«Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.»

«You -- poor and obscure, and small and plain as you are -- I entreat to accept me as a husband.»

«Words, like glasses, obscure everything which they do not make clear.»

«Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.»

«Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.»

«Words like glass, obscure when they do not aid vision»

«We were wise indeed, could we discern truly the signs of our own time; and by knowledge of its wants and advantages, wisely adjust our own position in it. Let us, instead of gazing idly into the obscure distance, look calmly around us, for a little, on the perplexed scene where we stand. Perhaps, on a more serious inspection, something of its perplexity will disappear, some of its distinctive characters and deeper tendencies more clearly reveal themselves; whereby our own relations to it, our own true aims and endeavors in it, may also become clearer.»

«What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.»