Obscure Quotes - Page 12

• [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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• '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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• 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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• The mathematician who is without value to mathematicians, the thinker who is obscure or meaningless to thinkers, the dramatist who fails to move the pit, may be wise, may be eminent, but as an author he has failed.

  George Henry Lewes

  Wise, Moving, May

  George Henry Lewes (1891). “The Principles of Success in Literature”

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• Rock roll is not obscure, it's really easy to understand. So is my painting.

  Grace Slick

  Rocks, Painting, Easy

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• In trying to be concise I become obscure.

  Horace

  Trying, Concise

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• I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs. There is in every living creature an obscure but powerful impulse to active functioning. Life demands to be lived. Inaction, save as a measure of recuperation between bursts of activity, is painful and dangerous to the healthy organism- in fact, it is almost impossible. Only the dying can be really idle.

  H. L. Mencken

  Life, Success, Powerful

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• How about a new game show called 'Battle Begala?' Contestants would pick any obscure bad thing that happened anywhere in the world, and Paul would have 10 seconds to explain why it is President Bush's fault.

  Ann Coulter

  Games, Battle, President

  "CNN Crossfire", www.cnn.com. August 5, 2002.

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• For Spirits when they please Can either sex assume, or both; so soft And uncompounded is their essence pure, Not tied or manacled with joint or limb, Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones, Like cumbrous flesh; but in what shape they choose Dilated or condensed, bright or obscure, Can execute their airy purposes, And works of love or enmity fulfil.

  John Milton

  Sex, Essence, Enmity

  'Paradise Lost' (1667) bk. 1, l. 423

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• So death obscures your gentle form, So memory strives to make the darkness bright; And, in that heap of rocks, your body lies, Part of the island till the planet ends, My gentle comrade, beautiful and wise, Part of this crag this bitter surge offends, While I, who pass, a little obscure thing, War with this force, and breathe, and am its king.

  John Masefield

  Beautiful, Wise, Kings

  John Masefield, Margaret Bridges, Donald Elwin Stanford (1984). “Letters to Margaret Bridges (1915-1919)”, Olympic Marketing Corporation

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• Many years before when I had serious back pain from a sports injury, the surgeons said they would explore my spine and "figure it out." Out of frustration I had impulsively opted for the procedure. They ended up fusing the vertebrae. It left me debilitated. In hindsight, I blamed myself more than the surgeons. I had pressed them for a solution when in fact none was apparent because the cause of the pain was obscure.

  Jerome Groopman

  Sports, Pain, Frustration

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

  Billy Collins

  Kind, Rudeness

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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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• 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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• 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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• The evening before my departure for Blithedale, I was returning to my bachelor-apartments, after attending the wonderful exhibition of the Veiled Lady, when an elderly-man of rather shabby appearance met me in an obscure part of the street.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Book, Men, Elderly

  Nathaniel Hawthorne (1852). “The Blithedale Romance”, p.9

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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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• There is a culture among academics to be obscure. If you're too clear, you can't be saying anything interesting. The issue isn't word length. The issue is a commitment to speaking in a way an audience can understand.

  Lawrence Lessig

  Commitment, Issues, Interesting

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