Quotes About Abstruse

If someone smells a flower and says he does not understand, the reply to him is: there is nothing to understand, it is only a scent. If he persists, saying: that I know, but what does it all mean? Then one has either to change the subject, or make it more abstruse by saying that the scent is the shape which the universal joy takes in the flower.

sociology has gone the way of poli-sci and econ, now firmly in the clutches of rabid number crunchers who have abandoned or forgotten the link between their abstruse theoretical musings and the presence of human beings on the planet's surface;

I find no quality so easy for a man to counterfeit as devotion, though his life and manner are not conformable to it; the essence of it is abstruse and occult, but the appearances easy and showy.

Nature . . . is inexorable and immutable; she never transgresses the laws imposed upon her, nor cares a whit whether her abstruse reasons and methods of operations are understandable to men.

Abstruse preachers; who do not make the mysteries of the gospel known, but make truths plain in themselves mysterious by their dark perplexed discourses upon them.

ESOTERIC, adj. Very particularly abstruse and consummately occult. The ancient philosophies were of two kinds,—exoteric, those that the philosophers themselves could partly understand, and esoteric, those that nobody could understand. It is the latter that have most profoundly affected modern thought and found greatest acceptance in our time.

Surely you don't think that the world is a rule for measuring the universe. The are entities we never dream of floating under our very noses.

What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any ... journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends.

Ah! trapeze of my sins, trapeze of abstruse conceptions

For the primary function of culture in Gissing's scheme of things was to segregate him from other people. To qualify as culture, knowledge had to be abstruse.

When you're writing stuff that's already clotted with neologisms and trying to get across fairly abstruse concepts, you're already putting a heavy burden on the reader.

But, perhaps, the excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some obvious and useful truth in a few words.

The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious.

Most of the time the concept of globalization ends up sounding unnecessarily abstruse - even the name itself sounds clunky and highfalutin.

Oh, maybe a little treasure for the more rabid Incunks, the collectors and the academics who maintained their positions in large part by examining the literary equivalent of navel-lint in each other's abstruse journals; ambitious, overeducated goofs who had lost touch with what books and reading were actually about and could be content to go on spinning straw into footnoted fool's gold for decades on end.

There are greater depths and obscurities, greater intricacies and perplexities, in an elaborate and well-written piece of nonsense, than in the most abstruse and profound tract of school divinity.

The greater part of mankind may be divided into two classes; that of shallow thinkers who fall short of the truth; and that of abstruse thinkers who go beyond it.

In the stock market the more elaborate and abstruse the mathematics the more uncertain and speculative the conclusion we draw therefrom….

May I ask," I asks, asking, "what you are trying to do with your time traveling and what you do when you have traveled time? Your motives are obscure, your methods abstruse, your results intangible.

Because there is such disagreement among the learned about these abstruse matters, we will consider them no further.

Ed Miliband should be out and proud about his abstruse interests, his Master's in Economics, his political obsession, his prioritising of the mental over the physical.

Can you be a trifle more obscure? I think I almost understood what you said that last time.