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Obvious Quotes

Browse 2005 quotes about Obvious.

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Obvious Quotes

“When prayer, rituals and ascetic life are just a means of self-indulgence, they are harmful rather than beneficial. This is quite obvious to people nowadays, when it is widely recognised that fixations are not the same as valuable and laudable observances. One should not pray if that prayer is vanity; rituals are wrong when they provide lower satisfactions, like emotional stimulus instead of enlightenment; he or she should not be an ascetic who is only enjoying it.”

PeopleIfsShouldMeanSelfEnjoyPrayerEmotionalPrayingEnlightenmentSatisfactionObviousValuableVanityRitualBeneficialIndulgenceStimulusObservanceSelf IndulgenceFixation
Book:Seeker After Truth
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“Libertarians are not the brightest lights in the candelabra, a fact that is evident from the alternatives they tend to offer to public prevention of private abuses. For example: if you don’t like working a hundred hours a week for twenty-five cents a day, then find another employer! It is obvious to intelligent people, if not libertarians, that more generous employers will price themselves out of a market whose standards are set by the most rapacious.”

PeopleIfsFactsLightHoursFiveWeekExampleOffersStandardsHundredAbuseTwentiesIntelligentObviousLibertarianAlternativesGenerousCentsEvidentEmployersTwenty FivePrevention
Author:Michael Lind
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“Few intellectual tyrannies can be more recalcitrant than the truths that everybody knows and nearly no one can defend with any decent data (for who needs proof of anything so obvious). And few intellectual activities can be more salutary than attempts to find out whether these rocks of ages might crumble at the slightest tap of an informational hammer.”

KnowsNeedsMightAgeRocksActivityIntellectualObviousProofTyrannyDataDecentHammersRecalcitrant
Book:Life's Grandeur: The Spread of Excellence From Plato to Darwin
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“The necessity for power is obvious, because life cannot be lived without order; but the allocation of power is arbitrary because all men are alike, or very nearly. Yet power must not seem to be arbitrarily allocated, because it will not then be recognized as power. Therefore prestige, which is illusion, is of the very essence of power.”

MenSeemsOrderIllusionEssenceObviousArbitraryPrestigeAllocation
Book:Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
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“You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?”

ThinkingWorldYearsFirstsLooksGovernmentAsksEnergyGrowthNaturalCitiesWonderRecordsCenturyEvidenceResourcesClimatePopulationObviousDecadesPanicFlood21st CenturyThreatenedNatural ResourcesDroughtWorld PopulationConfluence
Author:Thomas Friedman
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“Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood. With such a book the impact isn't necessarily obvious at first...but the more you read it and re-read it, and live with it, and travel with it, the more it speaks to you, and the more you realize that you cannot live without that book. It's then that the wisdom hidden inside, the seed, is passed on.”

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Author:Tahir Shah
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“Traveling across the United States, it's easy to see why Americans are often thought of as stupid. At the San Diego Zoo, right near the primate habitats, there's a display featuring half a dozen life-size gorillas made out of bronze. Posted nearby is a sign reading CAUTION: GORILLA STATUES MAY BE HOT. Everywhere you turn, the obvious is being stated. CANNON MAY BE LOUD. MOVING SIDEWALK IS ABOUT TO END. To people who don't run around suing one another, such signs suggest a crippling lack of intelligence.”

PeopleMayMadeEndsStatesRunningAmericaMovingTurnsReadingEasyUnitedHalfUnited StatesStupidHotSizeObviousLoudDozenDisplayCautionStatuesZoosSidewalkHabitatCannonsBronzePrimatesGorillasSan DiegoSuingLife Size
Book:Me Talk Pretty One Day
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“The reality of today, different as it is from the reality of my society one hundred years ago, is and can be important if we have the energy and the inclination to challenge it, to go out and engage with its peculiarities, with the things that we do not understand. The real danger is the tendency to retreat into the obvious, the tendency to be frightened by the richness of the world and to clutch what we always have understood.”

IfsWorldYearsImportantDifferentRealRealityTodayEnergyChallengesDangerUnderstoodHundredYears AgoObviousTendenciesFrightenedRetreatInclinationRichnessClutch
Book:There Was a Country: A Memoir
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“Creativity sometimes needs the protection of darkness, of being ignored. That is very obvious in the natural tendency many artists and writers have not to show their paintings or writings before they are finished.”

NeedsWritingSometimesShowsArtistNaturalCreativityDarknessPaintingObviousProtectionFinishedTendenciesIgnoredArtists And WritersBeing Ignored
Book:The Interpretation of Fairy Tales: Revised Edition
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“The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn't absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.”

WorldBelieveMeanIdeasEndsAgeHumanityFallViewsKnownTechnologyProgressMankindObviousSeekingAbsurdRepeatsDelusionTrapsDesirableScience And TechnologyApocalypticScientific KnowledgeGreat Progress
Author:Ludwig Wittgenstein
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“It is worth repeating that powerful imagination is not false outward vision, but intense inward representation, and a creative energy constantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minutiæ of experience, which it reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes; not the habitual confusion of provable fact with the fictions of fancy and transient inclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs every material object, every incidental fact with far-reaching memories and storied residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious relations to human existence.”

