Obscure Quotes - Page 3

• Dilemma of civilized man; body mobilized, but danger obscure.

  Philip K. Dick

  Men, Body, Danger

  Philip K. Dick (2012). “The Man in the High Castle”, p.175, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Things are more beautiful when they're obscure.

  Veda Hille

  Love, Beautiful

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• Nothing out of the ordinary ever occurs to me when I'm by myself. But you attract duels, ambushes, immortal enemies, obscure creatures such as the Ra'zac, long-lost family members, and mysterious acts of magic as if they were were starving weasels and you were a rabbit that wandered into their den.

  Christopher Paolini

  Long, Magic, Enemy

  "Brisingr: Book Three". Book by Christopher Paolini, September 20, 2008.

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• Of course witnessing poverty was the first to be ticked off the list. Then I had to graduate to the more obscure stuff. Being in a riot was something I pursued with a truly obsessive zeal, along with being tear-gassed and hearing gunshots fired in anger.

  Alex Garland

  Tears, Poverty, Firsts

  Alex Garland (2005). “The Beach”, p.126, Penguin

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• Death confronts us not unlike the historical battle scene that hangs on the wall of the classroom. It is our task to obscure or quite obliterate the picture by our deeds while we are still in this world.

  Franz Kafka

  Death, Wall, Historical

  Franz Kafka (1946). “The great wall of China: stories and reflections”

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• I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

  Kazuo Ishiguro

  Memories, Opportunity, Self

  "In the Land of Memory" by Adam Dunn, edition.cnn.com. October 27, 2000.

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• My favourite fellow of the Royal Society is the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an obscure 18th-century Kent clergyman and a brilliant mathematician who devised a complex equation known as the Bayes theorem, which can be used to work out probability distributions. It had no practical application in his lifetime, but today, thanks to computers, is routinely used in the modelling of climate change, astrophysics and stock-market analysis.

  Bill Bryson

  Science, Work Out, Royal

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• Now, I'm as appreciative as the next obsessive-compulsive recovering-academic of the vast riches of material becoming available online, thanks to all those Google scanners crouched in the basements of libraries around the world, madly feeding books through their machines. I download obscure tomes onto my iPad and give thanks to the dual gods Gates and Jobs, singing hymns to all the lesser pantheon of geniuses. But there's nothing like a book.

  Laurie R. King

  Jobs, Book, Hymns

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• The best ideas aren't hidden in shadowy recesses. They're right in front of us, hidden in plain sight. Innovation seldom depends on discovering obscure or subtle elements but in seeing the obvious with fresh eyes. This is easier said than done because nothing is as hard to see as what's right before our eyes. We overlook what we take for granted. Billions of tea drinkers observed the force of steam escaping from water boiling in a kettle before James Watt realized that this vapor could be converted into energy.

  Richard Farson

  Leadership, Eye, Ideas

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• There is nothing obscure about the objectives of educational exchange. Its purpose is to acquaint Americans with the world as it is and to acquaint students and scholars from many lands with America as it is-not as we wish it were or as we might wish foreigners to see it, but exactly as it is-which by my reckoning is an "image" of which no American need be ashamed.

  J. William Fulbright

  Educational, Land, America

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• On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.

  Philip K. Dick

  Other Worlds, Evil, Different

  Philip K. Dick (2012). “The Man in the High Castle”, p.260, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• If we imagine an observer to approach our planet from outer space, and, pushing aside the belts of red-brown clouds which obscure our atmosphere, to gaze for a whole day on the surface of the earth as it rotates beneath him, the feature, beyond all others most likely to arrest his attention would be the wedge-like outlines of the continents as they narrow away to the South.

  Eduard Suess

  Science, Space, Clouds

  "The Face of the Earth: (Das Antlitz Der Erde)" by Eduard Suess, Clarendon Press, (p. 1), 1904.

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• One dark night the skeletons that they had carefully hidden in an obscure closet appeared, grabbed them around the throat, and strangled them.

  Benjamin Carson

  Dark, Night, Skeletons

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• Intellectual comradeship requires that you think your thoughts through to the place where you can make the complex seem simple, the obscure quite clear.

  David Seabury

  Simple, Thinking, Simplicity

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• I reject karma and rebirth not only because I find them unintelligible, but because I believe they obscure and distort what the Buddha was trying to say. Rather than offering the balm of consolation, the Buddha encouraged us to peer deep and unflinchingly into the heart of the bewildering and painful experience that life can so often be.

  Stephen Batchelor

  Karma, Believe, Heart

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• Gross and obscure natures, however decorated, seem impure shambles; but character gives splendor to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and gray hairs.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Nature, Character, Hair

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2009). “Nature and Other Essays”, p.118, Courier Corporation

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• In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon- The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of thing that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be.

  Wallace Stevens

  Spring, Moon, Clouds

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.288, Vintage

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• I feel like I am involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won't tell me the rules, and who smiles all the time.

  Neil Gaiman

  Dark, Dice, Cards

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• For after the subject is removed or the eye shut, we still retain an image of the things seen, though more obscure than when we see it...Imagination, therefore, is nothing more than decaying sense.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Eye, Imagination, Stills

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• Most people's lives are run by desire and fear. Desire is the need to add something to yourself in order to be yourself more fully. All fear is the fear of losing something and thereby becoming diminished and being less. These two movements obscure the fact that Being cannot be given or taken away. Being in its fullness is already within you, Now.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Running, Spiritual, Being Yourself

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• If I had never touched Holmes, who has tended to obscure my higher work, my position in literature would at the present moment be a more commanding one.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Literature, Moments, Holmes

  Arthur Conan Doyle (2012). “The Sherlock Holmes Archives (incl. The Truth About Sherlock Holmes)”, p.9, Jazzybee Verlag

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• For I had rather die in the adventure ot noble achievements, then live in obscure and sluggish security.

  Margaret Cavendish

  Adventure, Achievement, Noble

  "Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader".

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• Twenty years from now if there is some obscure trivial pursuits question, I am confident I will be the answer.

  Ted Cruz

  Years, Twenties, Answers

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• I worked with such concentration and focus and I had hundreds of obscure engineering or programming things in my head. I was just real exceptional in that way

  Steve Wozniak

  Real, Engineering, Focus

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• The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.

  Italo Calvino

  Illusion, Knots, Novel

  "If On A Winter's Night A Traveller".

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