Obscure Quotes - Page 19

• 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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• Solitude, as I understand it, does not signify an unhappy state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more or less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity.

  Jean Genet

  Profound, Solitude, Secret

  Jean Genet, Edmund White (1993). “The selected writings of Jean Genet”, Ecco Pr

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• Happiness comes from living in the moment, this moment, now, right here. If you are in obscure states of mind, you won't see what this moment is. You won't realize its beauty.

  Frederick Lenz

  Happiness, Buddhism, Live In The Moment

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• When the digital world is really here, movies can be disseminated from satellite direct to homes and direct to small theaters in Mongolia and northern Russia and obscure places that the market for movies is going to grow and grow and grow.

  Howard Stringer

  Home, Russia, World

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• I have seen great jazz musicians die obscure and drinking themselves to death and not really being able to get any work and working in small, funky jazz clubs.

  Sonny Rollins

  Drinking, Musician, Clubs

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• Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us.

  Meghan O'Rourke

  Sea, Brain, Mind

  "Meghan O'Rourke: The Long Good-Bye". Interview with Jennifer Haupt, www.psychologytoday.com. April 26, 2011.

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• Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carrying a cargo of zeros and ones. Metaphors and similes are wonderful literary devices but they do nothing but obscure the beauty of technology.

  Charles Petzold

  Book, Technology, Illustration

  Charles Petzold (2000). “Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software”, p.4, Microsoft Press

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

  Nicholson Baker

  Book, Library, Stores

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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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• 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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• 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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• I do very few standards. Hardly any. Other people's tunes that I do are usually obscure tunes, for the most part, although I do a couple of Duke Ellington tunes that are well known.

  Mose Allison

  Couple, People, Tunes

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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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• Any effort... to make the obscure obvious is likely to be unappealing, for the penalty of failure is confusion while the reward of success is banality.

  Nelson Goodman

  Confusion, Effort, Obscurity

  Nelson Goodman (2012). “The Structure of Appearance”, p.1, Springer Science & Business Media

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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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• 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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• 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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• Music is relegated to an underground, relatively obscure group of listeners. It's partly because of the nature of the medium. With a piece of visual art, you can look at something ugly, brutal and in your face, but it's kind of - there it is. It doesn't take you over in the same way that putting on the music at a certain volume does.

  David Byrne

  Art, Groups, Doe

  Source: pitchfork.com

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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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• The woman who fights against her father still has the possibility of leading an instinctive, feminine existence, because she rejects only what is alien to her. But when she fights against the mother she may, at the risk of injury to her instincts, attain to greater consciousness, because in repudiating the mother she repudiates all that is obscure, instinctive, ambiguous, and unconscious in her own nature.

  Carl Jung

  Mother, Father, Fighting

  Carl Gustav Jung (1981). “The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious”, p.99, Princeton University Press

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• There is always in the healthy mind an obscure prompting that religion teaches us rather to dig than to climb; that if we could once understand the common clay of earth we should understand everything. Similarly, we have the sentiment that if we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. This is the great truth which has always lain at the back of baby-worship, and which will support it to the end.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Baby, Stars, Children

  "The Defendant". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1901.

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• Harmony is an obscure and difficult musical science, but most difficult to those who are not acquainted with the Greek language; because it is necessary to use many Greek words to which there are none corresponding in Latin.

  Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

  Latin, Greek, Musical

  Marcus VITRUVIUS POLLIO, Joseph GWILT (1826). “The Architecture of M. Vitruvius Pollio in Ten Books, Translated from the Latin by J. Gwilt”, p.134

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