Obvious Truth Quotes & Sayings

Kids reveal an obvious truth: natural wonder is built in to us," she wrote in her journal. "We are instinctively attracted to nature." Nature tugs on us like gravity, Carol believed. We travel long distances to stand atop mountains or stroll along seashores for reasons we can't quite put into words. Nature keeps alive a childlike wonder and enables us to see the world anew through fresh eyes. — Will Harlan

That the discovery of this great truth, which lies so near and obvious to the mind, should be attained to by the reason of so veryfew, is a sad instance of the stupidity and inattention of men, who, though they are surrounded with such clear manifestations of the Deity, are yet so little affected by them, that they seem as it were blinded with excess of light. — George Berkeley

Bob and Maria's kids, now grown and in high school and college, each have a quiet dignity and confidence. They also have an informal charm. [...] It is obvious they'd played the roles in the story their family was living, the roles of foreign dignitaries, traveling with their parents on the important assignment of asking world leaders what they hope in. Their STORY had given them their CHARACTER.

I only say this about the children because I used to believe charming people were charming because they were charming, or confident people were confident because they were confident. But all of this is, of course, circular. The truth is, we are all living out the character of the roles we have played in our stories. — Donald Miller

You will never be able to see clearly when people around you distort your view of truth with their own clouded version. You will begin to read into everything incorrectly and find yourself lost in a delusional story stitched together from the crumbs of over analyzed words once spoken, misunderstandings or speculation. Life should not be wasted by collecting clues or piecing together a puzzle about how someone feels. Love is straightforward and it is clearly seen on the cloudiest days of your life. If someone loves you it will be obvious. They won't let you go, until you ask them to. — Shannon L. Alder

Wolfe was going on. "I didn't have a client this morning, or even an hour ago, but now I have. Mr. Rowcliff's ferocious spasms, countenanced by you gentlemen, have made the challenge ineluctable. When Mr. Goodwin said that I was not concerned in this matter and that he was acting solely in his own personal interest, he was telling the truth. As you may know, he is not indifferent to those attributes of young women that constitute the chief reliance of our race in our gallant struggle against the menace of the insects. He is especially vulnerable to young women who possess not only those more obvious charms but also have a knack of stimulating his love of chivalry and adventure and his preoccupation with the picturesque and the passionate. — Rex Stout

Holly was playing the concerned relative, the devoted sister, and if it was a ham performance Robin was experienced enough, now, to know that there were usually nuggets of truth to be sifted from even the most obvious dross. — Robert Galbraith

The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned.
The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.
With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. — Henry A. Wallace

It is better to believe an obvious lie, than to swallow a deceitful truth. — Dennis E. Adonis

There is possibly no insult so calculated to sting the English as the suggestion that they may at any time be considered foreign, as this flies in the face of the obvious truth that the whole of Creation actually belongs to the English, and that they are just allowing everybody else to camp out on bits of it from a national sense of noblesse oblige. — Jonathan L. Howard

I was an answer-seeking machine, in love with what I called "the truth," whether it came in the form of little truth particles stuck to the pages of books or vast patterns screaming out from the obvious and mundane. — Barbara Ehrenreich

It seems too simplistic that just repeating a persuasive message should increase its effect, but that's exactly what psychological research finds (again and again). Repetition is one of the easiest and most widespread methods of persuasion. In fact it's so obvious that we sometimes forget how powerful it is. — Jeremy Bean

The greatest, like Rembrandt, paint a gallant, a hag, and a carcass with equal passion and rapture; they love the truth as it is. They do not admit that anything can be ugly or evil; its existence justifies itself. This is because they know themselves to be part of an harmonious unity; to disdain any item of it would be to blaspheme the whole. The Thelemite is able to revel in any experience soever; in each he recognizes the tokens of ultimate Truth. It is surely obvious, even intellectually, that all phenomena are interdependent, and therefore involve each other. — Aleister Crowley

Because the universal truth of getting older is obvious: IF YOU ARE A LOSER AT FORTY YOU WILL BE A LOSER FOR LIFE. — Mike Gayle

In summoning even the wisest of physicians to our aid, it is probably that he is relying upon a scientific "truth", the error of which will become obvious in just a few years' time. — Marcel Proust

The obvious truth is that the moment any matter has passed through the human mind it is finally and for ever spoilt for all purposes of science. — G.K. Chesterton

Isn't it obvious in in today's world from people's preoccupation with self-medication, drug and alcohol use, rationalization and avoidance distraction that the truth doesn't just hurt, it's extremely painful. — James Turner

There are responses which originate from joy. Intuition can also mean an instant recognition of a truth, sensing that you are doing the right thing in making a choice or decision even if it is not the immediately obvious option, or an experience of knowing the probable outcome just as it is beginning to unfold. The dictionary defines it as immediate unreasoned perception. — Sylvia Clare

The truth is, you need your fear, for obvious reasons of basic survival. — Elizabeth Gilbert

I wish I had another chance to write that school composition, 'What I Did Last Summer.' When I wrote it in fifth grade, I was scared and just recorded: 'It was interesting. It was nice. My summer was fun.' I snuck through with a B grade. But I still wondered, How do you really do that? Now it is obvious. You tell the truth and you depict it in detail: 'My mother dyed her hair red and polished her toenails silver. I was mad for Parcheesi and running the sprinkler catching beetles in a mason jar and feeding them grass. My father sat at the kitchen table a lot staring straight ahead, never talking, a Budweiser in his hand. — Natalie Goldberg

Say the very simplest and most obvious things, say them as often as possible, and put into the saying all the screaming passion which one human voice can carry -- that was Adolf Hitler's technique. No matter whether it was true or not -- for (Hitler) meant literally his maxim that the bigger the falsehood, the easier to get it believed; people would say you wouldn't dare make up a thing like that. Imagine the worst possible about your enemies and then swear that you knew it, you had seed it, it was God's truth and you were ready to stake your life upon it -- shout this, bellow this, over and over, day after day, night after night...when ten million join in it becomes history. — Upton Sinclair

The truth is, the Science of Nature has been already too long made only a work of the Brain and the Fancy: It is now high time that it should return to the plainness and soundness of Observations on material and obvious things. — Robert Hooke

It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect. — G.K. Chesterton

Everyone died in solitude, after all. A simple enough truth. A truth no one need fear. The spirits waited before they cast judgement upon a soul, waited for that soul - in its dying isolation - to set judgement upon itself, upon the life it had lived, and if peace came of that, then the spirits would show mercy. If torment rode the Wild Mare, why, then, the spirits knew to match it. When the soul faced itself, after all, it was impossible to lie. Deceiving arguments rang loud with falsehood, their facile weakness too obvious to ignore. — Steven Erikson

I have always been aware that human life is dream-like because most human beings exist passively. Their consciousness is little more than a reflection of their environment. In the sexual orgasm, the voltage power of their minds surges, and they become momentarily aware that they are not forty-watt bulbs, but two hundred and fifty, five hundred, a thousand ... Then the voltage drops, and they sink back to forty watts without a protest. They are like empty-headed fools who cannot remember anything for more than a few seconds. Human beings are so mediocre that they can scarcely be said to possess minds in any real sense. In a flash, I understood the absurd and obvious truth: nothing is worth possessing except intensity of consciousness. This is the truth we glimpse in the orgasm. — Colin Wilson

When a thing is new, people say: 'It is not true.' Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: 'It is not important.' Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say: 'Anyway, it is not new. — William James

One of the most obvious characteristics of the very stupid is that they need to ask the same question multiple times whenever the answer doesn't match their preconceived judgement. They think that it's easier to impose their lie than accepting the truth. — Robin Sacredfire

The truth is that we stray and have affairs not because we are all naturally inclined to have multiple mates but because our bond with our partner is either inherently weak or has deteriorated so far that we are unbearably lonely. We haven't understood love or known how to repair it. So, confused and lost in a world that sells sex aggressively as the be-all and end-all of a relationship, the only obvious "solution" has been to seek out new lovers to try to create the longed-for connection. — Sue Johnson

Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people. — David Foster Wallace

This has led evangelicals to ethnocentrism, to asserting their historically contingent cultural values as "biblical truth." In the conservative direction, this has closed off productive dialogue between evangelicals and mainline Christians on gay marriage - because if the Bible has an obvious stance on the matter, as most evangelicals believe, the other side must be intentionally denying the truth. In the liberal direction, this has led green evangelicals to ignore the role contemporary experiences and theology have played in their reinterpretation of the Bible on environmental matters. — Jonathan Dudley

Truth never seems obvious until it is known. — David G. Myers

You have to get off that finite road that you've created from your transitional standpoint and onto the path of light. Onto the infinite road of eternal existence, the firm foundation of truth. This is where the crooked becomes straight, the lost get found, the blind see, and the dead live. Where the tangible reasoning of logical man loses credibility and is proven unrealistic. Where faith becomes active and the world of the supernatural becomes obvious. You have to accept Jesus. Accept it, accept Jesus. — Calvin W. Allison

