Obscure Quotes - Page 20

• 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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• If you want music that speaks to you, that LISTENS to you, you have to go out of your way, which I enjoy actually. I'm constantly on a private-eye kick to find the totally obscure

  Trevor Dunn

  Eye, Want, Way

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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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• For some obscure reason, some authorities seem bent on making the drinking of wine a ritual more complicated than chess. They have succeeded in inhibiting a large section of the public and depriving them of one of the greatest pleasures known to man.

  Craig Claiborne

  Drinking, Wine, Men

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• Among all the world's races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Believe, Race, Special

  "The United States". The New York magazine article on November 15, 1971, reprinted in "A View from the Stands", 1986.

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• Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Believe, People, Delight

  "Aphorisms". Book by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Notebook J 77, 1799.

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• To love it too much is to obscure and not see what is there.

  Dennis Potter

  Too Much

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• I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs.

  Don DeLillo

  Literature, Feels

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.77, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• In rural areas the majority of the victims of violent crime know their assailants (indeed, are probably married to them); in cities, the killer and the mugger come out of the anonymous dark, their faces unrecognized, their motives obscure.

  Jonathan Raban

  Dark, Cities, Majority

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Soft City: Picador Classic”, p.13, Pan Macmillan

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• Although much remains obscure, and will long remain obscure, ... I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification.

  Charles Darwin

  Mean, Long, Natural

  Charles Darwin, James T. Costa (2009). “The Annotated Origin: A Facsimile of the First Edition of On the Origin of Species”, p.6, Harvard University Press

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