Source: Will Grayson, Will Grayson
“A great deal of talent is lost to the world for the want of a little courage. Every day sends to their graves a number of obscure men who have only remained obscure because their timidity has prevented them from making a first effort.”
Lecture IX : On the Conduct of the Understanding
Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy (1849)
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Sydney Smith 68
English writer and clergyman 1771–1845Related quotes
“I know, that obscure as I am, my name is making a considerable deal of fuss in the world.”
Davy Crockett
(1786–1836) American politician
Preface (1 February 1834)
A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett (1834)
Context: I know, that obscure as I am, my name is making a considerable deal of fuss in the world. I can't tell why it is, nor in what it is to end. Go where I will, everybody seems anxious to get a peep at me … There must therefore be something in me, or about me, that attracts attention, which is even mysterious to myself.
"Introduction", page 6 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=21&itemID=F373&viewtype=image
On the Origin of Species (1859)
“Some are born to obscurity and others only achieve it through diligent effort.”
Roger Zelazny
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A Museum Piece (p. 217)
Short fiction, The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, and Other Stories (1971)
Josiah Parsons Cooke
(1827–1894) Harvard mineralogist and chemist
Context: One of the most striking characteristics of this new modification of oxygen is its peculiar odor, and hence Schönbein calls it ozone, from a Greek verb signifying to smell. It frequently happens that a great discovery supplies the wanting links between a number of obscure facts, and thus adds quite as much to our knowledge by its indirect bearings as by the positive additions it makes to the general stock. So it has been with the discovery of ozone. Every one who has used an electrical machine must have noticed the peculiar smell which follows the electrical discharge. This was formerly supposed to be the odor of the electrical fluid itself; but as soon as ozone was discovered, the odor was recognized at once as belonging to this new agent, and it was soon ascertained that electricity is one of the most efficient means of modifying the oxygen of the air.
Washington Irving
(1783–1859) writer, historian and diplomat from the United States
Book II, ch. 3.
Knickerbocker's History of New York http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/13042 (1809)
Benito Mussolini
(1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…
Remark to Galeazzo Ciano (11 April 1940), quoted in Famous Lines : A Columbia Dictionary of Familiar Quotations (1997) by Robert Andrews. p. 330
1940s
Kevin M. Kruse
(1972) American historian
Source: One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (2015), p. 292
Benjamin N. Cardozo
(1870–1938) United States federal judge
Other writings, The Altruist in Politics (1889)
John Angell James
(1785–1859) British abolitionist
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 121.