Obscure Quotes - Page 18

• 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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• 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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• Feuerbach ... recognizes ... "even love, in itself the truest, most inward sentiment, becomes an obscure, illusory one through religiousness, since religious love loves man only for God's sake, therefore loves man only apparently, but in truth God only." Is this different with moral love? Does it love the man, this man for this man's sake, or for morality's sake, for Man's sake, and so-for homo homini Deus-for God's sake?

  Max Stirner

  Religious, Men, Sake

  "The Ego and Its Own (1844)". Book by Max Stirner. Cambridge edition, p. 55, 1995.

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• When grown-up persons indulge in practical jokes, the fact gauges them. They have lived narrow, obscure, and ignorant lives, and at full manhood they still retain and cherish a job lot of left-over standards and ideals that would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had then moved out into the world and a broader life.

  Mark Twain

  Jobs, Indulge In, Ignorant

  Mark Twain (2013). “Autobiography of Mark Twain”, p.4, Univ of California Press

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• I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse.

  Edward Abbey

  Communication, Race, Ideas

  Edward Abbey (1988). “Desert Solitaire”, p.7, University of Arizona Press

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• I am never needlessly obscure - I am needfully obscure, when I am obscure.

  Donald Barthelme

  Quoted by Tracy Daugherty in an interview in "Splice Today", September 02, 2009.

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• For it is not the bare Words, but the Scope of the writer that giveth true light, by which any writing is to bee interpreted; and they that insist upon single Texts, without considering the main Designe, can derive no thing from them clearly; but rather by casting atomes of Scripture, as dust before mens eyes, make everything more obscure than it is; an ordinary artifice of those who seek not the truth, but their own advantage.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Eye, Writing, Light

  "Leviathan". Book by Thomas Hobbes. The Third Part, Chapter 43, 1651.

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• A Minister can always give a reason; and, if he be clever, he can generally when doing so punish the man who asks for it. The punishing of an influential enemy is an indiscretion; but an obscure questioner may often be crushed with good effect.

  Anthony Trollope

  Clever, Men, Often Is

  Anthony Trollope (2015). “The Palliser Novels: Complete Parliamentary Chronicles (All Six Novels in One Volume): Can You Forgive Her? + Phineas Finn + The Eustace Diamonds + Phineas Redux + The Prime Minister + The Duke’s Children”, p.1776, e-artnow

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• Do the structures of language and the structures of reality (by which I mean what actually happens) move along parallel lines? Does reality essentially remain outside language, separate, obdurate, alien, not susceptible to description? Is an accurate and vital correspondence between what is and our perception of it impossible? Or is it that we are obliged to use language only in order to obscure and distort reality -- to distort what happens -- because we fear it?

  Harold Pinter

  Moving, Mean, Reality

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• The function of a great library is to store obscure books.

  Nicholson Baker

  Book, Library, Stores

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• Since the fabric of the universe is most perfect and the work of a most wise Creator, nothing at all takes place in the universe in which some rule of maximum or minimum does not appear ... there is absolutely no doubt that every affect in the universe can be explained satisfactorily from final causes, by the aid of the method of maxima and minima, as it can be from the effective causes themselves ... Of course, when the effective causes are too obscure, but the final causes are readily ascertained, the problem is commonly solved by the indirect method.

  Leonhard Euler

  Wise, Perfect, Doubt

  "A method for finding curved lines enjoying properties of maximum or minimum, or solution of isoperimetric problems in the broadest accepted sense". Book by Leonhard Euler, 1744.

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• I find that life is easier when it is just a blur With no details to confuse who or what or where I was So when the ending comes the full regret will be obscure

  Conor Oberst

  Regret, Details, Life Is

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• The exact objectives of Islam Inc. are obscure. Needless to say everyone involved has a different angle, and they all intend to cross each other up somewhere along the line.

  William S. Burroughs

  Islam, Atheism, Lines

  William S. Burroughs (1984). “Naked lunch”, Grove Pr

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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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• Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader.

  Georges Bataille

  Communication, Desire, Tasks

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• I am poor - obscure - just eighteen years of age - with a rapacious appetite for everything and principles as light as my purse.

  Katherine Mansfield

  Light, Years, Age

  Brownlee Jean Kirkpatrick, Katherine Mansfield, Vincent O'Sullivan (1989). “Katherine Mansfield: selected letters”, Oxford University Press, USA

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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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• Theater for me is about enduring human truth. Special effects can be part of that, but when they obscure what is the reason we come to theater - to see reflections of our confounded humanity - the theater has lost its way.

  Neil Patrick Harris

  Reflection, Humanity, Special

  Source: articles.latimes.com

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• Practically all writers and artists are aware of their destiny and see themselves as actors in a fateful drama. With me, nothing is momentous: obscure youth, glorious old age, fateful coincidences - nothing really matters. I have written a number of good sentences. I have kept free of delusions. I know I am going to die soon.

  Eric Hoffer

  Drama, Artist, Destiny

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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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• It was a dagger in the haughty father's heart, an arrow in his brain, to see how the flesh and blood he could not disown clung to this obscure stranger, and he sitting by. Not that he cared to whom his daughter turned, or from whom turned away. The swift sharp agony struck through him, as he thought of what his son might do.

  Charles Dickens

  Daughter, Father, Heart

  Charles Dickens (1858). “Dombey and Son ... With frontispiece by H. K. Browne”, p.52

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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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