Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Obscurity
Content thyself to be obscurely good.
Addison—Cato. Act IV. Sc. 4.
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.
Robert Browning—Paracelsus. Pt. V.
Like beauteous flowers which vainly waste their scent
Of odours in unhaunted deserts.
Chamberlayne—Pharonida. Part II. Bk. IV.
As night the life-inclining stars best shows,
So lives obscure the starriest souls disclose.
George Chapman—Hymns and Epigrams of Homer. The Translator’s Epilogue. L. 74.
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Gray—Elegy in a Country Churchyard. St. 14.
Yet still he fills affection’s eye,
Obscurely wise, and coarsely kind.
Samuel Johnson—On the Death of Robert Levet.
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.
Samuel Madden—Boulter’s Monument.
The palpable obscure.
Milton—Paradise Lost. Bk. II. L. 406.
Bene qui latuit, bene vixit.
He who has lived obscurely and quietly has lived well.
Ovid—Tristium. III. 4. 25.
Ut sæpe summa ingenia in occulto latent!
How often the highest talent lurks in obscurity!
Plautus—Captivi. I. 2. 62.
How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Pope—Eloisa to Abelard. L. 207.
Thus let me live, unseen, unknown,
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.
Pope—Ode on Solitude.
Yet was he but a squire of low degree.
Spenser—Faerie Queene. Bk. IV. Canto VII. St. 15.
Eo magis præfulgebat quod non videbatur.
He shone with the greater splendor, because he was not seen.
Tacitus—Annales. III. 76.
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love.
Wordsworth—She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways.