Quotes & Sayings About Being Obvious

Charles Murray, however, clearly believes that being able to cure fatal diseases is more important than some other things and that Rembrandt was a greater artist than your local sidewalk cartoon sketcher. Most people might regard this as obvious common sense but some of the intelligentsia may be seething with resentment at seeing their pet fetishes ignored. — Thomas Sowell

You cannot study the Bible diligently and earnestly without being struck by an obvious fact-the whole matter of personal holiness is highly important to God! — Aiden Wilson Tozer

I start off with the obvious, that it makes no sense either to believe or to disbelieve in God until a substantial and intelligent definition or concept should be offered. Belief or disbelief is a secondary consideration, contingent on the intelligibility and cogency of the premise; the primal unintelligence or irrationality of moderns is revealed by their eagerness to leap to a conclusion without ever being curious what the hell the original premise was. — Kenny Smith

One of the most obvious explanations is that the leaders undertake many actions that make it possible for them to pretend they are doing something effective to avoid a catastrophe: endless conferences, resolutions, disarmament talks, all give the impression that the problems are recognized and something is being done to resolve them. — Erich Fromm

But as the primeval past faded into memory, mankind's knowledge expanded and its hubris grew with the promise of the Serpent that humans would become as gods. The Watchers became less obvious with passing time, as they sought to work more behind the veil of the supernatural world. As divine beings, Watchers could exert hypnotic effect on humans to see them in any appearance they desired. Thus, the eight-foot tall shining Belial made himself appear to be a mere five-foot ten being, both male and female, neither male nor female, a dissolution of gender, an abomination in the Law of God. But to Belial, such intolerant condemnation would not stop him from looking good. Unlike the ordinary, quite uncomely human before him, Belial still wanted to stand out from the crowd. He reveled in abomination. — Brian Godawa

The very way that you think is a crucial component to your overall health and well being. Living towards the negative will only foster conflict and a sense of lack, while living towards the positive will create more opportunity for you to experience harmony and abundance. — Gary Hopkins

In some ways the operation of the feminine stereotype is so obvious and for many women entirely unattainable, that it can be easily reacted against. It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one that society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along. Of course, a woman who goes her own way will find her conditioning is ineradicable, but she at least can recognize its operation and choose to counteract it, whereas a man might find that he was being more subtly deluded. — Germaine Greer

You mean beyond the obvious drawbacks of being involved with a self-proclaimed and unapologetic asshole? — Qwen Salsbury

That Hegelian dialectics should provide a wonderful instrument for always being right, because they permit the interpretations of all defeats as the beginning of victory, is obvious. One of the most beautiful examples of this kind of sophistry occurred after 1933 when the German Communists for nearly two years refused to recognize that Hitler's victory had been a defeat for the German Communist Party. — Hannah Arendt

All this cut-price transcendentalism does not prevent California from being a startlingly physical state. This becomes most obvious where Los Angeles saunters down to the sea. The region is called Venice. — Quentin Crisp

I think of my photographs as being obviously symbolic, but not symbolically obvious. — Jerry Uelsmann

Difficult as his task may be, so is writing an act that is perpetually longing in its attempt to cull the surreptitious meaning of life, which is always located experiences, beyond the obvious, possible, experience that is renewed with each new writing as if it were lived for the first time is the experience that drives today's human being to live a perpetual state of tension as he stands face to face with destruction, death, torture, and solitude. — Luay Hamza Abbas

Sides are being divided now. It's very obvious. So if you're on the other side of the fence, you're suddenly anti-American. It's breeding fear of being on the wrong side. — Sam Shepard

The key to such power is ambiguity. In a society where the roles everyone plays are obvious, the refusal to conform to any standard will excite interest. Be both masculine and feminine, impudent and charming, subtle and outrageous. Let other people worry about being socially acceptable; those types are a dime a dozen, and you are after a power greater than they can imagine. — Robert Greene

He didn't love her. They were together for the obvious and timeless reason: It was slightly less painful than being alone. — Gary Shteyngart

Since the will has never tasted God as he is or known him through some gratification of the appetite, and consequently does not know what God is like, it cannot know what the pleasure of God is; nor can its being, appetite, and satisfaction know how to desire God, for he transcends all its capacity. Thus it is obvious that none of all those particular things in which it can rejoice is God. In order to be united with him, the will must consequently be emptied of and detached from all disordered appetite and satisfaction with respect to every particular thing in which it can rejoice, whether earthly or heavenly, temporal or spiritual, so that purged and cleansed of all inordinate satisfactions, joys, and appetites it might be wholly occupied in loving God with its affections. For if in any way the will can comprehend God and be united with him, it is through love and not through any gratification of the appetite. — San Juan De La Cruz

I'm very interested, in all my books, in community, what binds people together, which I think is an obvious consequence of being the fourth of six children. — Beth Gutcheon

We accept what Scripture teaches as far as our doctrine is concerned; but when it comes to practice, we very often fail to take the Scriptures as our only guide ... Dare I give an obvious illustration? The question of women preaching, and being ordained to the full ministry. — D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of your existence may be only a breath away from being the last. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable fact. Still, as we mature into our mortality, we begin to gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes into the void, hoping that our mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture into the darkness of non-being. — Aleksandar Hemon

It is obvious that taking the country from a state of war to being a lawful state won't be easy. — Ahmed Ben Bella

I don't think it ever does any harm in any business to feel that there is someone there who cares about it. If you look at any business, fashion being the most obvious, the aura, or the reality of the designer, is part of what creates it. It's true in luxury goods stores and in good food stores. It leaves a palpable sense that someone cares. — Andre Balazs

She never indulged in reveries or tried to be clever in her conversation; she seemed to have drawn a line in her mind beyond which she never went. It was quite obvious that feelings, every kind of relationship, including love, entered into her life on equal terms with everything else, while in the case of other women love quite manifestly takes part, if not in deeds, then in words, in all the problems of life, and everything else is allowed in only in so far as love leaves room for it. The thing this woman esteemed most was the art of living, of being able to control oneself, of keeping a balance between thought and intention, intention and realization. You could never take her unawares, by surprise, but she was like a watchful enemy whose expectant gaze would always be fixed on you, however hard you tried to lie in wait for him. High society was her element, and therefore tact and caution prompted her every thought, word, and movement. — Ivan Goncharov

I'm not a statistician, but it doesn't take a genious to work out that 100 million children being denied an education is ridiculous. There is nothing lost in translation here, it's obvious that's wrong. — Scarlett Johansson

Today he was being reminded yet again of the obvious: The world doesn't give even the slightest damn about us or our petty problems. We never quite get that, do we? Our lives have been shattered - shouldn't the rest of us take notice? But no. To the outside world, Adam looked the same, acted the same, felt the same. We get mad at someone for cutting us off in traffic or for taking too long to order at Starbucks or for not responding exactly as we see fit, and we have no idea that behind their facade, they may be dealing with some industrial-strength shit. Their lives may be in pieces. They may be in the midst of incalculable tragedy and turmoil, and they may be hanging on to their sanity by a thread. — Harlan Coben

The second objection is that some of the language is obvious metaphor. David painted the sun as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber or of being summoned by God and responding like a human. This is called anthropomorphism and is obviously poetic. But the problem here is that the metaphors still reinforce the sun doing all the moving around a stationary immobile earth. — Brian Godawa

The heliocentric system itself admits of an obvious symbolism, since it identifies the centre of the world with the source of light. Its rediscovery by Copernicus (For it is not a case of an unprecedented discovery. Copernicus himself refers to Nicetas of Syracuse as also to certain quotations in Plutarch) however, produced no new spiritual vision of the world; rather it was comparable to the popularization of an esoteric truth. The heliocentric system had no common measure with the subjective experiences of people; in it man had no organic place. Instead of helping the human mind to go beyond itself and to consider things in terms of the immensity of the cosmos, it only encouraged a materialistic Prometheanism which, far from being superhuman, ended by becoming inhuman. — Titus Burckhardt

And if his youth was obvious, the Glorious Cause was to a large degree a young man's cause. The commander in chief of the army, George Washington, was himself only forty-three. John Hancock, the President of the Continental Congress, was thirty-nine, John Adams, forty, Thomas Jefferson, thirty-two, younger even than the young Rhode Island general. In such times many were being cast in roles seemingly beyond their experience or capacities, and Washington had quickly judged Nathanael Greene to be "an object of confidence. — David McCullough

You can't really win as a Booker judge. If you choose the obvious names, the unit-shifters, you're accused of being timid and unimaginative; if you choose the unfamous, you're labelled willful and perverse. — Tibor Fischer

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

Quite a number of writers comment on the decidedly human character of the fairies, but it must be obvious that practically all supernaturals partake of human traits, more usually unpleasant ones, being as they are the projections of man's fear and imagination and created by him, psychologically, in his own image. Fairies are frequently described as being peevish, irritable, and revengeful to a degree. Grant Stewart says rather unmercifully of the Scottish fairies that their appetites are as keen as their inclinations are corrupt and wicked. — Lewis Spence

I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I'll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence. — Ian McEwan

In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is ... in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to. — Theodore Dalrymple

This is the part where you apologize to me," I said, getting angry. "You guys screwed up and this is where you make me feel better about it." I like to use this tactic on people. It can work. When someone is being rude, abusing their power, or not respecting you, just call them out in a really obvious way. Say, "I can't understand why you are being rude because you are the concierge and this is the part of the evening where the concierge helps me." Act like they are an actor who has forgotten what part they are playing. It brings the attention back to them and gives you a minute to calm down so you don't do something silly like burst into tears or break their stupid fucking glasses. — Amy Poehler

If Edgar sounded overeager, even rushed, the race was with his own temperament. He placed a premium on savvy. Yet since you could only obtain new information by admitting you didn't know it already, savvy required an apprenticeship as a naive twit. You had to ask crude, obvious questions ... you had to sit still while worldly-wise warhorses ... fired withering glances as if you were born yesterday.
Well, Edgar was born yesterday for the moment, although his tolerance for being treated liked a simpleton was in short supply. He'd needed to rattle off a multitude of stupid questions before he embraced his next incarnation as an insider. The trouble was that savvy coated your brain in plastic like a driver's license: nothing more could get in. Hence the point at which you decided you knew everything was exactly the point at which you became an ignorant dipshit. — Lionel Shriver

It wasn't all that long ago that he'd stood where I did, that my mom's face was one of many in his
world. And yet, despite all the impediments and all the time that had passed, they were still deeply in
love.
It was obvious in everything, from their shared room to the way they fretted over each other to the
way they seemed to be incapable of not flirting with each other even after being married so long. — Kiera Cass

The climate system is being pushed hard enough that change will become obvious to the man in the street in the next decade. — James Hansen

Creativity sometimes needs the protection of darkness, of being ignored. That is very obvious in the natural tendency many artists and writers have not to show their paintings or writings before they are finished. — Marie-Louise Von Franz

How did you know?" Benedict finally asked.
One corner of Colin's mouth tilted up into a crooked smile. "About Sophie? It's rather obvious."
"Colin, she's - "
"A maid? Who cares? What is going to happen to you if you marry her?" Colin asked with a devil-may-care shrug of his shoulders. "People you couldn't care less about will ostracize you? Hell, I wouldn't mind being ostracized by some of the people with whom I'm forced to socialize."
Benedict shrugged dismissively. "I'd already decided I didn't care about all that," he said.
"Then what in bloody hell is the problem?" Colin demanded.
"It's complicated."
"Nothing is ever as complicated as it is in one's mind. — Julia Quinn

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. — Jane Addams

'Out' was my real breakthrough, the novel that became a hit in Japan and sold a lot of books, so it was sort of an obvious choice for being the first book to be translated into English. — Natsuo Kirino

For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming. Even though atmospheric CO2 has continued to accumulate - up about 4 percent in the last 10 years - the global mean temperature has remained flat. That should raise obvious questions about CO2 being the cause of climate change. — Walter Cunningham

Fucking hell." He smoothed her hair back with shaking fingers before turning to kiss her cheek. "All those years wasted, when I could have been loving you."
The answer was easy, obvious. "You were."
He choked on a laugh and coaxed her head back, urging her to meet his eyes. "Fine, then. All those wasted years, I could have been being loved."
"You were that, too. — Kit Rocha

The doves, as we know, must be killed according to the law before Mary's purification can be acknowledged and ratified. Any ironic or irreverent disciple of Voltaire will find it difficult to resist making the obvious remark that, things being what they are, purity can be maintained only so long as there are innocent creatures to sacrifice in this world, whether turtledoves, lambs, or others. — Jose Saramago

In the absence of either a widely accepted theory of language learning or a solid empirical base for classroom practice, teachers and learners have always been, and will always be, vulnerable to drastic pendulum swings of fashion, the coming and going of various unconventional and unlamented "Wonder Methods" being an obvious recent example. The sad truth is that after at least 2,000 years, most language teaching takes place on a wing and a prayer - sometimes successfully, but often a relative failure. — Michael H. Long

Through the bars he had laid eyes on a face like glass, somebody who could not lie without it being obvious. And he had seen a way of using that very fact to tell the greatest of lies. — Frances Hardinge

An artist who is inspired is being obvious. He's not making any decisions, he's not weighing one idea against another. He's accepting his first thoughts. — Keith Johnstone

The power of our thoughts may never be measured or appreciated, but it became obvious to me as a young boy that there was value and power in being aware of my thoughts and how I expressed myself. — Robert Kiyosaki

Be nice to each other. Not a lot, but seems like the most obvious thing. — Lenny Jacobson

It's tedious to watch something very obvious being worked out, like a movie that's not particularly good and after about half an hour you know how it's going to end. — Rudy Rucker

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. — Sam Harris

When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. — Theodore Dalrymple

The Impression that Pakistan being an Islamic State is thereby a Theocratic State is being sedulously fostered in certain quarters with the sole object of discrediting her in the eyes of the world. To anyone conversant with the basic principles of Islam, it should be obvious that in the fields of civics, Islam has always stood on complete social democracy and social justice, as the history of the early Caliphs will show, and has not sanctioned government by a sacerdotal class deriving its authority from God. The ruler and the ruled alike are #equal before Islamic Law, and the ruler, far from being a vicegerent of God on earth, is but a representative of people who have chosen him to serve them ... Islam has not recognized any distinction between man and man based on sex, race or worldly possessions ...
Fazul Rahman, First Education Minister of Pakistan, All Pakistan Educational Conference, Karachi, Nov 1947 — Fazul Rahman

Being unemployed is even more disastrous for individuals than you'd expect. Aside from the obvious harm - poverty, difficulty paying off debts - it seems to directly affect people's health, particularly that of older workers. — James Surowiecki

It's so obvious that you're gonna ask a good looking dude to be with you for the rest of your holiday while you only know his name for like 2 hours, 32 minutes, 12 seconds."
"Trisha! Being mean is my job! June, you're so predictable, like, it's not a shock for us if you're gonna ask a good looking dude to be with you for the rest of your holiday while you only know his name for like 2 hours, 33 minutes, 2 seconds. — Rea Lidde

In a profound sense every man has two halves to his being; he is not one person so much as two persons trying to act in unison. I believe that in the heart of each human being there is something which I can only describe as a child of darkness who is equal and complementary to the more obvious child of light. — Laurens Van Der Post

In reaction against the age-old slogan, "woman is the weaker vessel," or the still more offensive, "woman is a divine creature," we have, I think, allowed ourselves to drift into asserting that "a woman is as good as a man," without always pausing to think what exactly we mean by that. What, I feel, we ought to mean is something so obvious that it is apt to escape attention altogether, viz: ( ... ) that a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person. — Dorothy L. Sayers

The first thing that is not obvious to people is global warming is a less-than-1% effect. It's like being shortchanged at the bank by a penny every dollar. Over a long period of time with lots of transactions, that piles up. — Nathan Myhrvold

Football became my obvious metaphor as it does for many, and I began to equate this as being 'halftime' in my life. As I reflected on my professional life I realized how much time I had spent trying to make first downs and score touchdowns. My focus had now changed into trying to be more about people and serving others. — Marc Trestman

I just wish she wouldn't make herself such an obvious target." "No one should have to worry about being a target. She's just a kid trying to graduate. It's the school's responsibility to keep her safe. It's the teachers' job to make sure we all get a fair shot here. — Rachel Spangler

This is the very boring part of eating disorders, the aftermath. When you eat and hate that you eat. And yet of course you must eat. You don't really entertain the notion of going back. You, with some startling new level of clarity, realize that going back would be far worse than simply being as you are. This is obvious to anyone without an eating disorder. This is not always obvious to you. — Marya Hornbacher

Magical realism allows an artist like myself to inject layers of meaning without being obvious. In American culture, where there is freedom of expression, this approach may seem forced, unnecessary and misunderstood. But this system of communication has become very Iranian. — Shirin Neshat

The view of life adopted by these people, my literary associates, was that generally speaking life is a process of development in the course of which the most important role is played by us, the thinkers; and that among the thinkers it is we, the artists and poets, who have the most influence. Our vocation is to educate people. In order to avoid being confronted by the obvious question - 'What do I know and what have I got to teach? — Leo Tolstoy

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. — Bob Cousy

Yochai Benkler likens cultural creation to blood drives: the quality of donations increases when organizers stop paying.12 "Remember, money isn't always the best motivator," Benkler said, reiterating the point during a TED Talk touching on similar themes. "If you leave a fifty dollar check after dinner with friends, you don't increase the probability of being invited back. And if dinner isn't entirely obvious, think of sex. — Anonymous

It's no surprise that a generation of women who were brought up being told that they were equal to men, that sexism, and therefore feminism, was dead, are starting to see through this. And while they're pissed off, they're also positive, bubbling with hope. One obvious outcome of being brought up to believe you're equal is that you're both very angry when you encounter misogyny, but also confident in your ability to tackle it. — Kira Cochrane

For not even one person to have ever exhibited this interest in writing nor for any to have so satisfied it is bizarre. Saying this all went on in person is simply insufficient to answer the point: if everything was being resolved in person, Paul would never have written a single letter; nor would his congregations have so often written him letters requesting he write to satisfy their questions - which for some reason always concerned only doctrine and rules of conduct, never the far more interesting subject of how the Son of God lived and died. On the other matters Paul was compelled to write tens of thousands of words. If he had to write so much on those issues, how is it possible no one ever asked for or wrote even one word on the more obvious and burning issues of the facts of Jesus' life and death? — Richard Carrier

Angry obsessive thoughts about another weaken your state of mind and well being. If you must have revenge, then take it by choosing to be happy and let them go forever. — Gary Hopkins

Halt eyed them balefully. They were all being so obvious about not mentioning his sudden reappearance that it was even worse than if they had commented on it ...
'Oh, go on!' he said. 'Somebody say something! I know what you're thinking!'
'It's good to see you up and about, Halt,' Selethen said gravely ...
Halt glared at the others and they quickly chorused their pleasure at seeing him back to his normal self. But he could see the grins they didn't quite manage to hide. He fixed a glare on Alyss.
'I'm surprised at you Alyss,' he said. 'I expected no better of Will and Evanlyn, of course. Heartless beasts, the pair of them. But you! I thought you had been better trained!' ...
'Halt, I'm sorry! It's not funny, you're right ... Shut up, Will.' This last was directed at Will as he tried, unsuccessfully, to smother a snigger. — John Flanagan

I like myself.

Not once did I ever hate myself.

My basic, but high specs; my decent face; and my pessimistic, but realistic thinking; I didn't hate any single one of them.

But now, for the first time, I was on the verge of hating myself.

I arbitrarily placed my expectations on her, I arbitrarily forced my ideals on her, I arbitrarily acted as if I understood her, and I arbitrarily disappointed myself. Over and over again, I'd warn myself, yet I just wouldn't learn.

- - Even Yukinoshita Yukino tells lies.

For not being able to acknowledge something so obvious, I hate myself. — Wataru Watari

A commonality among factitious disorder is a lack in bonding personal relationships, providing alternative supports. Mr. McIlroy a skilled patient would receive over 200 hospital admissions in Britain subjecting himself to hundreds of painful treatments and procedures (Pallis & Bamji, 1979). The strength of compulsion of being viewed in the patient role becomes ever more obvious through the individual's willingness to submit to such rigors. Munchausen's syndrome may be rare yet continues to be a consistent disorder at the same time. The characteristics of Munchausen syndrome include physiological complaints presented by a dramatic patient. The patient exaggerates the illness exhibiting Pseudologia Fantastica. To minimize communication a patient will make use of hospital networks within different geographical locations. — Steven G. Carley

My dream is to collaborate with a mature person.I feel like my talents were being wasted in art school. I would like to try something else, but not the obvious or usual thing. — Frances Stark

The only obvious advantage to being an adult is that you can eat your dessert without haying sampled the vegetables. — Lisa Alther

That's funny. You would think after being followed and shoved into a dark alley by a stranger, you would be at least a little shaken. Don't tell me, you are a black belt just waiting for the perfect moment to strike." He laughed soundlessly. "I mean your words do sound brave but your eyes and the fact that you're trembling like a scared little kitten say something else entirely." Even though the alley was submerged in darkness and shadows, it was obvious there was a devilish grin stretched across his face ... — Nicole Rae

Taking a deep breath and trying not to reveal my sudden feeling of inadequacy, I was about to come back with a counter offer when a knock on the window startled me and I did what I always do ... I squeaked, which Tristan thought was pretty hilarious. And for whatever reason, that embarrassed me. Nooo, not telling a guy I'd need gum in order to give him a blowjob, or being more than half-naked with a guy and almost having sex for the time, nor sitting on said guy's lap while he has an obvious erection ... no, none of that embarrasses me. Nope, squeaking like a timid mouse in front of him ... that's what turns my face bright red. I'm tellin' ya, I have issues. — Jenn Cooksey

Autistic children often show no real fears of danger despite obvious risks of harm. This may be easy to spot in a young child who bolts for the street at a moment's notice, or plunges into water with no fear of its depth without being able to swim. But what does it look like in an older child, one on the cusp of adolescence? — Jeannie Davide-Rivera

What are you doing? he gasped. He looked slightly ridiculous. It was not as if he was a defenseless damsel in distress. He could have stopped me, if he wanted to. But he didn't want to. Besides, I've always considered this to be the most idiotic question in the world. I'm pulling off your pants to have a good look at your dick and your ass, is the obvious answer. Looking being only the first step, by the way. — Boris Brannigan

Services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia. — Ezekiel Emanuel

Beginning to feel that her brother was being rather too harsh on Lillian Bowman, Livia frowned. "She's a very pretty girl, Marcus."
"A pretty facade isn't enough to make up for the flaws in her character."
"Which are?"
Marcus made a faint scoffing sound, as if Miss Bowman's faults were too obvious to require enumeration. "She's manipulative."
"So are you, dear," Livia murmured.
He ignored that. "She's domineering."
"As are you."
"She's arrogant."
"Also you," Livia said brightly.
Marcus glowered at her. "I thought we were discussing Miss Bowman's faults, not mine."
"But you seem to have so much in common," Livia protested, rather too innocently. — Lisa Kleypas

Haiti is always talking about decentralization and nothing has been so obvious, perhaps a weakness, as the centralized nature of Haitian society as being revealed by the earthquake. I mean, they lost all these medical training programs because they didn't have them anywhere else. — Paul Farmer

We've entered dangerous territory. You can't kiss someone with so much emotion if you're preparing to walk away. Alarms ring through my head, too loud and too obvious to be ignored. There are way too many complex emotions being passed between us. I already know he's going to shatter my heart. — Jennifer Ann

The look on Deathbringer's face was so obvious - so real and sad - that Starflight had the weird experience of being able to see what his own expression must be every time he thought of Sunny. — Tui T. Sutherland

The two sexes are different to the core, and each is necessary - culturally and biologically - for the optimal development of a human being."12 In a summary of the relevant science, University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox finds much the same: Let me now conclude our review of the social scientific literature on sex and parenting by spelling out what should be obvious to all. The best psychological, sociological, and biological research to date now suggests that - on average - men and women bring different gifts to the parenting enterprise, that children benefit from having parents with distinct parenting styles, and that family breakdown poses a serious threat to children and to the societies in which they live.13 — Sherif Girgis

But being in the middle of it, it wasn't that obvious. — Lev Grossman

Harris: Yes. In fact, self-deception might have paid evolutionary dividends in other ways. Robert Trivers argues, for instance, that people who can believe their own lies turn out to be the best liars of all - and an ability to deceive rivals has obvious advantages in the state of nature. Now, clearly many things may have been adaptive for our ancestors - such as tribal warfare, rape, xenophobia - that we now deem unethical and would never want to defend. But I'm wondering if you see any possibility that a social system that maximizes truth-telling could be one that fails to maximize the well-being of all participants. Is it possible that some measure of deception is good for us? — Sam Harris

When we look for propaganda, we have the obvious job of asking what messages are being propagated. — Randal Marlin

So the professor takes the student's point seriously, and responds with a concise but adequate argument in defence of the disputed equation. The professor tries hard to show no sign of being irritated by criticism from so lowly a source. Most of the questions from the floor will have the form of criticisms which, if valid, would diminish or destroy the professor's life's work. But bringing vigorous and diverse criticism to bear on accepted truths is one of the very purposes of the seminar. Everyone takes it for granted that the truth is not obvious, and that the obvious need not be true; that ideas are to be accepted or rejected according to their content and not their origin; that the greatest minds can easily make mistakes; and that the most trivial-seeming objection may be the key to a great new discovery. — David Deutsch

I try not to look obvious as I wait for Mom's answer. I feel as if I am on the edge of a knife, my feet being sliced by the blade, teetering toward one side or the other.
"Oh, of course!" Mom exclaims, her voice trilling with laughter. "How could I have forgotten?"
And now I know. Really know. This woman is not my mother. I don't know who she is, but I know absolutely who she is not. — Beth Revis

In a world full of danger, to be a potentially seeable object is to be constantly exposed to danger. Self-consciousness, then, may be the apprehensive awareness of oneself as potentially exposed to danger by the simple fact of being visible to others. The obvious defence against such a danger is to make oneself invisible in one way or another. — R.D. Laing

If physical mobility is an essential condition of freedom, the bicycle has probably been the greatest single device for achieving what Marx called the full realization of the possibilities of being human invented since Gutenberg, and the only one without obvious drawbacks. — Eric Hobsbawm

You really work in those conditions?"

She, irritated by the contact, pulled her arm away, protesting: "And how do you work, the two of you, how do you work?"

They didn't answer. They worked hard, that was obvious. And at least Enzo in front of him, in the factory, women worn out by the work, by humiliations, by domestic obligations no less than Lila was. Yet now they were both angry because of the conditions _she_ worked in; they couldn't tolerate it. You had to hide everything from men. They preferred not to know, they preferred to pretend that what happened at the hands of the boss miraculously didn't happen to the women important to them and that - this was the idea they had grown up with - they had to protect her even at the risk of being killed. In the face of that silence Lila got even angrier. "Fuck off," she said, "you and the working class. — Elena Ferrante

The leap from maps to fluid flow seemed so great that even those most responsible sometimes felt it was like a dream. How nature could tie such complexity to such simplicity was far from obvious. "You have to regard it as a kind of miracle, not like the usual connection between theory and experiment," Jerry Gollub said. Within a few years, the miracle was being repeated again and again in a vast bestiary of laboratory systems: bigger fluid cells with water and mercury, electronic oscillators, lasers, even chemical reactions. Theorists adapted Feigenbaum's techiniques and found other mathematical routes to chaos, cousins of period-doubling: such patterns as intermittency and quasiperiodicity. These, too, proved universal in theory and experiment. — James Gleick

Lately I've been thinking a lot about leaving versus being left, and how obvious it is that leaving is easier. It was for me. — Sarah Protzman

A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious. — Walker Percy

As the twentieth century draws to a close it has become obvious that material yardsticks alone cannot serve as an adequate measure of human well-being. Even as basic an issue as poverty has to be re-examined to take into account the psychological sense of deprivation that makes people feel poor. — Aung San Suu Kyi

I think it's pretty obvious that women's stories are not necessarily being told in Hollywood and women are not necessarily being put in the leadership positions they deserve in mainstream film. — Diablo Cody

Spencer Brown puts it) once they are discovered, are seen to be extremely simple and obvious, and make everybody, including their discoverer, appear foolish for not having discovered them before. It is all too often forgotten that the ancient symbol for the prenascence (i.e., prior to emergence state) of the world is a fool, and that foolishness, being a divine state, is not a condition to be either proud or ashamed of. — Alan W. Watts

Fine writing, according to Mr. Addison, consists of sentiments which are natural without being obvious. — David Hume

Whereas the ancients held that garlick hindred the attraction of the Loadstone, he contradicts this by experience; but I cannot think the ancient Sages would write so confidently of that which they had no experience; of, being a thing so obvious and easie to try; therefore I suppose they had a stronger kind of garlick, then is with us — Alexander Ross

No mean person is mean all the time. The whole point of being mean is to fluctuate so that you can hold out the hope for someone. So someone will hold out the hope that they're gonna catch you on the sunny side or that you're gonna be nice this time. The tyranny is inconsistency. Somebody thats consistently mean is something that is pretty easy to sort out. The reality is that the meanest people can be wonderful sometimes. That's the whole point of meanness because otherwise it's too obvious. It's the niceness that gets you trapped in the dysfunction. That is the problem and so the fact that you have this belief that there is hope in the relationship is foundational to the dysfunction. — Stefan Molyneux

What these [personality] tests tell employers about potential employees is hard to imagine since the 'right' answer should be obvious to anyone who has ever encountered the principle of hierarchy and subordination. Do I work well with others? You bet, but never to the point where I would hesitate to inform on them for the slightest infraction. Am I capable of independent decision making? Oh yes, but I know better than to let this capacity interfere with a slavish obedience to orders ... The real function of these tests, I decide, is to convey information not to the employer but to the potential employee, and the information being conveyed is always: You will have no secrets from us. We don't just want your muscles and that portion of your brain that is directly connected to them; we want your innermost self. — Barbara Ehrenreich