Obscurity Quotes - Page 8

• Men seek fame and high places only to learn that they were happier in obscurity

  Vance Havner

  Christian, Men, Fame

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• As the idea imparted by the term Cataclysm, Catastrophe, or Revolution, is extremely vague, and may comprehend any thing you choose to imagine, it answers for the time very well as an explanation; that is, it stops further inquiry. But it also has had the disadvantage of effectually stopping the advance of science, by involving it in obscurity and confusion.

  George Julius Poulett Scrope

  Science, Ideas, Imagination

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• It's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code... obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Artist, Use, Language

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• However dark our lot may be, there is light enough on the other side of the cloud, in that pure empyrean where God dwells, to irradiate every darkness of this world; light enough to clear every difficult question, remove every ground of obscurity, conquer every atheistic suspicion, silence every hard judgment, light enough to satisfy, nay, to ravish the mind forever.

  Horace Bushnell

  God, Dark, Clouds

  Horace Bushnell (1876). “Sermons for the New Life”, p.156

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• Public opinion, - a tyrant, sitting in the dark, wrapt up in mystification and vague terrors of obscurity; deriving power no one knows from whom ... - but irresistible in its power to quell thought, to repress action, to silence conviction.

  Harriet Martineau

  Dark, Tyrants, Silence

  Harriet Martineau (1837). “Society in America”, p.138

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• Avoid an unusual and unfamiliar word just as you would a reef.

  Julius Caesar

  Unusual, Reefs, Unfamiliar

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• I mean, you hear the word 'globalization' over and over and over again. Globalization, globalization, globalization. Rarely has a word gone so directly from obscurity to meaninglessness without any intervening period of coherence.

  Robert Reich

  Mean, Gone, Coherence

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• Artists are the best theologians. They feel things that are true before theologians can jargonize them into obscurity.

  Tony Campolo

  Artist, Theologian, Feels

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• The most attractive class of people are those who are powerful obliquely, and not by the direct stroke: men of genius, but not yetaccredited: one gets the cheer of their light, without paying too great a tax.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Cheer, Powerful, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.238, Harvard University Press

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• Obscurity in writing is commonly an argument of darkness in the mind. The greatest learning is to be seen in the greatest plainness.

  John Wilkins

  Writing, Darkness, Style

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• The enemy of a writer is not controversy but obscurity.

  William P. Young

  Enemy, Controversy

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• I am grown old, and have possibly lost a great deal of that fire, which formerly made me love fire in others at any rate, and however attended with smoke: but now I must have all sense, and cannot, for the sake of five righteous lines, forgive a thousand absurd ones.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Fire, Poetry, Forgiving

  Lord Chesterfield (1998). “Lord Chesterfield's Letters”, p.316, OUP Oxford

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• ... the sciences are like a beautiful river, of which the course is easy to follow, when it has acquired a certain regularity; but if one wants to go back to the source, one will find it nowhere, because it is everywhere; it is spread so much [as to be] over all the surface of the earth; it is the same if one wants to go back to the origin of the sciences, one will find only obscurity, vague ideas, vicious circles; and one loses oneself in the primitive ideas.

  Lazare Carnot

  Beautiful, Circles, Ideas

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• In geometry I find certain imperfections which I hold to be the reason why this science, apart from transition into analytics, can as yet make no advance from that state in which it came to us from Euclid.
  As belonging to these imperfections, I consider the obscurity in the fundamental concepts of the geometrical magnitudes and in the manner and method of representing the measuring of these magnitudes, and finally the momentous gap in the theory of parallels, to fill which all efforts of mathematicians have so far been in vain.

  Nikolai Lobachevsky

  Imperfection, Effort, Transition

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• Look, we live in a celebrity culture and sometimes you get caught in the wave and the buzz and a lot of it's flattering but, you know, one of the things that I try to remind people of is, is that I was in politics as a state senator operating in obscurity for many years. Before that I was a community organizer working in low income communities in Chicago and nobody knew my name then. And so, having involved myself in public service for a pretty long time without getting too much attention, hopefully I can keep some of the attention that I'm getting now in perspective.

  Barack Obama

  Names, Years, Perspective

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• My words like eyes that flinch from light, refuse And shut upon obscurity; my acts Cast to their opposites by impatient violence Break up the sequent path; they fly On a circumference to avoid the centre.

  Stephen Spender

  Eye, Light, Opposites

  Stephen Spender (1966). “World Within World: The Autobiography of Stephen Spender”, p.5, Univ of California Press

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• Those humble but indomitable workers, to whom later generations referred by the collective name of Baale Masorah, Masters of Tradition, performed in obscurity their Herculean task of guarding the Biblical Text against loss or variation.

  Robert Gordis

  Humble, Loss, Biblical

  Robert Gordis (1971). “The Biblical text in the making: a study of the kethib-qere”, Ktav Pub Inc

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• To crave wealth and honor, to demand power, to pile up riches, to gather all those vanities which seem to make for pomp and empty display, that is our furious passion and our unbounded desire.On the other hand, we fear and abhor poverty, obscurity, and humility, and we seek to avoid them by all possible means.

  John Calvin

  Mean, Humility, Passion

  John Calvin (2004). “Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life”, p.41, Baker Books

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• Nothing helps an artist's career more than a little death and obscurity.

  Dan Simmons

  Art, Careers, Littles

  Dan Simmons (2014). “The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle: Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion”, p.733, Spectra

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• As touching the gods, I do not know whether they exist or not, nor how they are featured; for there is much to prevent our knowing: the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.

  Protagoras

  Knowing, Touching, Human Life

  "Sallustius: Concerning the Gods and the Universe". Book by Sallustius,

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• For the most part, executions happen in obscurity. If people did hear about executions, if they were publicized, even televised, I fear more would enjoy them than be repelled by them.

  Wendy Kaminer

  People, Execution, Enjoy

  "Wendy Kaminer on Crime". Online discuss, www.aclu.org. June 24, 1995.

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• A government official is a man who has risen from obscurity to something worse.

  Pat Robertson

  Men, Risen, Officials

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• Alexander the Great once said that 'I would rather live a short life of glory than a long one of obscurity!' What a great illusion is this! Wise man is he who always chooses to live longer and he who blesses the obscurity!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Life, Wise, Men

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• One of the things I've learned about being president is that we'll work on issues for long periods of time, sometimes in obscurity.

  Barack Obama

  Issues, Long, President

  Interview with Steve Inskeep, www.npr.org. August 10, 2015.

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• There is nothing so charming as the knowledge of literature; of that branch of literature, I mean, which enables us to discover the infinity of things, the immensity of Nature, the heavens, the earth, and the seas; this is that branch which has taught us religion, moderation, magnanimity, and that has rescued the soul from obscurity; to make her see all things above and below, first and last, and between both; it is this that furnishes us wherewith to live well and happily, and guides us to pass our lives without displeasure and without offence.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Knowledge, Mean, Sea

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