Oblivious People Quotes & Sayings

I seem to walk in the world as two people. The normal everyday-me is as preoccupied, unobservant and oblivious to visual clues as I ever was. Then there is the photographer-me, the one who has a camera in hand and a specific project in mind, and then the world suddenly jumps to life with potential pictures, as if a switch had been thrown in my brain and a different person is looking out of the same eyes. — Bill Jay

Adam delayed only a second longer before traversing into the uncertain future, crossing the hidden divide; the fabric separating worlds. He moved from the shadows that paralleled the town, where unseen lives existed alongside of unsuspecting, oblivious people. With his seemingly mundane act of taking one step forward, he effectively walked from myth to reality. — J.M. Northup

Most people are completely oblivious to eternity. They look at the sky at night and they think that's eternity; it is just the senses having contact in the sense world. There are other dimensions. — Frederick Lenz

Some people think God should in some way come to you and assist you, should answer your prayers. Why? It exists in perfect ecstasy beyond the dualistic consciousness. It's totally oblivious to you. It has no interest in your life or your death - it doesn't matter. — Frederick Lenz

I feel like that now: tired of the Me I've always been, tired of making the same mistakes, repetitively stumbling after the same small ego strokes, being caught in the same loops of anxiety and defensiveness. At the end of my life, I know I won't be wishing I'd held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the people around me. So what is stopping me from stepping outside my habitual crap?
My mind, my limited mind. — George Saunders

Because of the wind, the crows were pointing in one direction but traveling in another. I wondered if they knew it, and, knowing it, understood it, or if they were simply oblivious, carried along by a force that was felt but not seen. The same thing happens to people, but most of the time they don't know it, or when they know it, they think it an action of their own devising. They are usually wrong. — Robert Crais

People brush past us on the street in endless waves, leaving somewhere, headed somewhere else, laughing, smoking, speaking into cell phones, completely oblivious to the holocaust of an entire world casually imploding in their midst. — Jonathan Tropper

I don't engage in social media, which has its good and bad sides, I guess - but the good side is when people hate my guts, I'm kind of oblivious to it. — Hilarie Burton

As usual in the very young, she marveled that people could be so selfishly oblivious to her pain and the world rock along just the same, in spite of her heartbreak. Her — Margaret Mitchell

Like old married people who no longer have anything in common, to do or to talk about, save the same general weight of air to displace and breathe and general oblivious biding earth to bear their weight ... — William Faulkner

I'm saying it's totally oblivious to how people feel. Take the ocean, for instance. You can love it, but it doesn't love you back. It will suck you under and steal your breath and beauty can make you cry, or that the sound of the tide coming in at night is the best lullaby you ever heard. — D. Anne Love

Some people say: "There is no God; because, if there was a God, God would stop all the suffering." Nonsense! God is oblivious to suffering. God is beyond suffering. That's what makes God, God, by definition. — Frederick Lenz

Steve [sports psychiatrist] had already taught me to try and stop worrying so much about pleasing everyone. We knew that this was one of my most draining flaws and he again used three groups to clarify my thinking. There would always be some people, Steve said, who would care about me and love me. In contrast there would also be a select group of people who would never warm to me - no matter what I did. And in the middle came the overwhelming mass who were largely indifferent to any of my failures or triumphs. I needed to understand that most people didn't really care what I did or said. All my anguish about how they might perceive me was redundant. Steve helped me realize that I spent too much time trying to please those oblivious people in the middle or, more problematically, the small group who would never change their critical opinion of me. I should concentrate on the people who really did show concern for me. — Victoria Pendleton

PREFACE A New Look at the Legacy of Albert Einstein Genius. Absent-minded professor. The father of relativity. The mythical figure of Albert Einstein - hair flaming in the wind, sockless, wearing an oversized sweatshirt, puffing on his pipe, oblivious to his surroundings - is etched indelibly on our minds. "A pop icon on a par with Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, he stares enigmatically from postcards, magazine covers, T-shirts, and larger-than-life posters. A Beverly Hills agent markets his image for television commercials. He would have hated it all," writes biographer Denis Brian. Einstein is among the greatest scientists of all time, a towering figure who ranks alongside Isaac Newton for his contributions. Not surprisingly, Time magazine voted him the Person of the Century. Many historians have placed him among the hundred most influential people of the last thousand years. — Michio Kaku

A child is asleep. Her private life unwinds inside skin and skull; only as she sheds childhood, first one decade and then another, can she locate the actual, historical stream, see the setting of her dreaming private life - the nation, the city, the neighborhood, the house where the family lives - as an actual project under way, a project living people willed, and made well or failed, and are still making, herself among them. I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers. — Annie Dillard

Like, what if the people around you had been different?" "How can you separate those things, though? The people are the place is the people. And anyway, I didn't think there was anybody else to be friends with. I thought everyone was either scared, like you, or oblivious, like Lacey. And th - — John Green

You ever notice how the people who most need to see or read something are the most oblivious or resentful of its existence? — Ryan Quinn

One of the strangest things about life is that it will chug on, blind and oblivious, even as your private world - your little carved-out sphere - is twisting and morphing, even breaking apart. One day you have parents; the next day you're an orphan. One day you have a place and a path. The next day you're lost in the wilderness.
And still the sun rises and clouds mass and drift and people shop for groceries and toilets flush and blinds go up and down. That's when you realize that most of it - life, the relentless mechanism of existing - isn't about you. It doesn't include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you've jumped the edge. Even after you're dead. — Lauren Oliver

It's not that I lead this oblivious life where I think I've got such a great personality that people want to spend time with me. If someone has a poster of you or asks for your autograph, clearly you can't take them out on a date. It's not that interesting if someone is just interested in you. — George Clooney

Impossible things happen. When they do happen, most people just deal with it. Today, like every day, roughly five thousand people on the face of the planet will experience one-chance-in-a-million things, and not one of them will refuse to believe the evidence of their senses. — Neil Gaiman

Researchers have found that people oblivious to the haunting phenomena when they first enter the haunted site are likely to pick up something in the same spots in the house as the primary witnesses who reported the haunting. This indicates that something actually exists in the environment at those spots on some level, physical or psychic. — Loyd Auerbach

I looked at myself in that window, oblivious to all the people around me and I stared and smiled that particular smile. You know that smile that seems to knock you and tell you how pathetic you are? That's the smile I was smiling. — Markus Zusak

I had a feeling she probably made friends with people pretty easily, and that could be a good thing for me too, since I'd always been a little on the reserved side. She probably had offended a lot of people too, but maybe they all just overlooked it, as i was finding it surprisingly easy to do. She seemed genuinely oblivious to the fact that anything she said could be potentially insulting, and for some reason that made it kind of forgivable. — Jessi Kirby

Groups of people who take up the entire sidewalk so you have to step onto the road to go around them are a definite pet peeve of mine. Oblivious people who block the entire sidewalk and walk slowly enough that you're forced to dawdle, yet fast enough that you can't walk around them? They make me fantasize about bringing swarms of bees down on their heads. Not that I would actually do it, of course. — Wildbow

It is a fact that people are always well aware of what is due them.
Unfortunately, they remain oblivious of what they owe to others.
— Francis De Sales

You've got to be oblivious to other people, the push and pull of other people's opinions, the way other people measure success. It's then that you realize you are 100 percent who you are and you have to use that who-you-are 100 percent in order to create great things. — Damien Hirst

If you turn a blind eye to the world now, history will turn a blind eye to you later. Ignoring an issue makes you a tacit supporter of it. — Stewart Stafford

I don't think about becoming a head coach. I really don't. I'm not oblivious of people who mention it. When you are in any business, people expect to aspire to the top. I guess everyone is supposed to aspire to being the man at the top of the heap. But I never have. — Joe Greene

Regarding sleep, this sinister adventure of each night, one could say that people fall asleep daily with an audacity that would be incomprehensible if we didn't know that it results from their being oblivious of danger. — Charles Baudelaire

We applaud the people who are film stars, who get elected to an office, who are very athletic, the small group who play with power in a very limited way. But we're completely oblivious to what can be done to the infinite realities that exist in front of us. We deny them. — Frederick Lenz

A lot of the things I find funniest about people are their shortcomings that they're oblivious to, but that they're constantly reminding everyone around them of. — Emile Hirsch

Earlier, I was sitting on a bench on the banks of the Tiber, and there were all these people there
holding hands and kissing. Happy and in love.
They made it seem so easy. Like giving their heart to someone else isn't the scariest thing in the
world.
I still don't understand that.
Don't they know the power they're giving to that other person? The absolute future-forming
dominion?
Don't they understand how much it's going to hurt when it all goes wrong? And let's face it, ninety
percent of those couples won't still be together a year from now. Even six months from now.
And yet, there they are, hugging and lip-locking, completely oblivious to the pain that's coming for
them.
Unconcerned and trusting. — Leisa Rayven

In the West people are basically oblivious to power, solstices, enlightenment and everything that matters. — Frederick Lenz

Together the five orbiters Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour have flown a total of 133 successful missions, an unequaled accomplishment of engineering, management, and political savvy. But it's the two disasters that people remember, that most shape the shuttle's story. The lovely dream of spaceflight I grew up with is marred by the images of Challenger and Columbia breaking apart in the sky, the lost astronauts smiling on hopefully in their portraits, oblivious. Some people took the disasters to mean the entire space program had been a lie, that the dream itself was tainted with our fallibility. But even as a child, I knew it was more complex than that. If we want to see people take risks, we have to be prepared to sometimes see them fail. The story of American spaceflight is a story with many endings, a story of how we have weighed our achievements against our failures. — Margaret Lazarus Dean

As long as you think there is a pretty good chance that you will achieve some of your dreams, as long as you think you have a shot at success, you experience your inner emptiness as "drive" and your anxiety as "hope." And so you can remain almost completely oblivious to how deep your thirst actually is. Most of us tell ourselves that the reason we remain unfulfilled is because we simply haven't been able to achieve our goals. And so we can live almost our entire lives without admitting to ourselves the depth of our spiritual thirst. And that is why the few people in life who actually do reach or exceed their dreams are shocked to discover that these longed-for circumstances do not satisfy. Indeed they can enhance the inner emptiness by their presence. — Timothy Keller

The state legislatures, as Madison and many another viewed them, had become a babel of narrow-minded parochial concerns, their members men of selfish interests and untutored understanding, oblivious of minority rights, passing unjust laws (such as legal tender acts whereby debts people owed each other could be paid in worthless currency), and all unchecked by any overriding vision of the public good or what it might consist of. — Stanley Elkins

If you're oblivious to other people, chances are pretty good that you're going to hurt them. — William Deresiewicz

Most people were oblivious to the luck already bestowed upon them. I'd certainly been guilty of it. — Vicki Pettersson

People tend to remember and mentally classify work according to how it looks, sometimes oblivious to the underlying intent. — David Salle

I used to think that people who regarded everyone benignly were a mite simple or oblivious or just plain lax-until I tried it myself. Then I realized that they made it only look easy. Even the Berditchever Rebbe, revered as a man who could strike a rock and bring forth a stream, was continually honing his intentions. "Until I remove the thread of hatred from my heart," he said of his daily meditations, "I am, in my own eyes, as if I did not exist." — Marc Ian Barasch

Most people are oblivious to F.A. Hayek's insight that the critical information needed to run an economy - or even 15 percent of one - doesn't exist in any one place where it is accessible to central planners. Instead, it is scattered piecemeal among millions of people. All those people put together are far wiser and better informed than Congress could ever be. Only markets - private property, free exchange and the price system - can put this knowledge at the disposal of entrepreneurs and consumers, ensuring the system will serve the people and not just the political class. — John Stossel

After coming from a major label, I realized the entire business has been decimated, and you can't look to labels to try to figure it out because they don't even use the technology, and they're oblivious to how people consume music these days. — Trent Reznor

I think the industry is oblivious to the fact that most people listen to all kinds of stuff. I personally don't know of anyone who listens to only one genre of music. It's vanity because no one does. — Keith Urban

Nell's husband has short-man syndrome. Eddie is one of those deadly dull people who is so upbeat that I suspect he would subconsciously like to go through the neighborhood, house by house, with a machine gun. He seems oblivious to the effect that his long, rambling monologues have on people - he doesn't notice the blank faces, the fingers flexing like those of people buried alive, the ocular tics. You could write down his words verbatim, show them to him, and he'd probably say, 'I know someone just like that!' Then he'd tell you about that person until your teeth hurt. His hostage-taking is passive-aggressive. — Anne Lamott

To me, this is from a Buddhist perspective or whatever, sometimes people who are working out their political beliefs, they can rage against the man, and yet at the same time can be oblivious to their own way of stepping on the foot of the person right next to them. — Mike White

You wouldn't think the touch of someone's hand could blow your mind. It's nothing, right? People don't right songs and poems about holding hands - they write them about kisses and sex and eternal love. I mean, when you're a little kid you hold hands with your parents to cross the street. Who's going to write an ode to that?
We were alone in the dark, even though the enormous theater was filled with probably a thousand people. We were a tiny island in a sea of other people who didn't matter, who had no meaning, who were so stupid, so oblivious, so stuck in their own boring lives that they didn't even notice the huge, momentous, life-shattering event that was taking place right there in row L, between seats 102 and 104.
Derek Edwards was holding my hand. — Claire LaZebnik

Love is made by two people, in different kinds of solitude. It can be in a crowd, but in an oblivious crowd. — Louis Aragon

It was painful to contemplate the distance between the future of accomplishment I'd imagined for myself twenty years earlier ... it was painful to understand that the cushion of exceptionality invoked by the drug had made me oblivious to my inertia. And it was painful to have to define myself again, at an age when most people are happy in their own skins. — Ann Marlowe

Jacob being sensitive is an endowment. Think about all you'd miss out on if you didn't feel things so deeply, or see things so clearly."
"But feeling good things deeply means you feel bad things deeply, too."
"Would you rather walk around oblivious to the meaning of things hidden under the surface and the opportunities to feel wonder and joy? Would you want to miss out on moments that take your breath away? — Jacqueline Simon Gunn

When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes. Body time flows at its own variable rate, oblivious to the most precise hydrogen master clocks in the laboratory. In fact, the human body contains its own exquisite time-pieces, all with their separate rhythms. There are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging. — Alan Lightman

Nostalgia washes over me with tons of memors and lifetime rolled on this land. Every oblivious memory from the childhood wraps open in the fragrance of these busy roads and familiar land, long signals, irritating traffic,honking cars,rushing people,excessive pollution defining Delhi at its best. — Parul Wadhwa

But Amanda ... " Jadina said, looking past Maylin at the young Fate. "She doesn't ask for anything. She doesn't even try to read the future, it's just there. She ends up blurting things out. Starts talking about the car accident you're going to have in three years, or your baby boy dying in child birth in a few months, or your grandmother's funeral next year. Thing's you can't change even if you know about them. Things you're happier not knowing about. People go through life, happily oblivious. If you start telling them all the horrible things that are coming, they get upset. When those horrible things start coming true, they get scared and blame you. They say you caused it. Label you witch. Even burn you at the stake. She's safer in there. — Crissy Moss

Anger ignites fires or do fires ignite anger? Did the dispossessed, their rage burning within them for years, finally strike a match to enlighten an oblivious region of their dissatisfaction? Or were the fires the primary cause of the dissatisfaction, inciting through its searing heat, the fury which is colouring the country a bright crimson, as its people imitating the violence of the flames spill the blood of thousands? — Jinat Rehana Begum

You are an impertinent wench! Do you not know the Black Lion eats three girls such as you each day afore dinner?" Oblivious to the staring people around them, she put a finger on his lower lip. "I do not find that a horrible way to die at all," she said gently. — Jude Deveraux

The summer sun continued to rise in the sky and propel shocks of heat down on the city and the heavy moisture moistened bodies and clothing, and people fanned and wiped at sweating faces trying to survive another bitch of a day as Harry and Marion peacefully passed the day sleeping in each others arms oblivious to the reality surrounding them. — Hubert Selby Jr.

Be a balanced optimist. Nobody is suggesting that you become an oblivious Pollyanna, pretending that nothing bad can or ever will happen. Doing so can lead to poor decisions and invites people to take advantage of you. Instead, be a rational optimist who takes the good with the bad, in hopes of the good ultimately outweighing the bad, and with the understanding that being pessimistic about everything accomplishes nothing. Prepare for the worst but hope for the best - the former makes you sensible, and the latter makes you an optimist. — Dale Carnegie

We were alone in the dark, even though the enormous theater was filled with probably a thousand people. We were a tiny island in a sea of other people who didn't matter, who had no meaning, who were so stupid, so oblivious, so stuck in their own boring lives that they didn't even notice the huge, momentous, life-shattering event that was taking place right there in row L, between seats 102 and 104. — Claire LaZebnik

This was all chemistry ever was: two people's silent selves invisibly aligning while their noisy selves carried on, oblivious. — Alethea Black

The most oblivious people are often the happiest. — George Meyer

I'm not saying this just to be self-deprecating, but I have always taken delight in playing people who are oblivious, because I do think I have giant, giant blind spots. It's a very comfortable place to be. — Ty Burrell

When a traveler from the future must talk, he does not talk but whimpers. He whispers tortured sounds. He is agonized. For if he makes the slightest alteration in anything, he may destroy the future. At the same time, he is forced to witness events without being part of them, without changing them. He envies the people who live in their own time, who can act at will, oblivious of the future, ignorant of the effects of their actions. But he cannot act. He is an inert gas, a ghost, a sheet without soul. He has lost his personhood. He is an exile of time. — Alan Lightman

The conquistadors and their followers were very rough people, and they were fixated on gold and silver. They were oblivious to the astonishing achievements of the Inca civilisation. — Peter Shaffer

People in America get up and go to their nine-to-five jobs every day and are oblivious to all these battles and wars and people dying every minute all over the world. This is life. This is how other countries live. This is a daily occurrence in some places. — Mitchell Zuckoff

Never had I felt so much the slave as when I scoured those stone steps each afternoon. Working against time, I would wet five steps, sprinkle soap powder, then a white doctor or a nurse would come and, instead of avoiding the soppy steps, walk on them and track the dirty water onto the steps that I had already cleaned. To obviate this, I cleaned but two steps at a time, a distance over which a ten-year-old child could step. But it did no good. The white people still plopped their feet down into the dirty water and muddled the other clean steps. If I ever really hotly hated unthinking whites, it was then. Not once during my entire stay at the institute did a single white person show enough courtesy to avoid a wet step. — Richard Wright

She was shocked when she followed her aunt and cousin down into the city proper. The streets were crawling with people, all hurrying to and fro, mindless of one another. They brushed by with barely even a glance, stepping down into the busy roads between horse drawn buses and draymen's carts with such confidence, seemingly oblivious that they could be run down at any moment. Children dodged in and out amongst them, ragamuffins all, some barefoot. — Lillian White

In the U.S., ironically, people work longer hours in the U.S. than they do in Europe or in any other industrialized country. They seem utterly oblivious to May Day, don't really know what it is - our own history. — Eric Drooker

Unless you are oblivious to your own suffering, you have no right to be oblivious to other people's suffering. — Jaggi Vasudev

I hate people walking down the street listening to the soundtrack of their lives which responds to them but not their setting. I hate the overspill of sound which metro and subway riders are oblivious to because they notice no one and nothing around them. — Margaret Heffernan

Cities are gentrified by the following types of people in sequence: first the risk-oblivious (artists), then the risk-aware (developers), finally the risk adverse (dentists from New Jersey). — Bill Kraus

He held the camera out for me to see. It was a women, her sunken eyes looking straight at the camera. 'I don't want your money', her cardboard sign read. 'Just look at me so I know I exist'. The words and her expression were arresting on their own, but they weren't what made the photograph so compelling. It was the people in the foreground, the passersby, eyes glued to their phones as they hurried to wherever they were going at lunch, completely oblivious of the women with the sign. — Lauren Miller

Humans are often more stupid than they realize. Because of our weaknesses are so easily exploited. Just like a child's clumsy fingers messing up the buttons on a shirt. It's easy to mock someone who buttoned his shirt wrongly. It's easy to mock someone who had buttoned wrongly yet remains oblivious to it. But there are also people who completely fail to realize that they buttoned them all wrongly. Just a moment's error, a wrong choice, traps us on the road of no return. But who can reprimand them for that? Why can't humans be lonely? Why can't we yearn for those right by our side? On such a cold lonely night, who can stand to bear it alone? Imagine the fright when we realize the severity of our mistakes. Whoever said love was a happy affair? — Yuuri Eda