Obvious Quotes

But once you allow yourself to recognize necessity, you find two things: One you find your options so restricted that the only course of action is obvious, and, two, that a great sense of freedom comes with the decision.

A thing is obvious mathematically after you see it.

I wish more people would belabor the obvious, and more often.

I think it is obvious that people repeat acts that are shown on the television or the screen and I wouldn't want to inspire any violence on anyone.

It's not that I'm deliberately trying to shock people all the time. I'm just doing things that are obvious to me. It's because the public doesn't understand my way of thinking that they get surprised.

If we win, someone else loses. But if someone else loses, we lose. Which is a point we're not getting. The new spirituality will make this just painfully obvious.

One of the rules of history is that people do not write about what is too obvious to mention. And so the information, having never been recorded, is now lost for ever.

Humans often fail to see what is close to them and obvious to others.

It wasn't that she was different from all the other girls at Jackson. That was obvious. It was that she made me realize how much I was just like the rest of them, even if I wanted to pretend I wasn't.

I think the obvious answer is I was raised in New York City, so growing up, not only myself but my family, like my father, we would watch a lot of Scorsese films.

Laying tracks gives you freedom without being too obvious.

The first time, I usually skim off the outer layer and end up with photographs that are fairly obvious. The second time, I have to look a little deeper. The images get more interesting. The third time it is even more challenging and on each subsequent occasion, the images should get stronger, but it takes more effort to get them.

My notion of a failed writing workshop is when everybody comes out replicating the teacher and imitating as closely as possible the great original at the head of the table. I think that's a mistake, in obvious opposition to the ideal of teaching which permits a student to be someone other than the teacher. ... The successful teacher has to make each of the students a different product rather than the same.

I gave guitar lessons. I tried to join bands. My mom always said it was obvious that nothing was going to stop me.

The extremes of opulence and of want are more remarkable, and more constantly obvious, in [Great Britain] than in any other place that I ever saw.

The service we render to others is really the rent we pay for our room on this earth. It is obvious that man is himself a traveler; that the purpose of this world is not 'to have and to hold' but "to give and serve."

Every jock gets up and tells the world how lucky he is. But I feel that I may be the luckiest one of all in terms of timing and being at the right place at the right moment-even though, for the last 30 years, I was told I was born 20 years too soon, for obvious reasons.

A genius knows how to make himself easily understood without being obvious about it.

All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

My main expertise is in the past, but if I have to extrapolate into the future, I would say: no good news any time soon and an obvious exit strategy is not apparent to me.

Sometimes what is most important to us is not obvious and can be seen only by how we respond to our husbands in everyday life.

Pets are the world to me. I think they are the most obvious manifestations of divine love that we are going to see this side of eternity.

I will garden on the double run, my rhythm obvious in the ringing rakes, and trust in fate to keep me poor and kind and work until my heart is short, then go out slowly with a feeble grin, my fingers flexing but my eyes gone gray from cramps and the lack of oxygen.

Shooting an improv-based film is incredibly liberating, exhilarating, and fun, but editing that kind of movie can be difficult for obvious continuity reasons.

We cannot conceive how the Foetus is form'd in the Womb, nor as much as how a Plant springs from the Earth we tread on ... And if we are ignorant of the most obvious things about us, and the most considerable within our selves, 'tis then no wonder that we know not the constitution and powers of the creatures, to whom we are such strangers.

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.

I thought if the climate was heating that CO2 was the only forcing, and it would be late in the century before we had trouble. Now that we know about the other half of the forcing, it's obvious that the trouble is coming much sooner.

It is this simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences-makes them, as the poets tell us, 'charm the crowd's ears more finely.' Educated men lay down broad general principles; uneducated men argue from common knowledge and draw obvious conclusions.

I'm good at my job for a midwestern American. Maybe it's because people in fashion often mistake common sense for genius. I mean, some model walks down the runway in an impossible outfit, and I state the obvious ? no one is going to wear that ? and people are like, you're brilliant!.

