Top 130 Obscure Quotes

The problem of how we finance the welfare state should not obscure a separate issue: if each person thinks he has an inalienable right to welfare, no matter what happens to the world, that’s not equity, it’s just creating a society where you can’t ask anything of people.

I went for endless auditions for tiny parts in obscure plays, and never got one job until I was in ‘Four Weddings‘.

I want my books to sell, to be read. I’m not interested in being obscure.

I’m not a career politician, so the ways of Washington may be a little obscure to me.

Dave Van Ronk is not an obscure figure. He’s the biggest figure on an obscure scene, playing a kind of niche music that we knew and liked.

I find my characters and stories in many varied places; sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts, lively dinner party conversations and some even crawl out of the dusty remote recesses of my imagination.

Crabbed and obscure definitions are of no use beyond a narrow circle of students, of whom probably every one has a pet one of his own.

Chinese dumpling and noodle trainspotters know that the best versions usually come from obscure hole-in-the-wall joints where personal space and flattering lighting isn’t a consideration and splatter-proof menus are customary.

I was very into New Order, Joy Division, all of that when I was younger. I had a lot of bootlegs that I saved up my pocket money to buy. I had all the obscure early EPs.

I give the fight up: let there be an end, a privacy, an obscure nook for me. I want to be forgotten even by God.

In our media-driven age, the mere fact of having name recognition is a big advantage. When the leadership election was confined only to Conservative MPs, relatively obscure figures could emerge quickly.

What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.

Sometimes people get fairly obscure just for the creative license of it, and that can backfire. Iconic stories are iconic for a reason, and there are so many incredible, iconic history stories that have not been told that we don’t need to go too deep in the well yet.

Language-wise, my mom and dad‘s dialect, they’re pretty obscure. It’s Chinese, but not your traditional Chinese, like Cantonese or Mandarin. It wasn’t something that I got to use very much growing up. We eventually just spoke English around the house.

Those quotations were really quite obscure. Anyone can see that he is a very well read man.

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

I am not afraid of death, but would not want to die in some obscure or pointless way.

The world is now aware that the most unavoidable and most dangerous weapon that exists is the blind decisiveness of a man ready to sacrifice his life for an obscure cause.

That’s one of the ways language evolved, by some very obscure form becoming common usage. And I must say that I’m very intrigued by use of language and slang, and criminal underground terms.

Charles Dickens is a lot of fun to read but it’s not obscure, and that’s just fine.

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

The charge frequently leveled against poetry – that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot – indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.

Every writer must find a way of writing that tells the reader: This is me and no one else. The Voice can be idiosyncratic, but it cannot be obscure. It is a blend of style and content and intent and rhythm and pure personality.

With each thing that you do, all the fears in life and safeguards block out, or obscure, who you truly are. I think that just a glimpse of the person ever comes through in most material.

I strive to be brief but I become obscure.

On our first album, ‘Sounding the Seventh Trumpet,’ we were listening to more obscure heavy metal bands and hardcore bands.

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 that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

I just lucked into this weird, little obscure cameoesque film career. I just love being a part of film history.

Ricky Washington is from a Baptist church in Miami, Florida, and he can pretty much sing anything. We just started working it up at soundcheck, and holy smokes, it’s just great! The audience gets to singing. So there’s that stuff to do – find some old obscure R&B stuff – because we can do it justice.

It’s just so obscure to take a folk song in a different language and be a pretty well-respected English-speaking rock band and totally take a song and twist it around and have fun with it.

I don’t necessarily want to be defined as an action star. I love movies, and my movie culture, luckily because of my parents and my family, is quite obscure and independent.

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

My popularity has to do with the divorce between modern art, where everything is obscure, and the viewer who often feels he needs a professor to tell them whether it’s good or not. I believe a painting has to talk directly to the viewer, with composition, color and design, without a professor to explain it.

I’d want it to be really special to both of us, but I’m a huge fan of ‘At Last’ as a wedding song. But what’s also really cool is songs that no one else would have at their wedding, like an obscure Radiohead song.

