I have gone from local obscurity to national obscurity to international obscurity. Once I learn how to monetize obscurity, I will be rich.
You cannot go into the womb to form the child; it is there and makes itself and comes forth whole-and there it is and you have made it and have felt it, but it has come itself.
Many of the products which create a modern standard of living are only the physical incorporations of ideas- not only the ideas of an Edison or a Ford but the ideas of innumerable anonymous people who figure out the design of supermarkets, the location of gasoline stations, and the million mundane things on which our material well-being depends. Societies which have more people carrying out physical acts and fewer people supplying ideas do not have higher standards of living. Quite the contrary.
Ideas, as the raw material from which knowledge is produced, exist in superabundance, but that makes the production of knowledge more difficult rather than easier. Many ideas- probably most- will have to be discarded somewhere in the process of producing authenticated knowledge. Authentication is as important as the raw information itself, and the manner and speed of the authentication process can be crucial.
I guess I just always imagined that I was going to die, like, somehow on top. I was going to, like, go out in some sort of blaze of glory. I never thought about sort of fading into obscurity. And I've worked so hard at having a life, an identity, in obscurity and finding peace with that.
Propriety of thought and propriety of diction are commonly found together. Obscurity and affectation are the two greatest faults of style. Obscurity of expression generally springs from confusion of ideas; and the same wish to dazzle, at any cost, which produces affectation in the manner of a writer, is likely to produce sophistry in his reasonings.
Although scientists can often be as resistant to new ideas as anyone, the process of science ensures that, over time, good ideas and theories prevail.
The influence of Sun Tzu on other North Vietnamese military strategists is harder to answer. Certainly many of the key leaders in Hanoi were aware of Sun Tzu and made use of his ideas - Vo Nguyen Giap applied many of these ideas in seeking out weak elements in the enemy's defenses, as did Truong Chinh, whose famous treatise, The Resistance Will Win (1947), cited the ideas of Mao Zedong as a model for the North Vietnamese to follow.
Among the many evils which prevail under the sun, the abuse of words is not the least considerable. By the influence of time, and the perversion of fashion, the plainest and most unequivocal may be so altered, as to have a meaning assigned them almost diametrically opposite to their original signification.
When men are able to influence so many others through their life and their example, they do not die.
Yeah, well, we were looking for something sort of anonymous. It suggests what it is, but I like that it's modest. I feel like that's an underrated virtue. It's modest and it's kind of anonymous, which I liked, because it reminds me of my own ideas about why music should be played, which is not to be a star. That was never my intention.
Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.
Obscurity is just obscurity. There's no romance in obscurity.
The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the easy life of the gods would be a lifeless life.
I wish more people felt that photography was an adventure the same as life itself and felt that their individual feelings were worth expressing. To me, that makes photography more exciting.
I think that because this is a moral universe, then right will prevail, goodness will prevail, compassion will prevail, laughter will prevail, love, caring, sharing will prevail. Because we are made for goodness. We are made for love.