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Content thyself to be obscurely good.
When vice prevails and impious men bear away,
The post of honor is a private station.
Author: Joseph Addison
Source: Cato (act IV, sc. 4)
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I give the fight up; let there be an end,
A privacy, an obscure nook for me,
I want to be forgotten even by God.
Author: Robert Browning
Source: Paracelsus (pt. V)
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Like beauteous flowers which vainly waste their scent
Of odours in unhaunted deserts.
Author: Edward Chamberlayne
Source: Pharonida (pt. II, bk. IV)
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As night the life-inclining stars best shows,
So lives obscure the starriest souls disclose.
Author: George Chapman
Source: Hymns and Epigrams of Homer--The Translator's Epilogue (l. 74)
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Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Author: Thomas Gray
Source: Elegy in a Country Churchyard (st. 14)
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Yet still he fills affection's eye,
Obscurely wise, and coarsely kind.
Author: Samuel Johnson
Source: Verses on the On the Death of Mr. Robert Levet
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Some write their wrongs in marble: he more just,
Stoop'd down serene and wrote them on the dust,
Trod under foot, the sport of every wind,
Swept from the earth and blotted from his mind,
There, secret in the grave, he bade them lie,
And grieved they could not 'scape the Almighty eye.
Author: Samuel Madden
Source: Boulter's Monument
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The palpable obscure.
Author: John Milton
Source: Paradise Lost (bk. II, l. 406)
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He who has lived obscurely and quietly has lived well.
[Lat., Bene qui latuit, bene vixit.]
Author: Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)
Source: Tristium (III, 4, 25)
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How often the highest talent lurks in obscurity.
[Lat., Ut saepe summa ingenia in occulto latent!]
Author: Plautus (Titus Maccius Plautus)
Source: Captivi (I, 2, 62)
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How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Author: Alexander Pope
Source: Eloisa to Abelard (l. 207)
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Thus let me live, unseen, unknown,
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.
Author: Alexander Pope
Source: Ode on Solitude
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Yet was he but a squire of low degree.
Author: Edmund Spenser
Source: The Faerie Queene (bk. IV, canto VII, st. 15)
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He shone with the greater splendor, because he was not seen.
[Lat., Eo magis praefulgebat quod non videbatur.]
Author: Tacitus (Caius Cornelius Tacitus)
Source: Annales (III, 76)
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She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love.
Author: William Wordsworth
Source: She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways
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Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
Author: Marshall Mcluhan
Source: None
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Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honour as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.
Author: Thomas Hardy
Source: None
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Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
Author: Napoleon Bonaparte
Source: None
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Obscurity and competence: That is the life that is worth living.
Author: Mark Twain
Source: None
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It is better to be famous than notorious, but better to be notorious than obscure.
Author: James K. Feibleman
Source: None
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