Opaque quotes:

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The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him. -- Sigmund Freud
The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face. -- Jim Bishop
In reality the workings of your governing system are opaque and covert, while hiding in the chattering spotlight of an ostensible transparency, even though the ultimate objective is clear. -- Breyten Breytenbach
The divisions of Perspective are 3, as used in drawing; of these, the first includes the diminution in size of opaque objects; the second treats of the diminution and loss of outline in such opaque objects; the third, of the diminution and loss of colour at long distances. -- Leonardo da Vinci
I realized in the early days I just didn't edit at all. But I think you become a little more cagey with your lyrics when you know more people are going to hear them and make assumptions about you as a person. Realizing that, you want to be a little more opaque. -- Eddie Vedder
The earth is heavy and opaque without dreams. -- Anais Nin
Art pierces opaque subjectivity, the not seeing of conventional life, and discloses reality. -- Langdon Brown Gilkey
From time to time, you may see a girl wearing her black opaque tights as pants. They are, in fact, not. -- Nina Garcia
Identification with your mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship. -- Eckhart Tolle
Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle headedness - and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all, that is what I was at nineteen and twenty. -- Mark Twain
When the philosopher's argument becomes tedious, complicated, and opaque, it is usually a sign that he is attempting to prove as true to the intellect what is plainly false to common sense. -- Edward Abbey
History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, [...] The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People are so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fool's caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else's are transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone are rosy. -- George Eliot
It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it. -- Michel de Montaigne
There was wildlife, untouched, a jungle at the border of the sea, never seen by those who floated on the opaque roof. Describing his early experience, in 1936, when a fellow naval officer, Philippe Tailliez, gave him goggles to see below the Mediterranean Sea surface. -- Jacques Yves Cousteau
Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. The judgmental precedents of law function that way, littering your path with dead ends. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary. -- Frank Herbert
Endless moons, an opaque universe, thunder, tornadoes, the quaking earth. Rare moments of peace; forehead up against my knees, arms around my head, I though, I listened, I longed not to exist. but life was there, a transparent pearl, a star revolving slowly on its own axis. -- Shan Sa
The magical story is not a microscope but a mirror, not a drop of water but a well. It is not simply one thing or two, but a multitude. It is at once both lucid and opaque, it accepts both dark and light, speaks to youth and old age. -- Jane Yolen
It was not for the sake of oil that the risky decision to cease this corrupt coexistence was made. But at least now the Iraqi people have a chance of controlling their own main resource, and it will be our task to ensure that the funding and revenue are transparent instead of opaque. -- Christopher Hitchens
Shadow is the obstruction of light. Shadows appear to me to be of supreme importance in perspective, because, without them opaque and solid bodies will be ill defined; that which is contained within their outlines and their boundaries themselves will be ill-understood unless they are shown against a background of a different tone from themselves. -- Leonardo da Vinci
Your life is something opaque, not transparent, as long as you look at it in an ordinary human way. But if you hold it up against the light of God's goodness, it shines and turns transparent, radiant and bright. And then you ask yourself in amazement: Is this really my own life I see before me? -- Albert Schweitzer
It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to 'see through' [everything]. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see. -- C. S. Lewis
Commercial real estate is really a black box: its super opaque, and it's hard to get the information. -- Jason Calacanis
I've got spider veins all over my legs, so I wear opaque tights all winter. All sorts of colours. -- Sally Phillips
Citizens' rights cannot be protected if their digital activities are governed and policed by opaque and publicly unaccountable corporate mechanisms. -- Rebecca MacKinnon
Like many great world faiths, Mormonism has an important strand of sacred mystery. Mormon temples have traditionally been closed to outsiders and designed with opaque windows. -- Noah Feldman
Our technologised society is becoming opaque. As technology becomes more ubiquitous and our relationship with digital devices ever more seamless, our technical infrastructure seems to be increasingly intangible. -- Honor Harger
The obsessions of others are opaque to the unobsessed, and thus easy to mock. NASCAR, jazz, baseball, roses, poetry, quilts, fishing. If we're lucky, we all have at least one. -- Roberta Smith
For many people, when they come to Twitter, the language is opaque. We need to push the scaffolding to the background and bring the content forward. The media, the photos, the videos. -- Dick Costolo
For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People do things for unfathomable reasons. They are opaque even to themselves. -- Gary Wolf
Back in the NBA's pre-mask era, ballers with busted noses or orbital bones had two unappealing options: Sit out and heal, or strap on a Michael Myers-looking opaque face shield closely related to that worn by hockey goalies. -- Brendan I. Koerner
I've learned so many things from directors in my acting career. There are even some things I've learned that I didn't want to do. There are those directors who've really made me shine and others who've made me opaque. -- Valeria Golino
There are few industries as defiantly opaque as shipping. Even offshore bankers have not developed a system as intricately elusive as the flag of convenience, under which ships can fly the flag of a state that has nothing to do with its owner, cargo, crew, or route. -- Rose George
But nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency. -- Margaret Atwood
Things are opaque to us, and we are opaque to ourselves. -- Jacques Maritain
The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us. -- Terence McKenna
Self is the opaque veil that hides the face of God from us. -- Aiden Wilson Tozer
Self is the opaque veil that hides the face of God from us. -- Aiden Wilson Tozer
The new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance. -- Ivan Illich
Businesses can be opaque. They are complex. You don't know how aircraft engines work either. -- Jamie Dimon
The imagination is to the effect as the shadow to the opaque body which causes the shadow. -- Leonardo da Vinci
Derivatives serve practically no purpose except to enrich bankers through opaque pricing and to deceive investors through off-the-balance-sheet accounting. -- James Rickards
More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable. -- Michel De Certeau
I think I have a pugnacious style. My style is not pretty. I don't use words like "amber" or "opaque." -- Ishmael Reed
Poetry depends on being simultaneously opaque and transparent. It can't be only one or the other. The pebble and the pool. -- Peter J. Daniels
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Life may be seen through many windows, none of them necessarily clear or opaque, less or more distorting than any of the others. -- Isaiah Berlin
I had kept opaque Down deeper than the canyons undersea The sullen spectrum of a buried lake Nobody saw; not seen even by me.... -- Allen Tate
Here, then, is the last moment of true perception, a man fishing in a red jacket and a cloudy sky reflected on opaque water. -- Michael Cunningham
Self is the opaque veil that hides the Face of God from us. It can be removed only in spiritual experience, never by mere instruction. -- Aiden Wilson Tozer
I can't move my body slowly. I can't move the line slowly. So I end up with way too much, often opaque to me later. -- Martha Ronk
When my own writing needs a perk, I open Zukofsky and read from "A" - particularly sections "22" and "23." It can be opaque, but I love the intensity. -- Stephen Vincent Benet
...for human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light and between shadow and light there is the opaque body from which words are born.. -- Jose Saramago
Nineteen twentieths of [mankind is] opaque and unenlightened. Intimacy with most people will make you acquainted with vices and errors and follies enough to make you despise them. -- John Adams
Experimental music scores are enigmatic, opaque, demanding, irritating, humorous, childlike; the best, like Cardew's Treatise, are also inspiring, giving rise, on occasion, to a music of vitality, intelligence and elegance. -- John Tilbury
I perceive everything to be constantly subjective and strange. My version of truth in what I express, it feels like that opaque quality that you're talking about. It's just me being legitimate. -- Paul Banks
...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener) -- Milan Kundera
Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary. -- Frank Herbert
The Iranian leaders describe the American government exactly the way American analysts describe the Iranian one, as an opaque, factionalized system with competing power centers, over which the president exercises very limited authority. -- Ali Khamenei
...though one can be callous in Ireland one cannot be wholly opaque or material. An unearthly disturbance works in the spirit; reason can never reconcile one to life; nothing allays the wants one cannot explain. -- Elizabeth Bowen
That's the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image. -- William Faulkner

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