Quotes about Obscurity
Not everyone wants to be out of the spotlight as she did. But it's important for a leader to learn to work in obscurity because it is a test of personal integrity. The key is being willing to do something because it matters, not because it will get you noticed.
- John Maxwell
being famous is a thing that depends greatly on position and opportunity. It is not enough to possess gifts and powers: there must also be the means of exhibiting them. For want of opportunity some of the greatest men perhaps are buried in obscurity.
- JC Ryle
Pale wox I, and in vapours hid my face. Art thou, too, near such doom? vague
- John Keats
There are two places in the world where men can most effectively disappear - the city of London and the South Seas.
- Herman Melville
The tragedy of her death was not that it made one, now and then and very intensely, unhappy. It was that it made her unreal; and us solemn, and self-conscious. We were made to act parts that we did not feel; to fumble for words that we did not know. It obscured, it dulled.
- Virginia Woolf
This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it.
- Virginia Woolf
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. And so he sank into a quiet mood, under the oak tree, the hardness of whose roots, exposed above the ground seemed to him rather comfortable than otherwise.
- Virginia Woolf
Excellence in obscurity is better than mediocrity in the spotlight.
- Matshona Dhliwayo
In truth, Jesus did not, in his own time, attract much notice.
- Jay Parini
They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.
- Cormac McCarthy
Their arms aloft pulling at their clothes were luminous and each obscure soul was enveloped in audible shapes of light as if it had always been so. The mare at the far end of the stable snorted and shied at this luminosity in beings so endarkened and the little horse turned and hid his face in the web of his dam's flank.
- Cormac McCarthy
Your only real safety would be in disappearing.
- Cormac McCarthy