Obscure Quotes - Page 17

• Lenin sensed that Tukhachevsky was a kindred spirit. He delegated the most responsible jobs to the obscure lieutenant.

  Mikhail Tukhachevsky

  Jobs, Spirit, Kindred

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• Poetry, in the entire course of its development, has always been trying to capture meanings and problems which are still obscure and dormant. Poetry tries to awaken them with a kiss, wherever they may be: in the air, in things, in human beings.

  Mieczyslaw Jastrun

  Kissing, Air, Trying

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• Tis an admirable thing to see how some people will labour to find out terms that may obscure a plain sense, like a gentleman I knew, who would never say 'the weather grew cold,' but that 'winter begins to salute us.' I have no patience for such coxcombs.

  Dorothy Osborne

  Winter, Weather, People

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• The distinctions of personal merit and influence, so conspicuous in a republic, so feeble and obscure under a monarchy, were abolished by the despotism of the emperors; who substituted in their room a severe subordination of rank and office, from the titled slaves who were seated on the steps of the throne, to the meanest instruments of arbitrary power.

  Edward Gibbon

  History, Office, Thrones

  Edward Gibbon (2009). “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edited and Abridged): Abridged Edition”, p.325, Modern Library

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• Mathematics is one of the most basic -- and most ancient -- types of knowledge. Yet the details of its historical development remain obscure to all but a few specialists.

  Ivor Grattan-Guinness

  Historical, Details, Development

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• Spero Speroni explains admirably how an author who writes very clearly for himself is often obscure to his readers. "It is," he says, "because the author proceeds from the thought to the expression, and the reader from the expression to the thought.

  Nicolas Chamfort

  Writing, Expression, Authorship

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• She was sad with an obscure sadness of which she had not the secret herself. There was in her whole person the stupor of a life ended but never commenced.

  Victor Hugo

  Sadness, Secret, Persons

  Victor Hugo (1862). “Marius”, p.25

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• As soon as a friendship passed a certain point - some obscure and secret boundary - a woman quite automatically became overwhelmed by a raging compulsion to complicate things.

  David Eddings

  Secret, Overwhelmed, Rage

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• I can’t let you go now. I want to go places with you; obscure little places, just to be able to say: here I came with her.

  Anais Nin

  Want, Littles, Able

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• Making love to Aurelia was like rummaging through a card catalog in a deserted library, searching for one very obscure, little-read entry on Hungarian poetry.

  Marisha Pessl

  Making Love, Library, Littles

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• Are not the thoughts of the dying often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, visceral aspect, towards the "seamy side" of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, and which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?

  Marcel Proust

  Crush, Death, Breathing

  Marcel Proust (2010). “In Search Of Lost Time Vol 1: Swann's Way”, p.96, Random House

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• We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.

  Marcel Proust

  Death, Grieving, Filled In

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• There is reason to suspect, that the distinctions of mankind have more show than value, when it is found that all agree to be weary alike of pleasures and of cares; that the powerful and the weak, the celebrated and obscure, join in one common wish, and implore from nature's hand the nectar of oblivion.

  Samuel Johnson

  Powerful, Hands, Humanity

  Samuel Johnson (1810). “The works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: With An essay on his life and genius”, p.127

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• Mathematics is an obscure field, an abstruse science, complicated and exact; yet so many have attained perfection in it that we might conclude almost anyone who seriously applied himself would achieve a measure of success.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Success, Science, Perfection

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• Ecstacy stripped away the user's inhibitions to self-expression. On E, lies are inefficient, and the peculiarities or weaknesses they are meant to obscure no longer seem like offenses against nature.

  Douglas Rushkoff

  Lying, Self, Expression

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• Being obscure in acronyms is great. I think I'll start making up my own... INYM - I'm Not Your Momma.

  Paul Vixie

  Thinking, Acronyms, Your Mom

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• If you want to study one of these strange organisms, you had better have a good justification. It's not good to say I want to study gene organisation in some obscure insect that no one's ever heard about.

  Thomas Cech

  Want, Strange, Study

  "Funding above and beyond scientific research". EMBO reports Interview, embor.embopress.org. September 2001.

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• The great success stories of chemotherapy were always in relatively obscure types of cancer. Childhood leukemia constitutes less than two percent of all cancers and many of chemotherapy's other successes were in diseases so rare that many clinicians had never even seen a single case

  Ralph W. Moss

  Cancer, Two, Childhood

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• At the outset, it is only liking, not understanding, that matters. Gaps in understanding ... are not only important, they are perhaps even welcome, like clearings in the woods, the better to allow the heart's rays to stream out without obstacle. The unlit shadows should remain obscure, which is the very condition of enchantment.

  Andre Breton

  Heart, Poetry, Understanding

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• Tradition is only democracy extended through time; it may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who are merely walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Father, Mean, Men

  'Orthodoxy' (1908) ch. 4

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• Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.

  Oscar Wilde

  Style, Succeed, Masters

  Oscar Wilde (2012). “Oscar Wilde's Wit and Wisdom: A Book of Quotations”, p.39, Courier Corporation

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• For most people it's easier to support an eminent person in deserved disgrace than an obscure one who has been wronged.

  Shirley Hazzard

  People, Support, Easier

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• I think [James] Joyce sometimes enjoyed misleading his readers. He said to me that history was like that parlor game where someone whispers something to the person next to him, who repeats it not very distinctly to the next person, and so on until, by the time the last person hears it, it comes out completely transformed. Of course, as he explained to me, the meaning in Finnegans Wake is obscure because it is a 'nightpiece.' I think, too, that, like the author's sight, the work is often blurred.

  Sylvia Beach

  Thinking, Games, Sight

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• I love memoirs, particularly obscure ones because the writer is usually a regular guy just telling what happened to him and to his friends. What these tales lack in artfulness they make up for in passion and authenticity. For a writer of fiction, they are solid gold. I have stolen so much from memoirs it's ridiculous.

  Steven Pressfield

  Passion, Guy, Gold

  Interview with Will Duquette, www.patheos.com. May 21, 2014.

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• I went for endless auditions for tiny parts in obscure plays, and never got one job until I was in 'Four Weddings'.

  Anna Chancellor

  Jobs, Play, Four

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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