Obvious Things Quotes

• The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Life, World, Mystery Novels

  Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901).

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• Mathematics consists in proving the most obvious thing in the least obvious way.

  George Polya

  Knowledge, Math, Way

  George Pólya (1968). “Mathematical discovery: on understanding, learning, and teaching problem solving”

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• When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something.

  Steve Jobs

  Creativity, Artist, Best Job

  Steve Jobs (0101). “Motivating Thoughts of Steve Jobs”, p.35, Prabhat Prakashan

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• We need men who can dream of things that never were.

  John F. Kennedy

  Motivational, Dream, Inspiration

  Address Before the Irish Parliament, delivered 28 June 1963, Dublin, Ireland

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• Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things.

  Steve Jobs

  Inspirational, Creativity, Artist

  "Steve Jobs: seven lessons from Apple's founder" by Frédéric Filloux, www.theguardian.com. October 10, 2011.

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• Science,' said Mr Anders Anders. 'Science, not magic. I told you before: when things are not as they appear to be, it's because they're actually simpler than you think them to be. Things are never as difficult and complicated as folk believe. You'd be surprised just how straightforward and obvious things really are. The secret is in knowing how to look at them the right way.

  Robert Rankin

  Believe, Thinking, Knowing

  Robert Rankin (2011). “The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse: Eddie Bear”, p.129, Hachette UK

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• What is the relationship of the obvious things that we see around us to the things that we believe we understand within ourselves? This is the ancient alchemical formula: "as above, so below, as within, so without."

  Fred Alan Wolf

  Believe, Ancient, Formulas

  Source: www.edgemagazine.net

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• Paris is a beautiful city to walk around in. And, you know, all the obvious things: I like the museums, I like the theater, I like the dance. And it's manageable. The food's good. I know a lot of interesting people here. I lived in Boston for 50 years or more. Wherever I am, I'm usually holed up most of the time in the editing room, and so, when I leave the editing room, even if I just take a walk, it's gorgeous. And I walk everywhere. I'm a victim of the seduction of Paris.

  Frederick Wiseman

  Beautiful, Museums, Editing

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Everybody's got something to tell you. And most people have told me to do the obvious thing as far as my career goes. Which would have sent me tottering into the abyss.

  Robert Plant

  Careers, People, Abyss

  "The Survivors: Robert Plant". Interview with Chris Heath, www.gq.com. November 7, 2011.

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• Obvious things like The Deer Hunter. After that happened, the scripts got better. Opportunities happened.

  Christopher Walken

  Opportunity, Hunters, Deer

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• [Albert Camus] also says that nothing is true which forces exclusion. From that, you're obliged to accept contradictions if you don't want to reject certain obvious things about life, certain evidences. If you create a system, and you say 'here there is truth', in that kind of pathway [chemin], then you'll evacuate all the other pathways and you'll kill life. It's up to each individual.

  Catherine Camus

  Pathways, Want, Exclusion

  Source: www.spikemagazine.com

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• Love is an open secret, the most obvious thing in the world and the most hidden, with no why to how it keeps its mystery.

  Rumi

  Spiritual, Love Is, Secret

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• The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Life, Travel, Mean

  Charles Horton Cooley, Hans-Joachim Schubert (1998). “On Self and Social Organization”, p.95, University of Chicago Press

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• I make a model of the site. There are some obvious things: where the entrance should be, where the cars have to go in. You start to get the scale of it. You understand the client's needs, and what the client is hoping for and yearning for.

  Frank Gehry

  Car, Clients, Needs

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• Only recently I’ve learned, it’s an obvious thing, but it just took me a while to realize

  David Archuleta

  Realizing, I've Learned, Obvious

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• When you go to that other country you realize that in France and in England, you don't ask somebody what they do for a living when you meet someone. A lot of the obvious things, the shortcuts we take in America - in America you can talk about money all you want. You can ask how much they make, rent they pay, how much their house costs and how much their car costs, and they'll feel comfortable telling you. But it's scandalous to ask anyone in England or France a question like that.

  David Sedaris

  Country, America, Car

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• One of the obvious things that went wrong with Multics as a commercial success was just that it was sort of over-engineered in a sense. There was just too much in it.

  Dennis Ritchie

  Too Much, Obvious

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• If there's a big problem and you've got the right people with you, usually the answer emerges and you do what's the obvious thing to do. I don't think of myself as some great manager or great leader. I've been very lucky to be in the positions that I've been in. I meet a lot of people and I've grown a lot of companies, and I meet a lot of CEOs at big enterprises. I'm always so surprised at how much they seem to know. It doesn't always seem to be correlated to how well they actually do.

  Larry Brilliant

  Business, Thinking, People

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• The problem with improvisation is, of course, that everyone just slips into their comfort zone and does sort of the easy thing to do, the most obvious thing to do with your instrument.

  Brian Eno

  Comfort, Doe, Problem

  Interview with Mark Richardson, pitchfork.com. November 1, 2010.

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• The obvious thing for the cavalryman to do is to accept the fighting machine as a partner, and prepare to meet more fully the demands of future warfare.

  George S. Patton

  Military, War, Fighting

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• Ideas that most people derided as ridiculous have produced the best outcomes. Don't do the obvious thing.

  Fred Wilson

  Ideas, People, Outcomes

  "Fred Wilson: My Harvard Business School Lecture" by Fred Wilson, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 17, 2011.

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• It's pretty popular today to say that everybody should learn to fail and that failure's a good thing. Intellectually, it's an obvious thing. But in fact, it gets conflated with another meaning of failure, so when we grow up as kids, failing in school was a really bad thing.

  Edwin Catmull

  Growing Up, School, Kids

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• It's more like there are some really obvious things that are different and then lots and lots of smaller things, lots of things about who lives and who dies, civilizations that rose and fell, all the way down to individual characters. That becomes the state of where you left your galaxy. The endings have a lot more sophistication and variety in them.

  Casey Hudson

  Character, Civilization, Rose

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• The most important lesson I received from Conceptual art consisted in the recording of simple and obvious things, and viewing them under a whole new light.

  Luigi Ghirri

  Art, Simple, Light

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• I guess that as life is speeded up and our capacity for concentration is being nibbled away at by all the obvious things, that leads us actually to be more susceptible to boredom.

  Geoff Dyer

  Boredom, Life Is, Capacity

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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