People who get implants, it's so depressing, you know... People - I don't know. The route of that, you know, maybe they want more love or attention, or what it is, but they always go for the most obvious place, you know? Here... Well if you really want more attention, why not get them in your eyes? And then move your eyes down to where your nipples used to be, put your breasts up on your head, everybody will pay attention!

Those moments of solitude and exhibiting a mental breakdown, and how you do that physically and without it being too obvious, but being relatively settled but relatively intense. There are some intense moments in there that sort of pepper his breakdown.

If a person weren't failing in some way, shape or form, would he or she need to blame, justify, or complain? The obvious answer is no.

No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clichés that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn nor commonplace to him. ... The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart's blood.

I'm pretty good at inventing phrases - you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you'd sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they're about something hypnopaedically* obvious. But that doesn't seem enough. It's not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too.

I think it's pretty obvious to most people that Napster is not media specific, but I could see a system like Napster evolving into something that allows users to locate and retrieve different types of data other than just MP3s or audio files.

By the aristocracy of finance must here be understood not merely the great loan promoters and speculators in public funds, in regard to whom it is immediately obvious that their interests coincide with the interests of the state power. All modern finance, the whole of the banking business, is interwoven in the closest fashion with public credit.

It may be a mere patriotic bias, though I do not think so, but it seems to me that the English aristocracy is not only the type, but is the crown and flower of all actual aristocracies; it has all the oligarchical virtues as well as all the defects. It is casual, it is kind, it is courageous in obvious matters; but it has one great merit that overlaps even these. The great and very obvious merit of the English aristocracy is that nobody could possibly take it seriously.

Common sense … has the very curious property of being more correct retrospectively than prospectively. It seems to me that one of the principal criteria to be applied to successful science is that its results are almost always obvious retrospectively; unfortunately, they seldom are prospectively. Common sense provides a kind of ultimate validation after science has completed its work; it seldom anticipates what science is going to discover.

Sometimes the situation is only a problem because it is looked at in a certain way. Looked at in another way, the right course of action may be so obvious that the problem no longer exists.

The moral is that in trading it's important to examine the situation from as many angles as possible, because your initial impulses are probably going to be wrong. There is never any money to be made in the obvious conclusions.

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

The process of philosophizing, to my mind, consists mainly in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things, that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear, definite, which by reflection and analysis we find is involved in the vague thing that we start from, and is, so to speak, the real truth of which that vague thing is a sort of shadow.

The language of commerce has been engineered to describe the overt purpose of a thing, but cannot encompass fringe benefits or peripheral pleasures. It weighs the obvious against what in its terms are incomprehensible. When I drive from here to there, speed, privacy, control, and safety are easy to claim. When I walk, what happens is more vague, more ambiguous-and in many circumstances much richer. I am out in the world. It's exercise, though not so quantifiably as on a treadmill in a gym with a digital readout.

It seems to me patently obvious that we can no more respect and tolerate vast differences in notions of human well-being than we can respect or tolerate vast differences in the notions about how disease spreads, or in the safety standards of buildings and airplanes.

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

I hadn’t seen any novel make the statement that entering the workforce was like entering the grave. That from then on, nothing happens and you have to pretend to be interested in your work. And, furthermore, that some people have a sex life and others don’t just because some are more attractive than others. I wanted to acknowledge that if people don’t have a sex life, it’s not for some moral reason, it’s just because they’re ugly. Once you’ve said it, it sounds obvious, but I wanted to say it.

Intellectually, human beings and animals may be different, but it's pretty obvious that animals have a rich emotional life and that they feel joy and pain. It's easy to forget the connection between a hamburger and the cow it came from. But I forced myself to acknowledge the fact that every time I ate a hamburger, a cow had ceased to breathe

Girls are not accustomed to jockeying for status in an obvious way; they are more concerned that they be liked.

Most new insights come only after a superabundant accumulation of facts have removed the blindness which prevented us from seeing what later comes to be regarded as obvious.

Secrecy was the problem; transparency the obvious cure.