We thought ‘Father Ted’ was destined to be obscure late-night Channel 4 fodder and then it works and you don’t really know why.

I went out of my way to try not to be an artist, because I thought I would end up leading a miserable, obscure life. I tried to escape it for as long as I could, until I had to admit at 25 that that was my path.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

Action is coarsened thought; thought becomes concrete, obscure, and unconscious.

There comes not seldom a crisis in the life of men, of nations, and of worlds, when the old forms seem ready to decay, and the old rules of action have lost their binding force. The evils of existing systems obscure the blessings that attend them, and, where reform is needed, the cry is raised for subversion.

Initially, I thought problems on how the brain works to be the most interesting. But it was necessary to be practical and concentrate on less obscure matters when I entered Washington State College. Besides, there were no courses given in neurobiology.

‘Penthouse’ didn’t seem to concentrate as much on the girls’ faces, and I really wanted to see the girls’ faces. It seems like through the 1980’s, they almost went out of their way to obscure the girls’ faces.

Quibbling over the definition of genocide does nothing but help obscure the long history of vicious racism and undeniable suffering of Indigenous people in this country. It’s bad enough whatever you want to call it.

Some people are so famous that the legends about them and the cultural aftermath of their life altogether obscure the real human being.

In a series of articles beginning on Oct. 2, 1966, I wrote about the long-forgotten history of the Liberty Tree. To call attention to how obscure the site had become, I interviewed waitresses at the Essex Delicatessen below the plaque on Washington Street. None knew what the Liberty Tree was.

Those things which I am saying now may be obscure, yet they will be made clearer in their proper place.

I tend to gravitate to the darkest or most obscure part of any venue in an effort to have my own space to experience the music on my own, free from unwanted conversations and other distractions.

I do very few standards. Hardly any. Other people’s tunes that I do are usually obscure tunes, for the most part, although I do a couple of Duke Ellington tunes that are well known.

You only get one chance in this thing called life. I know that is a bit maudlin and obscure, but it’s a fact, and you can make a profound difference in people’s lives without having a title in front of your name.

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.

A lot of the novels that I’ve really enjoyed in my life, whether it’s Tolstoy‘s ‘Cossacks,’ or ‘Sons and Lovers‘ or ‘Jude the Obscure’ or ‘David Copperfield’ or ‘Herzog,’ have an autobiographical spine.

‘Richard III’ is a really difficult play to film – it’s involved, often obscure. I felt it absolutely necessary to do more simplification than I’ve ever done before.

Twenty years from now if there is some obscure Trivial Pursuit question, I am confident I will be the answer.

As an artist, you’re always somewhat obscure. We’re not talking Hollywood.

Words, like glass, obscure when they do not aid vision.

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.

Analogies, in particular, can illuminate, but they can also obscure and confuse. They need to be handled carefully, like rhetorical high explosives.

I’ve been away writing songs and recording and doing albums that are much more obscure.

Of the Sturges family, much more is known than is available about poor Irish immigrants and obscure Scottish-English settlers around Rochester.

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

So much has happened to obscure the dialogue about race and about gender and discrimination in general, especially where those things touch on economics.

When I was growing up, I was the most pretentious person I have ever met. I only read obscure books and watched obscure movies and only listened to obscure music.

I used to work at NASA in Virginia. It was nothing glamorous; I was just tasked with making code compile for obscure projects, and I wasn’t very good at it. Now I spend most of my time drawing pictures and looking at funny things on the Internet, which in retrospect is largely what I did at my old job, too.

The workman in the true sense of the word – the artist in guns – is either extinct, or hidden in an obscure corner. There is no individuality about modern guns. One is exactly like another.

Nothing is more unreliable than the populace, nothing more obscure than human intentions, nothing more deceptive than the whole electoral system.

Never be so brief as to become obscure.

In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.

At the end of the day, I would like to have the farthest reach in terms of being able to communicate to as many people as possible. So it’s not that I enjoy being obscure; it’s that I sonically don’t want to be situated here or there.

