“I keep saying, Shakspeare, Shakspeare, you are as obscure as life is.”
Letter to Arthur Hugh Clough (ca. 6 December 1847)
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Matthew Arnold 166
English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector… 1822–1888Related quotes

Friday Sermon at Tehran University: America Will Collapse http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/186.htm July 2004.
America to collapse

The One That Got Away, written by Katy Perry, Lukasz Gottwald, and Max Martin
Song lyrics, Teenage Dream (2010)

“Obscurity and a competence—that is the life that is best worth living.”
Source: Notebook

“I love you more than songs can say, but I can't keep running after yesterday…”
Source: John Mayer - Battle Studies

“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece”
Variant: Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
Source: Lolita

“Children sometimes see things clearly that are obscured in later life.”
Source: The Emperor's New Mind (1989), Ch. 10, Where Lies the Physics of the Mind?, p. 448–9 (p. 580 in 1999 edition).
Context: Beneath all this technicality is the feeling that it is indeed "obvious" that the conscious mind cannot work like a computer, even though much of what is involved in mental activity might do so.
This is the kind of obviousness that a child can see—though the child may, later in life, become browbeaten into believing that the obvious problems are "non-problems", to be argued into nonexistence by careful reasoning and clever choices of definition. Children sometimes see things clearly that are obscured in later life. We often forget the wonder that we felt as children when the cares of the "real world" have begun to settle on our shoulders. Children are not afraid to pose basic questions that may embarrass us, as adults, to ask. What happens to each of our streams of consciousness after we die; where was it before we were born; might we become, or have been, someone else; why do we perceive at all; why are we here; why is there a universe here at all in which we can actually be? These are puzzles that tend to come with the awakenings of awareness in any one of us — and, no doubt, with the awakening of self-awareness, within whichever creature or other entity it first came.