Top 40 Obscurity Quotes

Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.

One must choose between Obscurity with Efficiency, and Fame with its inevitable collateral of Bluff.

People romanticize struggle and obscurity, and I get that, but it’s a very one-dimensional argument to say that people who have money are evil, and artists who are poor are virtuous.

When I wrote about the French Revolution, I didn’t choose to write about aristocrats; I chose characters who began their lives in provincial obscurity.

I had a great time on News Radio, I got to make tons of money in relative obscurity and learn a lot about the TV biz and work on my standup act constantly. It was a dream gig.

Donald had reached its further edge, and could hear the rush of the stream from the deep obscurity of the abyss below, when there rose from the opposite side a strain of the most delightful music he had ever heard.

I was discovered, or mentored, by Norman Lear, who plucked me from the grinder of relative obscurity.

I honestly feel like I’ve been mostly toiling in obscurity until a little bit after ‘Day Of the Dog’ came out.

I always thought that I would just be working in obscurity in perpetuity.

I grew up in an age where women’s tennis did not have similar prizes to men, and they played in complete obscurity, really, compared to the men’s game.

But it is true that sometimes an enveloping darkness aids one to clearer vision; as in a panorama building, for example, where the obscurity about the entrance prepares one better for the climax, and gives the scene depicted a more real and vivid appearance.

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.

The worst thing for me would be going back to where I was – relative obscurity.

I entirely agree with you about the obscurity of Mrs Browning’s line about the stars. It is far-fetched. She wanted to express something which she found beyond expression.

Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.

In many ways, Obama is America’s first truly digital president. His 2008 campaign relied heavily on social media to lift him out of obscurity.

A lot of people get up to the top of the pile, maybe get one No. 1 contender match-up, and if they lose, they drift into obscurity. I lost, and I went back a bit. But I built myself back up. Three times.

Pure geometrical regularity gives a certain pleasure to men troubled by the obscurity of outside appearance. The geometrical line is something absolutely distinct from the messiness, the confusion, and the accidental details of existing things.

Yes, it was difficult – making ‘The Act of Killing’ in particular was a very lonely process. No one really believed in it until very close to the end. But it was also a sanctuary. I was working in obscurity.

My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned language.

In the 1930s, all the novelists had seemed to be people who came blazing up into stardom from out of total obscurity. That seemed to be the nature of the beast. The biographical notes on the dustjackets of the novels were terrific.

Philosophical reflection could not leave the relation of mind and spirit in the obscurity which had satisfied the needs of the naive consciousness.

Obscurity is the realm of error.

Leave bands, go back to obscurity if I choose to, without a great sense of loss of security because it’s all been based on the fact that I did it on my own or was doing, enjoying doing it on my own in the first place.

Being criticized in the media is a good problem to have – most of the time. It means you’re doing something that is at least interesting or cool or crazy enough to be noticed. It might not always feel good, but it’s usually better than the alternative of obscurity.

Life is an ordeal, albeit an exciting one, but I wouldn’t trade it for the good old days of poverty and obscurity.

When you work with web design companies in San Francisco, you end up with a bunch of twenty-somethings who have their own cultural peculiarities, including obscurity for its own sake. You give those guys a website for a banking institution and they screw it up, because they are designing for themselves.

Obscurity can be a fire of ambition in those who have stalwart souls.

I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

Don’t be a writer; it’s a terrible way to live your life. There’s nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don’t expect anything from anybody.

I was discovered out of nowhere. I didn’t have family that was in the industry. I didn’t know anyone in L.A.; I didn’t have any reason to have been discovered. Nowadays, you have YouTube, and people are scouting more, but I really was plucked out of obscurity.

As a student in Beijing in 1996, I sometimes marveled at the sheer obscurity of the movies that somehow made it onto pirated discs in China.

Not everyone can be as successful a performer as myself, who gave 10 great performances the first time I ever did comedy, and then toiled in obscurity for years.

I think I would like the sort of job where you can work away in obscurity to try and improve things, without being caught up in the political maelstrom.

I think it’s important to have had at least a few years of obscurity, where people treat you like everybody else.

Obscurity is just obscurity. There’s no romance in obscurity.

We’re a sport that was in obscurity for so long, we started to get used to that.

To morrow, I believe, is to be an eclipse of the sun, and I think it perfectly meet and proper that the sun in the heavens, and the glory of the Republic should both go into obscurity and darkness together.

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

As Ronald Reagan demonstrated, it is still possible to progress if not from a log cabin at least from obscurity to the White House. It is also rare.