A century ago, petroleum – what we call oil – was just an obscure commodity; today it is almost as vital to human existence as water.

I like slightly obscure places, where the waves may not be world class, but you can tie some culture in with your surf trip.

I always thought of myself as a very, very obscure artist.

It’s quite an obscure notion for a kid, no? To want to be a curator. But even then, I knew that I would do this.

I’m never going to be inspired by some obscure film, which isn’t to say I don’t enjoy that sort of thing. I just want to share my work with everyone.

When the history of the 20th century is written, there are going to be some pretty obscure people who are entitled to sainthood. And they’re not going to be well-known.

Nothing is as real as a dream. The world can change around you, but your dream will not. Your life may change, but your dream doesn’t have to. Responsibilities need not erase it. Duties need not obscure it.

When I say there is no such crime as date rape I am saying what is true. There isn’t a specific legal category of date rape and I wanted to make that point in order to ensure that people don’t use this to obscure the difference between real sexual violence and, you know, things that have gone wrong.

My mom watches really obscure stuff on IFC. She’s a real comedy fan. She knows everything that’s going on.

I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.

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.

Obscure as still remains the origin of that ‘genre‘ of romance to which the tales before us belong, there is little doubt that their models, if not their originals, were once extant at Constantinople.

Computer vision and machine learning have really started to take off, but for most people, the whole idea of what is a computer seeing when it’s looking at an image is relatively obscure.

A ‘philosophical dictionary‘ is not a dictionary of philosophy that you use to look up obscure thinkers or recondite terms. It is a collection of brief and pithy essays on diverse topics, informed by one vision, and usually arranged in alphabetical order.

I would perhaps like to go back to writing small books about obscure people.

I can’t impress people with the pedigree of obscure French filmmakers that got me into film. It was Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg. I really thought I wanted to make dumb action movies.

I talked to a guy who has old cars, and there are parts that don’t exist any more. So he makes radio dial knobs for obscure cars.

I am utterly opposed to all equivocation or obscure expressions in our public acts. We are bound to say plainly what we mean to say. If we mean negotiation and compromise, let us say it distinctly and plainly instead of sending to the President a resolution on which he may put whatever interpretation he pleases.

For a long time, I didn’t think I wanted to live in the Ozarks or write about the region. It seemed to be a sure recipe for obscurity, and to be obscure was not my conscious ambition.

I’m showbiz-fat. It’s so funny, in all the reviews that I read, no one wants to use the word ‘fat’ as an adjective. So I have to deal with ‘dimpled-kneed,’ ‘hefty,’ ‘plus-sized,’ the most obscure words you can imagine.

The bands I like are not obscure at all. Far from it.

Bus routes reach the most obscure corners of Paris. There’s also the Metro – and especially the great Line No. 1, which runs on tires under the Champs-Elysees and beyond.

Talent, like beauty, to be pardoned, must be obscure and unostentatious.

I’m in the process of trying to organize my DVDs into some kind of order and it’s taking me weeks. I have everything from obscure ‘Antonioni’ to ‘Terminator Salvation.’

A dream set would include songs by other artists like Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, and other favorites. More obscure Heart songs like ‘Wait For an Answer’ and ‘Nada One’ would be fun, plus fan favorites like ‘Love Mistake’ and ‘Language of Love.’ Endless possibilities.

What is ‘cool,’ anyway? Maybe it’s Warne Marsh, almost totally obscure and penniless, coming in late to a fourth-rate Hollywood nightclub, playing like an angel with a couple of sidemen, but never speaking to or even acknowledging another human being.

I always laugh at these rock n’rollers where you can’t understand them. Mind you, it’s not because they’re inaudible or indistinguishable; it’s because they’re too obscure.

We take from the art of the past what we need. The variable posthumous reputations of even the greatest artists and the unpredictable revivals of interest in even the most obscure ones tend to reveal more about those who make revisionist assessments than about those who are being reassessed.

It will be good fun finding out what sport baby‘s good at; perhaps it will be something obscure. My parents were fantastic at taking me to training sessions and letting me try lots of different sports, so I want to do the same.

