Obscure Meaning Quotes

Obscurity is never a virtue.

So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined.

When I first discovered for myself the Celtic Twilight and read the earlier poems of Yeats and others, all was entirely incomprehensible to me. I groped through a mist of blurred meanings, stumbled through lines in which every accent seemed to be in the wrong place.

A multitude of words doth rather obscure than illustrate, they being a burden to the memory, and the first apt to be forgotten, before we come to the last. So that he that uses many words for the explaining of any subject, doth, like the cuttle-fish, hide himself, for the most part, in his own ink.

Indistinctness is my forte.

I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.

More people are troubled by what is plain in Scripture than by what is obscure.

A dream–I was trying to explain to St. Peter, and was doing it in the German tongue, because I didn't want to be too explicit.

By clarity I don't mean that we're always in kind of a simple area where everything is clear and comforting and understood. Clarity is certainly a way toward disorientation because if you don't start out - if the reader isn't grounded, if the reader is disoriented in the beginning of the poem, then the reader can't be led astray or disoriented later.

Blue oblivion, largely lit, smiled and smiled at me.

This message, in point of obscurity, comes nearer my ideas of a Delphic oracle than any state paper which has come under my inspection. It is so cautiously expressed that every man puts what construction on it he pleases.

At first it seems obvious, but the more you think about it the stranger the deductions from this axiom seem to become; in the end you cease to understand what is meant by it.

Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed.

The secret, if one may paraphrase a savage vocabulary, lies in the egg of night.

The surest method of being incomprehensible or, moreover, to be misunderstood is to use words in their original sense; especially words from the ancient languages.

It must be powerful language if you canna make oout what the heel it’s goin’ on aboot!

The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.

[Stéphane Mallarmé] theory of the hermetic is a mistake, but he can be only difficult to read when he has difficult things to say.

It is... easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague.