Obscure Quotes - Page 6

• Many words will be written on the wind and the sand, or end up in some obscure digital vault. But the storytelling will go on until the last human being stops listening. Then we can send the great chronicle of humanity out into the endless universe.

  Henning Mankell

  Wind, Humanity, Listening

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• Being horrible in a big film is a quicker nosedive than doing an obscure film and making no money.

  Renee Zellweger

  Money, Film, Bigs

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• Maybe if you and ten of your friends could pool your savings and borrow some money and actually buy some obscure station in Sonoma, and then take some chances and have some fun.

  Robert Waterman McChesney

  Fun, Saving, Chance

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• In our culture of constant access and nonstop media, nothing feels more like a curse from God than time in the wilderness. To be obscure, to be off the beaten path, to be in the wilderness feels like abandonment. It seems more like exile than a vacation. To be so far off of everyone’s radar that the world might forget about us for a while? That’s almost akin to death…[But] far from being punishment, judgment, or a curse, the wilderness is a gift. It’s where we can experience the primal delight of being fully known and delighted in by God.

  Jonathan Martin

  Vacation, Media, Punishment

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• Karl Popper once advised a student that if he wanted to reap intellectual fame, he should write endless pages of obscure, high-flown prose that would leave the reader puzzled and cowed. He should then here and there smuggle in a few sensible, straightforward sentences all could understand. The reader would feel that since he has grasped this part, he must have also grasped the rest. He would then congratulate himself and praise the author.

  Anthony de Jasay

  Writing, Intellectual, Pages

  "The Seen and the Unseen. Part I. On the Economics of Protecting Employment" by Anthony de Jasay, www.econlib.org. December 6, 2004.

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• Once you were just insentient cells, no more aware of anything than your liver is now. Today you are brimming with consciousness. How did you make the grade? What catapulted you into consciousness? There must be some kind of natural process behind this astonishing leap, but this process is obscure.

  Colin McGinn

  Cells, Today, Kind

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• Who wins at the end of the day? The self-satisfied people who heatedly debate some obscure details? Or the people who sidestep the entire debate and get started?

  Ramit Sethi

  Winning, Self, People

  Ramit Sethi (2009). “I Will Teach You To Be Rich”, p.4, Workman Publishing

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• The greatest danger in any argument is that real issues often clouded by superficial ones, that momentary passions may obscure permanent realities.

  Mary Ellen Chase

  Real, Passion, Issues

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• Who is this vague "they" we blame for so many of our problems? "They" is the obscure party we use as our whipping boy to camouflage the fact that we - you and I and other specific human beings just like us - have to start doing things differently. "They" can't fix anything. We can.

  Price Pritchett

  Party, Boys, Justice

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• Our amended Constitution is the lodestar for our aspirations. Like every text worth reading, it is not crystalline. The phrasing is broad and the limitations of its provisions are not clearly marked. Its majestic generalities and ennobling pronouncements are both luminous and obscure. This ambiguity of course calls forth interpretation, the interaction of reader and text. The encounter with the Constitutional text has been, in many senses, my life's work.

  William J. Brennan

  Reading, Law, Encounters

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• It was evident however that the lawyers would have to have their say....This also opened up a vista both lengthy and obscure.

  Winston Churchill

  War, World, Lawyer

  Winston Churchill (1987). “The Irrepressible Churchill: Stories, Sayings and Impressions of Sir Winston Churchill”, London : Robson Books

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• Muddy language is not confined to policies alone. Each of you has seen replies to simple questions in which the meaning was lost through hopelessly obscure wording. When a person writes to the Veterans Administration, he is entitled to an easily understood, frank, and courteous reply. If our replies cannot be understood, they are not only not worth writing, but they simply create additional work.

  Omar N. Bradley

  Writing, Simple, Government

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• I must try, however, as best I can, although I am very conscious of the fact that our feelings and strivings are often contradictory and obscure and that they cannot be expressed in easy and simple formulas.

  Albert Einstein

  Simple, Feelings, Trying

  Albert Einstein (2016). “The Albert Einstein Collection: Essays in Humanism, The Theory of Relativity, and The World As I See It”, p.9, Open Road Media

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• Years ago I realized that maybe I made mistake, politically, when I turned a lot of that stuff down. I would go off to obscure places and make movies that six people went to see.

  Mickey Rourke

  Mistake, Hands, Years

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• Finally, to the theme of the respiratory chain, it is especially noteworthy that David Kellin's chemically simple view of the respiratory chain appears now to have been right all along-and he deserves great credit for having been so reluctant to become involved when the energy-rich chemical intermediates began to be so fashionable. This reminds me of the aphorism: 'The obscure we see eventually, the completely apparent takes longer'.

  Peter D. Mitchell

  Science, Simple, Views

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• The freedom to create is somehow linked with facility of access to those obscure regions below the conscious mind.

  Loren Eiseley

  Creativity, Mind, Crafts

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• To claim that wines should not be changed is a heresy; the palate becomes saturated and after the third glass the best of wines arouses nothing but an obscure sensation.

  Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

  Wine, Glasses, Claims

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• If the soul is impartial in receiving information, it devotes to that information the share of critical investigation the information deserves, and its truth or untruth thus becomes clear. However, if the soul is infected with partisanship for a particular opinion or sect, it accepts without a moment's hesitation the information that is agreeable to it. Prejudice and partisanship obscure the critical faculty and preclude critical investigation. The results is that falsehoods are accepted and transmitted.

  Ibn Khaldun

  Soul, Receiving, Prejudice

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• Everything is on such a clear financial basis in France. It is the simplest country to live in. No one makes things complicated by becoming your friend for any obscure reason. If you want people to like you you have only to spend a little money. I spent a little money and the waiter liked me. He appreciated my valuable qualities. He would be glad to see me, and would want me at his table. It would be a sincere liking because it would have a sound basis. I was back in France.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Country, People, Quality

  Ernest Hemingway (2016). “The Sun Also Rises”, p.119, Hamilton Books

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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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• Reason and Knowledge have always played a secondary, subordinate, auxiliary role in the life of peoples, and this will always be the case. A people is shaped and driven forward by an entirely different kind of force, one which commands and coerces them and the origin of which is obscure and inexplicable despite the reality of its presence.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Reality, People, Different

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• Words, like glasses, obscure everything they do not make clear. Before using a fine word, make a place for it.

  Joseph Joubert

  Writing, Glasses, Fine Words

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• If often happens too, both in courts and in cabinets, that there are two things going on together,--a main plot and an under-plot; and he that understands only one of them will, in all probability, be the dupe of both. A mistress may rule a monarch, but some obscure favorite may rule the mistress.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Two, Mistress, Together

  Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.56

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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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• 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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