But have them tell us that every person needs to be with another person in order to be happy, and we nod along like it's the most obvious thing in the world. But there's no reason for it, is there? It's not a proven truth. It's just some thing that our culture has come to spin itself around, mostly so we'll procreate, and we're the dupes who fall for it over and over and over again. — David Levithan

People can leave, and then they can come back. It sounds simple, like an obvious thing. But when I realized that, the truth if it seemed important. — Ava Dellaira

That is one thing I've learned, that it is possible to really understand things at certain points, and not be able to retain them, to be in utter confusion just a short while later. I used to think that once you really knew a thing, its truth would shine on forever. Now it's pretty obvious to me that more often than not the batteries fade, and sometimes what you knew even goes out with a bang when you try to call on it, just like a lightbulb cracking off when you throw the switch. — Ann Patchett

It is all too often the case with certain types of scholars of Malay-Indonesian Islam, when dealing with Islamic texts such as the one in question in which they are confronted with a word they do not quite understand, that instead of admitting their failure to explain the word in the text as due to their own lack of understanding, they would proceed to conjure up some excuse for branding the word as an enigma, and then, because it is an enigma to them, they would proceed further to reject it with such pronouncements as: "it seems obvious that this puzzling word is due to a scribal error", so that they might suggest their own futile substitute. — Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas

The evolution of consciousness requires a wide range of opportunities and a playing field that affords almost unlimited options for development. If human life represents a learning process, then society is the ideal school that affords an extremely wide range of options for numerous levels of consciousness to develop, progress, define, identify, and grasp endless subtleties as well as learn more gross lessons. The ego is extremely tenacious and therefore often seems to require extreme conditions before it lets go of a positionality. It often takes the collective experience of millions of people over many centuries to learn even what appears upon examination to be a simple and obvious truth, namely, that peace is better than war or love is better than hate. — David R. Hawkins

Amazing how the most obvious things escape your notice. Maybe the truth is exactly the things you don't notice. Maybe the aim to see and tell the truth is inherently futile, a contradiction in terms, and it's exactly those things about oneself and the world that are invisible because they are woven into one's fabric that are the truth. Just like a person can't see his own eyes. You search and search and search, and the truth, by definition, is exactly that which you don't find. You don't see the truth, you are the truth. "Habits of attention are reflexes of the complete character of an individual." And how could you notice your own habits of attention? By writing. Well, at their most profound level? It doesn't make any difference. That is the point. It's like Zen. The truth is not straining for the truth, the truth is in effortlessness. The truth is in being, not trying. Aw hell, that doesn't leave much too chew on. — Richard Hell

But we know that freedom cannot be served by the devices of the tyrant. As it is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence. And any who act as if freedoms defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn't absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

There is a truth that everyone knows but you. Each of us has it; no one is immune. Not a secret, not a scandal, but something simple and obvious to everyone else. It can be as simple as losing weight, or as difficult as leaving a husband. How awful, to sense that everybody knows the thing that would change your life, and yet no one is friend enough to tell you! You are left to guess, all by yourself. Until that moment comes when it reveals itself to you, and of course this revelation always comes a moment too late. — Andrew Sean Greer

The chance is high that the truth lies in the fashionable direction. But, on the off chance that it is in another direction - a direction obvious from an unfashionable view of field theory - who will find it? Only someone who has sacrificed himself by teaching himself quantum electrodynamics from a peculiar and unfashionable point of view; one that he may have to invent for himself. — Richard P. Feynman

There are many realities. There are many versions of what may appear
obvious. Whatever appears as the unshakeable truth, its exact opposite
may also be true in another context. After all, one's reality is but
perception, viewed through various prisms of context. — Amish Tripathi

I am so used to hints and mixed messages, saying things that might mean what they sort of sound like they mean. Games and contests, roles and rituals, talking in twelve languages at once so the true words won't be so obvious. I am not used to a plainspoken, honest truth. — David Levithan

There are obvious places in which government can narrow the chasm between haves and have-nots. One is the public schools, which have been seen as the great leveler, the authentic melting pot. That, today, is nonsense. In his scathing study of the nation's public school system entitled "Savage Inequalities," Jonathan Kozol made manifest the truth: that we have a system that discriminates against the poor in everything from class size to curriculum. — Anna Quindlen

Christianity does the opposite of Plato. The rejection of reality by philosophy today is the most astonishing thing imaginable. Perhaps it is the proximity of revelation, the ever greater pressure it exerts, that feeds this impulse. But I think that revelation is going to become obvious in the "end times," precisely because the Apocalypse marks the end, the pulling down of the mythological and philosophical screen that was erected against the truth. And since most people do not want to know the truth, this end can come about only in a violent fashion. The — Rene Girard

Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that existence has no
real value in itself; for what is boredom but the feeling of the emptiness of life? If life - the craving for which is the very essence of our being - were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing. — Arthur Schopenhauer

In my experience, some Dzogchen masters are better teachers than others. I have been in the presence of several of the most revered Tibetan lamas of our time while they were ostensibly teaching Dzogchen, and most of them simply described this view of consciousness without giving clear instructions on how to glimpse it. The genius of Tulku Urgyen was that he could point out the nature of mind with the precision and matter-of-factness of teaching a person how to thread a needle and could get an ordinary meditator like me to recognize that consciousness is intrinsically free of self. There might be some initial struggle and uncertainty, depending on the student, but once the truth of nonduality had been glimpsed, it became obvious that it was always available - and there was never any doubt about how to see it again. I came to Tulku Urgyen yearning for the experience of self-transcendence, and in a few minutes he showed me that I had no self to transcend. — Sam Harris

Once you know the truth, it's always obvious — Jennifer Crusie

And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth's centre. — George Orwell

I confess that I do not believe that one human brain is capable of answering every objection that another human brain could raise against the most obvious truth in the world. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Truth telling, therefore, has to be an ultimate value, until it clashes with another ultimate value, pleasure, at which point, to state the obvious, there is conflict. — Hanif Kureishi

Perhaps the excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some obvious and useful truth in a few words.
We frequently fall into error and folly, not because the true principles of action are not known, but because, for a time, they are not remembered; and he may therefore be justly numbered among the benefactors of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to recur habitually to the mind. — Samuel Johnson

Under the elaborate filigree of language, hadn't it always been about this deferment, this selfishness, this veil drawn over the obvious truth, which was that Masood simply did not care enough? Morgan could not look at the possibility for long, but at least he could look at it, and over the coming days he took it out and hurt himself with it at particular moments when he was alone. He had always been slow to comprehend his own feelings, and it came only gradually to him how disappointed he was. — Damon Galgut

There's always someone who secretly believes in myths and legends; or at least parts of them. Those are the people who will look beyond the obvious and see things in this world that are truly wonderful ... But they won't say anything, even if they do. Because the rest of us who view the world as logical and scientific wouldn't see the truth if it was posted up on a billboard. — Aprilynne Pike

We spend our lives failing to realise this obvious truth, and thus anxiously seeking to fortify our boundaries, to build our egos and assert our superiority over others, as if we could separate ourselves from them, without realising that interdependence makes us what we are. — Oliver Burkeman

Why would you tell us the truth? If Christina really wasn't here, you'd tell us she was, to stall us from finding her. If James taught us one thing, it's how to detect a lie. You just want us to leave so you can get her to talk. By the way, good luck with that
Ida can't even get her to admit that she stole her cousin's candy at Halloween last year. And that was pretty obvious. — Embee

The obvious, the silly and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! — George Orwell

I know that most men - not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever, and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic problems - can very seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as to oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty - conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives. — Leo Tolstoy

Who am I? What am I doing here? Who are these others? This trilogy of spiritual conundrums is as practical as it is philosophical. Mindful inquiry devoted to these three questions is as spiritual as it is material and as obvious as it is unanswerable. Knowledge isn't to comfort our souls; it is to enhance awareness - that is what some call an awakening. Some things have to be believed to be seen. Feelings articulate truth in ways that our brains cannot. We may have a sense about who we are, what our purpose is and how we relate to the rest of the world even without the vocabulary to articulate it. Recovery is visceral as much as it is intellectual. The Eleventh Step is our spiritual barometer, feeding back sensations, feelings and thoughts as we observe our life. — Joe C.

It was all so damn fragile, that was the thing. Obvious, for sure,but for the most part we block - we refuse to think about how easily our lives could be torn asunder, because when we recognize it, we lose our minds. The ones who are fearful all the time, who need to medicate to function? It is because they understand the reality, how thin the line is. It isn't that they can't accept the truth - its that they can't block it. — Harlan Coben

Logic!" said the Professor half to himself. "Why don't they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is
telling the truth. You know she doesn't tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth. — C.S. Lewis

Dad claims that library science is the foundation of all sciences just
as math is the key
and we will survive or founder, depending on how
well the librarians do their jobs. Librarians didn't look glamorous to
me but maybe Dad had hit on a not very obvious truth. — Robert A. Heinlein

What I believe to be true I must therefore preserve. What seems to me so obvious, even against me, I must support. — Albert Camus

So many answers flew through her mind that she didn't know which to pick, aside from the obvious truth that "my drug dealers enforcer and his rival who I used to fuck" was definitely not it. — Stacia Kane

And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that the way the universe worked was now obvious to any child ... even though it went against everything innate to the species: the wild, undisciplined love of patterns, the craving to extract meaning and comfort from everything in sight.
We thought we were passing on everything that mattered to our children: science, history, literature,
art. Vast libraries of information lay at their fingertips. But we hadn't fought hard enough to pass on
the hardest-won truth of all: Morality comes only from within. Meaning comes only from within. Outside our own skulls, the universe is indifferent. — Greg Egan

Part of me wants to ignore the wrongness and just believe him, but then I'd be pretending as much as he is. No matter how much I want to deny the truth, it gets more obvious every day that he's a drowning man clinging to a sinking raft. — Anonymous

From the Greek word for spectators, theatai, the later philosophical term "theory" was derived, and the word "theoretical" until a few hundred years ago meant "contemplating," looking upon something from the outside, from a position implying a view that is hidden from those who take part in the spectacle and actualize it. The inference to be drawn from this early distinction between doing and understanding is obvious: as a spectator you may understand the "truth" of what the spectacle is about; but the price you have to pay is withdrawal from participating in it. — Hannah Arendt

It is never to be expected in a revolution that every man is to change his opinion at the same moment. There never yet was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious that all men believed it at once. Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy. — Thomas Paine

It has been estimated that 50 percent of all human conceptions end in spontaneous abortion, usually without a woman even realizing that she was pregnant. In fact, 20 percent of all recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage. There is an obvious truth here that cries out for acknowledgment: if God exists, He is the most prolific abortionist of all. — Sam Harris

The act of sending a letter is an act of generosity, even if, in retrospect, it might seem reckless. Why regret one's generosity? Why regret one's impulsiveness, one's misjudgment of others? The inevitable discovery that someone is selling letters you'd written in trust is simply to discover an obvious human truth: there are those who don't cherish us as we'd cherished them, and had wished to be cherished by them. — Joyce Carol Oates

The history of the African-American, also, is so morally outrageous as to make the fact that there has never been an official apology almost unbelievable. A strange psychological phenomenon occurs when a truth is so big, so obvious, that it becomes, in some perverse way, almost easy to resist. The history of racism in the United States is so cruel yet systemic in our society. Perhaps we fear we could not bear the feelings of guilt that would be unleashed were we to make to African-Americans a sincere and heartfelt amends. The truth is it is not our guilt that would be unleashed but our love. Making a formal apology to African-Americans is what we need to do in order to morally resurrect as a nation. — Marianne Williamson

When the public protests. confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizers pills of half truth. — Rachel Carson

But a question needs to be asked, a basic logical scientific question. It is simply this, has anyone applied Ockham's Razor to the question yet? — Leviak B. Kelly

Collect impressions. Don't be in a hurry to write them down. Because that's something music can do better than painting: it can centralise variations of colour and light within a single picture a truth generally ignored, obvious as it is. — Claude Debussy

Anachron's Law:
There is no myth which is so irrational that no one will believe it.
Anachron's Corollary:
There is no truth which is so obvious that everyone will accept it. — George Hammond

It would, therefore, seem obvious that patriotism as a feeling is bad and harmful, and as a doctrine is stupid. For it is clear that if each people and each State considers itself the best of peoples and States, they all live in a gross and harmful delusion. — Leo Tolstoy

Intuition can also mean an instant recognition of a truth, sensing that you are doing the right thing in making a choice or decision even if it is not the immediately obvious option or an experience of knowing the probable outcome just as it is beginning to unfold. — Sylvia Clare

The exotic and the erotic ideals go hand in hand, and this fact also contributes another proof of a more or less obvious truth - that is, that a love of the exotic is usually an imaginative projection of a sexual desire. — Mario Praz

The reason is obvious. You're my grandfather, okay. Like it or not, you're who you are and i'm who i am. And i'm here right now, so what are we going to do about it? -Adam Cayhall- — John Grisham

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

Trouble is, just because things are obvious doesn't mean they're true. — Terry Pratchett

The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics. — Sam Harris

If I could make it better I would, he says. In some ways it's a stupid, obvious thing to say, but the way he said it, so honest and simple like it's the truest thing there is, makes the tears prick in my eyes. (Before I Fall) — Lauren Oliver

Some things seem to be viewed in similar ways by many people, and I think we should take another look at these and truly question them. In our search for our own truth we need to ensure that we are not acting like sheep, merely following the herd behaviour.
One of these areas is that things are often regarded as opposites, things like black and white, day and night, light and dark, are obvious examples. A more open view might say they are opposite sides of one coin. I would go a little further and suggest to you that they are actually part of the same thing. Just as the coin cannot exist without its two sides, I would suggest that our world cannot exist without these so called opposites because they give us a spectrum to exist in, a matrix, or framework, that stretches between the two extremes (or polarities) to include every variation of light and shade that we sense or experience in-between. — Julia Woodman

Can you make a house of cards?" she asked.
"Yes," Violet said, and went on looking. This way Violet had of seizing first not the most obvious sense of what people said to her but some other, interior echo or reverse side of it was a thing that baffled and frustrated her husband, who sought in her sybilline responses to ordinary questions some truth he was sure Violet knew but couldn't quite enunciate. With his father-in-law's help, he had filled volumes with his searchings. Her children, though, hardly noticed it. Nora shifted from foot to foot for a moment waiting for the promised structure, and when it didn't appear forgot it. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed. — John Crowley

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

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

You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. When you get it right, it is obvious that it is right
at least if you have any experience
because usually what happens is that more comes out than goes in. — Richard P. Feynman

If I want to define myself, I first have to say, "I am a woman"; all other assertions will arise from this basic truth. A man never begins by positing himself as an individual of a certain sex: that he is a man is obvious. — Simone De Beauvoir

I don't think I could ever work in such a blatantly hierarchical corporate setting. I know that everyone in this world is not equal, but I can't bear environments that make this truth so obvious. — Peter Cameron

Now it seems obvious, of course, that even a strong person has weak spots and that I had hit Cassie's full force, with all the precision of a jeweler fragmenting a stone along a flaw. She must have thought, sometimes, of her namesake, the votary branded with her god's most inventive and sadistic curse: to tell the truth, and never to be believed. — Tana French

And indeed nothing but the most determined scepticism, along with a great degree of indolence, can justify this aversion to metaphysics. For if truth be at all within the reach of human capacity, it is certain it must lie very deep and abstruse: and to hope we shall arrive at it without pains, while the greatest geniuses have failed with the utmost pains, must certainly be esteemed sufficiently vain and presumptuous. I pretend to no such advantage in the philosophy I am going to unfold, and would esteem it a strong presumption against it, were it so very easy and obvious. — David Hume

What if the preacher or father's saying 'Someone here's lost and hopeless' was tantamount to those Sun-Times horoscopes that are specially designed to be so universally obvious that they always give their horoscope readers that special eerie feeling of particularity and insight, exploiting the psychological fact that most people are narcissistic and prone to the illusion that they and their problems are uniquely special and that if they're feeling a certain way then surely they're the only person who is feeling like that. — David Foster Wallace

What was once obvious to them was no longer quite as obvious. Why was it that humans lost sight of truth so quickly? — Ted Dekker

And this is the truth. Because I may be only eighteen, but it already seems pretty obvious that the world is divided into two groups: the doers and the watchers. The people things happen to and the rest of us, who just sort of plod on with things. The Lulus and the Allysons.
It never occurred to me that by pretending to be Lulu, I might slip into that other column, even for just a day. — Gayle Forman

I've said it's over for the white races, an obvious truth which caused much agitation amongst the journalists. The rich will rule as usual; they come in all colours, particularly yellow. — Hanif Kureishi

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

The process of philosophizing, to my mind, consists mainly in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things, that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear, definite, which by reflection and analysis we find is involved in the vague thing that we start from, and is, so to speak, the real truth of which that vague thing is a sort of shadow. — Bertrand Russell

Doubt and faith are parts of human experience, whether one views them as right or wrong. Also doubt and faith are instrumental to grasping truth in some very obvious senses. — Leviak B. Kelly

If the maladministration of the democracy ever brings about a revolutionary crisis, and if monarchical institutions ever become practicable in the United States, the truth of what I advance will become obvious. — Alexis De Tocqueville