Obscurity Quotes

“Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! - I have as much soul as you, - and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you!”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I'm never going to accomplish anything; that's perfectly clear to me. I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.”
― Dorothy Parker, Here Lies: The Collected Stories of Dorothy Parker

“It’s better for the whole world to know you, even as a sex star, than never to be known at all.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.”
― Samuel Johnson

“He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste it's fragrance on the desert air.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“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.”
― Edgar Allen Poe

“Notoriety wasn't as good as fame, but was heaps better than obscurity.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs. The beautiful supermachinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind. Would you deny them the right to exist? Would you ask them to labor and go hungry while you yourself enjoyed old-fashioned Values? You—you yourself are a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest. or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot. There, Herzog, thought Herzog, since you ask for the instance, is the way it runs.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“It always seems as though the definition of love will remain debatable by an opinionated world.”
― Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile

“We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared.”
― Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs

“This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.”
― Dylan Thomas

“While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace.”
― Virginia Woolf

“If I could I would always work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results.”
― Emily Brontë

“Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has in fact gained from his own zeal.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten but that we are all doomed to being forgotten; that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. If you gaze into that bleakness even for a moment, the sum of life becomes null and void, because if nothing lasts nothing matters. Everything we experience unfolds without a pattern, and life is just a baffling occurrence, a scattering of notes with no melody. But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are a part of a larger story that has shape and purpose—a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.”
― Susan Orlean

“I spent a long time writing in obscurity. You'll spend a long time writing in obscurity. ”
― Dan Kennedy

“(Regarding a twenty-questions game:)

Did you know that the Russian composer Aram Katchaturian described his ‘Sabre Dance’ as no more than a button on the shirt on the body of his work? No? You’re not alone. Suppose my twenty-questions answer was that metaphorical button — would that be fair?”
― Stephen Minkin, A no doubt mad idea

“It is well to be remembered with love. It is not so very dreadful to be forgotten entirely. But if we shall resent anything on earth at all, we shall resent the consecration of a deserted room.”
― E.M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread

“At last, after creeping as it were, for such a length of time along the utmost verge of the opaque puddle of obscurity, they had taken that downright plunge, which, sooner or later, is the destiny of all families, whether princely or plebian”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“A great thinker, book, strategy, etc. cannot be criticized or ignored into ungreatness.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“People don’t value their obscurity. They don’t know what it’s like to have it taken away…”
― Bob Dylan

“Success is a bitter fruit: sooner or later, what you have created turns against you, becomes your torment.”
― Henry Miller

“The best sentences are not those that are built from obscure words, but those whose meanings create ripples in our imagination that go beyond the words they contain.”
― Joyce Rachelle

“Better to be silent and obscure while building castles than loud and plain boasting for nothing than begging for bread.”
― Dr. Lucas D. Shallua

“Kindle the darkness of my calling, let me cry to the one who judges the heart in justice and mercy. Arouse my heart again with the limitless breath you breathe into me, arouse the secret from obscurity.”
― Leonard Cohen, Book of Mercy

“The emergence of success and recognition is hidden in years of hard working and pain submerged in obscurity; life is not designed to support overnight success.”
― Dr. Lucas D. Shallua

“Some celebrities are longing for obscurity way more often or intensely than they chased fame.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“A celebrity is merely someone who is known by way more people than most people.”
― @Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Sweat, tears, and blood that are shed in obscurity are rewarded in public and glory”
― Dr. Lucas D. Shallua