Like the winds that we come we know not whence and blow whither soever they list, the forces of society are derived from an obscure and distant origin. They arise before the date of philosophy, from the instincts, not the speculations of men.

Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us.

The Ancient Games are relatively obscure to most Olympians, but to understand just what the Games are about, it is really necessary to investigate the roots and the meaning that has transformed culture and society for so many years.

Hardship makes the world obscure.

Of my old tendency to overdo the dedication and deface the title page with florid compliments and obscure quotes which the recipient cannot read, I will say only that I learnt my lesson when I had to shell out with my own money for a hardback I’d vandalised and now limit myself to ‘Good wishes.’

My bassist Jorgen Jorgensen opened up my life to a lot of great, obscure old soul records.

I remember hoping there’d be 10 people at a show in 1998 when there was an incredible write-up in the local weekly. I don’t want to go back to that period of being obscure and having nobody know who I am, let alone have to struggle to get people to come to the show.

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.

I’m a bit of a nerd, I wouldn’t mind working in a shop selling records, or having a radio show where I could play obscure singles.

A Constitution should be short and obscure.

When I tour, it’s like, well, like a food tour as much as a comedy tour. I try to eat at all the weird places, the obscure barbecue joints, burger places. There are a few spots in L.A. that I’m obsessed with – one of them is the Taco Zone taco truck on Alvarado. There are secret off-menu items that are amazing.

I wanted to play football or be a boxer, but my dad didn’t want that because of all the impact. But in 1992 I was watching short track, and it was obscure, but they looked like superheroes in their tight outfits, and I thought it was amazing. I wanted to do that. I made the national team at 14.

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.

I’ve always been into fashion and obscure articles of clothing, and while this first set of Hoods Up includes beanies, shorts, shirts, leggings, sweaters and duffel bags, that is only the first tier of what we are planning.

Declining to go to church with my parents in the morning, I would ostentatiously set out for the Monist Society in the afternoon, down an obscure street which it seemed a little improper to be walking on, as everything was closed for Sunday, upstairs through a sort of side entrance over a saloon.

I admire artists who really take risks and aren’t afraid to do smaller movies and obscure, abstract things. It would be really cool if my career neared that.

I strive to be brief, and I become obscure.

Be obscure clearly.

I started buying ill, obscure records, and then I saw Portishead and Air live, and my mouth was on the ground.

Much has been written about Trump’s style of speech, which linguists have said is often unintelligible yet deeply compelling. Orwell‘s famous 1946 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language,’ centers on the use of abstract words, often by politicians, to obscure reality.

A little tough talk in the midst of a campaign or as part of a presidential debate cannot obscure a record of 30 years of being on the wrong side of defense issues.

The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.

Contempt for men pervades the most obscure strata of our society.

‘The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movement in Iraq,’ by Hanna Batatu. Few may wish to take on this massive, obscure work, but it changed my life, and I love it.

Maybe it’s just, I’ve always been to the less traveled places, in any topic, whether it’s history, I always like to just choose the most obscure topic. And I don’t know why I have that impulse. I can’t really explain it but I’ve been doing that since I was a little kid.

My birth was managed so rottenly that my mother had eventually to have a hysterectomy, after which she was ill off & on till she dies for obscure reasons when I was just 7.

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

Awards are very important for a show like ‘Rectify.’ We’re a small show; we’re on a more obscure, harder-to-find channel that is very supportive of creative and singular vision.

The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.

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.

I decided to be an actress, and the day after, I was an actress. That was quick and very scary at the same time. When ‘Obscure Object of Desire‘ came out in France, I felt guilty for my friends at the National School who weren’t in the movies. The whole thing was turmoil.

It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.

Don’t look for obscure formulas or mystery in my work. It is pure joy that I offer you. Look at my sculptures until you see them. Those closest to God have seen them.

If you want to study one of these strange organisms, you had better have a good justification. It’s not good to study gene organisation in some obscure insect that no one’s ever heard about.