece those institutions which have rendered it the wonder and luminary of the world, am I required to believe that the weak and wicked king of an obscure and barbarous nation, a murderer, a traitor and a tyrant, was the man after God's own heart?

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Atheist, Kings, Believe

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Roger Ingpen, Walter Edwin Peck (1965). “Complete Works: Newly Edited by Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck”

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• All beginnings are somewhat strange; but we must have patience, and little by little, we shall find things, which at first were obscure, becoming clearer.

  Vincent de Paul

  Littles, Firsts, Becoming

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• Religion is so great a thing that it is right that those who will not take the trouble to seek it if it be obscure, should be deprived of it.

  Blaise Pascal

  Math, Religion, Trouble

  Blaise Pascal (2013). “Pascal's Pensees”, p.162, Simon and Schuster

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• Talent, like beauty, to be pardoned, must be obscure and unostentatious.

  Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington

  Talent

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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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• All film directors, whether famous or obscure, regard themselves as misunderstood or underrated. Because of that, they all lie. They're obliged to overstate their own importance.

  Francois Truffaut

  Lying, Misunderstood, Directors

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• It is terribly important to appreciate that some things remain obscure to the bitter end.

  Anthony Stafford Beer

  Appreciate, Important, Bitter

  "Management Science" by Anthony Stafford Beer, (p. 115), 1968.

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• The deepest life of nature is silent and obscure; so often the elements that move and mould society are the results of the sister's counsel and the mother's prayer.

  Edwin Hubbel Chapin

  Mother, Prayer, Moving

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• ...intimacy being reduced to its content of mere sensation, will only be the misleading, obscure, and desperate alleviation of the existential disgust and anguish of him who has stumbled into a blind alley.

  Julius Evola

  Love, Existential, Blind

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• 'God' is the name given to the most 'important' human idea. In English, as in other languages, the original sense of the word is obscure. But the character of the name is the same in all languages: it is a question. 'God' is the question 'Is there something more important than, something besides, man?'

  Laura Riding

  Character, Men, Names

  "The Idea of God". "Essays from 'Epilogue' 1935-1937". Book by Laura Riding, Robert Graves, and Mark Jacobs, 2001.

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• 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

  Artist, Goal, Wish

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• We were wise indeed, could we discern truly the signs of our own time; and by knowledge of its wants and advantages, wisely adjust our own position in it. Let us, instead of gazing idly into the obscure distance, look calmly around us, for a little, on the perplexed scene where we stand. Perhaps, on a more serious inspection, something of its perplexity will disappear, some of its distinctive characters and deeper tendencies more clearly reveal themselves; whereby our own relations to it, our own true aims and endeavors in it, may also become clearer.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Wise, Distance, Character

  Thomas Carlyle (2014). “The Selected Works of Thomas Carlyle”, p.13, Lulu.com

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