Obscurity

"Content thyself to be obscurely good."

"Like beauteous flowers which vainly waste their scent Of odours in unhaunted deserts."

"That it has pleased God to make Holy Scripture obscure in certain places lest, if it were perfectly clear to all, it might be vulgarized and subjected to disrespect or be so misunderstood by people of limited intelligence as to lead them into error."

"Now, in our opinion, no author should be blamed for obscurity; nor should any pains be grudged in the effort to understand him, provided that he has done his best to be intelligible. Difficult thoughts are quite distinct from difficult words. Difficulty of thought is the very heart of poetry."

"The palpable obscure."

"How happy is the blameless vestal's lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot."

"Yet was he but a squire of low degree."

"Eo magis præfulgebat quod non videbatur."

"The evolutionary urge drives man to seek for intenser forms of fulfillment, since his basic urge is for more life, more consciousness, and this contentment has an air of stagnation that the healthy mind rejects. (This recognition lies at the centre of my own 'outsider theory': that there are human beings to whom comfort means nothing, but whose happiness consists in following an obscure inner-drive, an 'appetite for reality'.)"

"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."

"As night the life-inclining stars best shows, So lives obscure the starriest souls disclose."

"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air."

"Yet still he fills affection's eye, Obscurely wise, and coarsely kind."

"Some write their wrongs in marble: he more just, Stoop'd down serene and wrote them on the dust, Trod under foot, the sport of every wind, Swept from the earth and blotted from his mind, There, secret in the grave, he bade them lie, And grieved they could not 'scape the Almighty eye."

"Bene qui latuit, bene vixit."

"Ut sæpe summa ingenia in occulto latent!"

"Thus let me live, unseen, unknown, Thus unlamented let me die; Steal from the world, and not a stone Tell where I lie."

"She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love."