Obscurity

Obscurity is the state of being unknown or the quality of being difficult to understand.

Sourced

• Content thyself to be obscurely good.
  • Joseph Addison, Cato, A Tragedy (1713), Act IV, scene 4.

• Like beauteous flowers which vainly waste their scent
  Of odours in unhaunted deserts.
  • William Chamberlayne, Pharonida (1659), Part II, Book IV.

• The palpable obscure.
  • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), Book II, line 406.

• Yet was he but a squire of low degree.
  • Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1589-96), Book IV, Canto VII, Stanza 15.

• Eo magis præfulgebat quod non videbatur.
  • He shone with the greater splendor, because he was not seen.
  • Tacitus, Annales (AD 117), III. 76.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 565.

• 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.
  • Robert Browning, Paracelsus, Part V.

• As night the life-inclining stars best shows,
  So lives obscure the starriest souls disclose.
  • George Chapman, Hymns and Epigrams of Homer, The Translator's Epilogue, line 74.

• Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
  And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
  • Thomas Gray, Elegy in a Country Churchyard, Stanza 14.

• Yet still he fills affection's eye,
  Obscurely wise, and coarsely kind.
  • Samuel Johnson, On the Death of Robert Levet.

• 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.
  • Samuel Madden, Boulter's Monument.

• Bene qui latuit, bene vixit.
  • He who has lived obscurely and quietly has lived well.
  • Ovid, Tristium, III, 4, 25.

• Ut sæpe summa ingenia in occulto latent!
  • How often the highest talent lurks in obscurity!
  • Plautus, Captivi, I, 2, 62.

• How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
  The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
  • Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard (1717), line 207.

• Thus let me live, unseen, unknown,
  Thus unlamented let me die;
  Steal from the world, and not a stone
  Tell where I lie.
  • Alexander Pope, Ode on Solitude.

• She dwelt among the untrodden ways
  Beside the springs of Dove,
  A maid whom there were none to praise
  And very few to love.
  • William Wordsworth, She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways.