Obscura Quotes & Sayings

If there is something I like, I buy it and then find somewhere for it. I buy first then I think. — Christian Louboutin

Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams. — Pat Conroy

What is Atlas Obscura? So, it was a small digital media company. It's an atlas, it's literally like, an atlas of places, wonderful, unusual places. — David Plotz

Can I ask you a question?" "I'd be disappointed if you didn't." "How many of those suits do you have? Do you like, send them to the laundry, or throw them out and put on a new one when it gets all gamey?" - Bobby talking to Saint Dane, RR — D.J. MacHale

Originality is the only thing that counts. But the originator uses material and ideas that occur round him and pass through him. And out of his experience comes the original creation. — George Gershwin

Infinite strength is religion and God. — Swami Vivekananda

I'd like my coffin to be a camera obscura so I can see what's going on outside. — Bill Jay

If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices. — Emile M. Cioran

One thing is undeniably clear. We have all had bad experiences, we have all had tragedies in our lives which help to shape who we are. — J. Loren Norris

No words in our ledgers could do justice to this sublime beauty," Captain Lewis said. "The expedition should have brought a camera obscura."
Peter wasn't familiar with the words, but no matter. He knew he was part of something magnificent - something greater than himself or the Corps of Discovery. And he knew what it was.
It was America.
And it was beautiful. — P.J. Parker

She ran her hand over his cock and said, "This is the only thing I ever want to come between us."
His grin couldn't have stretched any further. — Terry Spear

...the Supreme Court made several liberal decisions in the 1970s, indicating the moral decline of the nation as a whole. — Kurt Grussendorf

They understood that. They all understood it. This is not the same as comprehension, but it was good enough. When you stop to think, the whole idea of comprehension has a faintly archaic taste, like the sound of forgotten tongues or a look into a Victorian camera obscura. We Americans are much higher on simple understanding. It makes it easier to read the billboards when you're heading into town on the expressway at plus-fifty. To comprehend, the mental jaws have to gape wide enough to make the tendons creak. Understanding, however, can be purchased on every paperback-book rack in America. — Stephen King

Soul competency is not the voice of a dean celebrating the latest lesbian at his divinity school; it is the voice of R. G. Lee thundering 'Payday Someday! — Russell D. Moore

Memory works like the collection glass in the Camera obscura: it gathers everything together and therewith produces a far more beautiful picture than was present originally. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. (Describing his poetic ideal, 1817) — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Everything that looks like a loss may be an extraordinary, successful life waiting to explode. — Mary V. Pate

Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow.
Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations.
The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight.
The camera obscura.
Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down. — Chuck Palahniuk

Nothing paralyzes our lives like the attitude that things can never change. We need to remind ourselves that God can change things. Outlook determines outcome. If we see only the problems, we will be defeated; but if we see the possibilities in the problems, we can have victory. — Warren W. Wiersbe

During photography's first decades, exposure times were quite long ... So, similar to the drawings produced with the help of a camera obscura, which depicted reality as static and immobile, early photographs represented the world as stable, eternal, unshakable. — Lev Manovich

However, when we step into farm fields, the vegetation becomes very quiet. Thanks to selective breeding, our cultivated plants have, for the most part, lost the ability to communicate above or below ground-you could say they are deaf and dumb-and therefore they are easy prey for insect pests. That is one reason why modern agriculture uses so many pesticides. Perhaps farmers can learn from the forests and breed a little more wildness back into their grain and potatoes so that they'll be more talkative in the future. — Peter Wohlleben

Considering that knowledge of the chemical as well as the optical principles of photography was fairly widespread following Schulze's experiment (in 1725) ... the circumstance that photography was not invented earlier remains the greatest mystery in its history ... It had apparently never occurred to any of the multitude of artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who were in the habit of using the camera obscura to try to fix its image permanently. — Helmut Gernsheim

The German astronomer Johannes Kepler coined the term "camera obscura" in the early seventeenth century, but by then the phenomenon had been known for millennia; in fact, it is perhaps the oldest known optical illusion. Some form of camera obscura was most likely behind a popular illusion performed in ancient Greece and Rome, in which spectral images were cast upon the smoke of burning incense by performers using concave metal mirrors - hence the expression "smoke and mirrors. — Jennifer Ouellette

If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from the physical life-process. — Friedrich Engels