HumansFactsLightPassionEnergyImaginationMemoriesPowerfulExistenceFictionVisionCreativeObjectsMaterialsIdealsRelationObviousIntenseConfusionFancyReachingFedsAssociationInwardRepresentationConstructsInclinationHuman ExistenceHabitualTransientBreadthCreative EnergySusceptibility
Author:George Eliot
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“The chance is high that the truth lies in the fashionable direction. But, on the off-chance that it is in another direction - a direction obvious from an unfashionable view of field theory - who will find it? Only someone who has sacrificed himself by teaching himself quantum electrodynamics from a peculiar and unusual point of view; one that he may have to invent for himself.”

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Author:Richard P. Feynman
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“The same polarity of the male and female principle exists in nature; not only, as is obvious in animals and plants, but in the polarity of the two fundamental functions, that of receiving and penetrating. It is the polarity of earth and rain, of the river and the ocean, of night and day, of darkness and light, of matter and spirit.”

TwoMatterLightEarthSpiritNightAnimalPrinciplesDarknessOceanRainFemaleRiversFunctionFundamentalsPlantMalesObviousReceivingLight And DarknessPolarity
Book:THE ART OF LOVING
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“We didn't build our bridges simply to avoid walking on water. Nothing so obvious. A bridge is a meeting place. A neutral place. A casual place. Enemies will choose to meet on a bridge and end their quarrel in that void... For lovers, a bridge is a possibility, a metaphor of their chances. And for the traffic in whispered goods, where else but a bridge in the night?”

EndsNightWaterChanceEnemyPossibilityLoversWalkingMeetingsMetaphorObviousBridgesGoodsVoidTrafficQuarrelsCasualWalking On Water
Book:The Passion
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“The art of war is at once comprehensive and complicated; ... it demands much previous study; and ... the possession of it, in its most improved and perfect state, is always a great moment to the security of a nation. This, therefore, ought to be a serious care of every government; and for this purpose, an academy, where a regular course of instruction is given, is an obvious expedient, which different nations have successfully employed.”

ArtDifferentWarStatesMomentsGovernmentCarePurposeCoursesGivenNationsPerfectStudySecuritySeriousOughtDemandObviousPossessionComplicatedInstructionEmployedArt Of WarAcademyComprehensiveGreat Moments
Book:The speeches, addresses and messages, of the several presidents of the United States, at the openings of Congress and at their respective inaugurations: Also, the Declaration of independence, the Constitution of the United States, and Washington's farewell address to his fellow-citizens
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“The courage to be as oneself within the atmosphere of Enlightenment is the courage to affirm oneself as a bridge from a lower to a higher state of rationality. It is obvious that this kind of courage to be must become conformist the moment its revolutionary attack on that which contradicts reason has ceased, namely in the victorious bourgeoisie.”

KindStatesReasonMomentsHigherEnlightenmentOneselfObviousBridgesAtmosphereRevolutionaryRationalityBourgeoisieConformist
Author:Paul Tillich
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“My toils in the quotation field have led me to formulate two or three laws about the way people use and abuse quotations. My first law is: When in doubt, ascribe all quotations to Bernard Shaw - which I don't mean to be taken literally, but as a general observation of the habit people have of attaching remarks to the nearest obvious speaker. Churchill, Wilde, Orson Welles and Alexander Woollcott are other useful figures upon whom to father remarks when you don't know who really said them.”

PeopleKnowsWayFirstsMeanSaidTwoUseLawThreeFatherTakenDoubtFiguresFieldsHabitAbuseObviousObservationSpeakersQuotationsToilRemarksWhen In DoubtWildeBernard ShawUse And Abuse
Author:Nigel Rees
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“As the acceptance of democracy brings a certain life-giving power, so it has its own sanctions and comforts. Perhaps the most obvious one is the curious sense which comes to us from time to time, that we belong to the whole, that a certain basic well being can never be taken away from us whatever the turn of fortune.”

GivingWellsWholeCertainTurnsDemocracyTakenAcceptanceComfortFortuneObviousCuriousWell BeingSanctions
Book:Democracy and Social Ethics
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“It is obvious that the fascist mass pestilence, with its background of thousands of years, cannot be mastered with social measures corresponding to the past three hundred years. The discovery of the natural biological work democracy in international human intercourse is the answer to fascism. This will be no less true even if not one of the living sex-economists, orgone biophysicists or work democrats should live to see its general functioning and its victory over the irrationalism in social life.”

IfsShouldYearsHumansPastThreeSocialSexNaturalAnswersDemocracyVictoryMassHundredDiscoveryDemocratInternationalObviousBackgroundsFascismEconomistIntercourseFascistsSocial LifeCorrespondingPestilence
Author:Wilhelm Reich
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