70 Oblique Quotes
Following is our list of oblique quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about how to use oblique symbol in a sentence.
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Famous Oblique Quotes
Extracurricular Parallel to none I am perpendicular — Nicki Minaj
Thanks to the oval I have discovered the meaning of the horizontal and the vertical. — Georges Braque
Treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. — Paul Cezanne
Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line. — Benoit Mandelbrot
A piece of wall can be visually disintegrated from the whole into a separate triangle by plunging a diagonal of light from edge to edge on the wall; that is, side to floor, for instance. — Dan Flavin
Exaggerate the essential, leave the obvious vague. — Vincent Van Gogh
Overlapping shapes are a safer indication of depth than is linear perspective. — Rex Brandt
Life isn't some vertical or horizontal line -- you have your own interior world, and it's not neat. — Patti Smith
If they give you ruled paper, write the other way. — Juan Ramón Jiménez
Mountains cannot be surmounted except by winding paths. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Horizontality is a desire to give up, to sleep. Verticality is an attempt to escape. Hanging and floating are states of ambivalence. — Louise Bourgeois
I always try to think in curves. — Greg Lynn
God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight. — Friedrich Nietzsche
Hard to find anything lovelier than a tree. They grow at right angles to a tangent of the nominal sphere of the Earth. — Bill Nye
When you have a large space to conquer, the curve is the natural solution. — Oscar Niemeyer
Short Oblique Quotes
- Families composed of rugged individualists have to do things obliquely. — Florence King
- Admiration involves a glorious obliquity of vision. — Max Beerbohm
- He who discommendeth others obliquely commendeth himself. — Sir Thomas Browne
- I have a position of indirect respect and oblique power. — Drew Carey
- All censure of a man's self is oblique praise. — James Boswell
- Talk ought always to run obliquely, not nose to nose with no chance of mental escape. — Frank Moore Colby
- Our relations to each other are oblique and casual. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
- I think I'm on an angle. I'm on an oblique angle through all of existence. — Frederick Lenz
- He who discommendeth others obliquely commendeth himself (Christian morals). — Thomas Browne
- All censure of a man's self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can spare. — Samuel Johnson
People Writing About Oblique
| Name | Quotes | Likes |
|---|---|---|
 Nicki Minaj |
328 | 1889 |
 Georges Braque |
80 | 466 |
 Paul Cezanne |
111 | 944 |
 Benoit Mandelbrot |
79 | 834 |
 Vincent Van Gogh |
410 | 6735 |
 Rex Brandt |
10 | 121 |
More Oblique Quotes
Criticism of others is thus an oblique form of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbors that all his pictures are crooked. — Fulton J. Sheen
For I am I: ergo, the truth of myself; my own sphinx, conflict, chaos, vortex—asymmetric to all rhythms, oblique to all paths. I am the prism between black and white: mine own unison in duality. — Austin Osman Spare
What do you know about me, given that I believe in secrecy? ... If I stick where I am, if I don't travel around, like anyone else I make my inner journeys that I can only measure by my emotions, and express very obliquely and circuitously in what I write. ... Arguments from one's own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments. — Gilles Deleuze
Radical self-care is quantum, and radiates out into the atmosphere, like a little fresh air. It is a huge gift to the world. When people respond by saying, “Well, isn’t she full of herself,” smile obliquely, like Mona Lisa, and make both of you a nice cup of tea. — Anne Lamott
If you make some comment even obliquely alluding to menstruation or menopause and its effect on my judgment," Murphy interrupted, "I will break your arm in eleven places. — Jim Butcher
The nervous system of any age or nation is its creative workers, its artists. And if that nervous system is profoundly disturbed by its environment, the work it produces will inescapably reflect the disturbances, sometimes obliquely and sometimes with violent directness. — Tennessee Williams
Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don't be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done. — Anne Lamott
The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head--no intricate game of chess where few moves are made in straight-forwardness and ends are attained by indirection, an oblique, tedious, barren game hardly worth that poor candle burnt out in playing it. — Herman Melville
As lines, so loves oblique, may well Themselves in every angle greet; But ours, so truly parallel, Though infinite, can never meet. — Andrew Marvell
The oblique paradox of propaganda is that the lie in the throat becomes, by repetition, the truth in the heart. — John Grierson
The weight of the world is on our shoulders, its vision is through our eyes; if we blink or look aside, or turn back to finger what Plato said or remember Napoleon and his conquests, we inflict on the world the injury of some obliquity. This is life. — Virginia Woolf
I'm fond of implied narratives, oblique angles, and leaving a little room for the viewer to finish a picture. — Keith Carter
It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking to it that one overcomes it; often it is by working on the one next to it. Some things and some people have to be approached obliquely, at an angle. — Andre Gide
Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom. — Evelyn Waugh
Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood. — Tryon Edwards
I like what a third man brings. A kind of oblique vision, seeing something in the material that you didn't know was there. As a comedian, I'm always listening to the audience. And in movies, sometimes the only audience you have is the producer and the director. I like having someone else's opinion, especially if you're on the same wavelength. — Steve Martin
Remember the enemy of all painting is gray: a painting will almost always appear grayer than it is, on account of its oblique position under the light. — Eugene Delacroix
There never was a woman who did not prefer an oblique compliment to a straight truth - if the latter were unflattering. — Minna Antrim
Light comes to us unexpectedly and obliquely. Perhaps it amuses the gods to try us. They want to see whether we are asleep. — H. M. Tomlinson
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up. — James A. Baldwin
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up. — James Baldwin
When the symbols are 'public' they usually act in an oblique manner, revealing themselves as archetypal symbols, which though familiar, have their central meanings obscured as is usual in esoteric imagery. — Kenneth Coutts-Smith
Somewhere, I had received the impression that Fine Folks were people who did the best they could with the sense they had, but Aunt Alexandra was of the opinion, obliquely expressed, that the longer a family had been squatting on one patch of land the finer it was. — Harper Lee
All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it -- an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view. — Peter Conrad
If there is a reason for keeping the wall very quiet, choose a pattern that works all over without pronounced lines...Put very succinctly, architectural effect depends upon a nice balance of horizontal, vertical and oblique. No rules can say how much of each; so nothing can really take the place of feeling and good judgement. — William Morris
The circling horse was an oblique warning that i would repeat the same mistake eternally. Would the law of averages allow it? Can anything continue without change? Nothing else in nature behaves so consistently and rigidly as a human being in pursuit of hell. — Pete Townshend
What if a man save my life with a draught that was prepared to poison me? The providence of the issue does not at all discharge the obliquity of the intent. And the same reason holds good even in religion itself. It is not the incense, or the offering that is acceptable to God, but the purity and devotion of the worshipper. — Seneca
A poem needs disguises. It needs secrets. It thrives on the tension between what is said and not said; it prefers the oblique, the implied, the ironic, the suggestive; when it speaks, it wants you to lean forward a little to overhear; it wants you to understand things only years later. — J. D. McClatchy
I do abs every day: regular, weighted crunches and sit-ups every other day, then my obliques and my sides on the alternating day. So I’m working my core every day. — Christopher Gorham
All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it, an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view. — Peter Conrad
That sinuous southern life, that oblique and slow and complicated old beauty, that warm thick air and blood warm sea, that place of mists and languor and fragrant richness... — Anne Rivers Siddons
Of course, sometimes when you write personally, you are also writing about society, obliquely reflecting topical issues, but not in a way that people would expect you to or in the way that someone trying to make a point would. — Suzanne Vega
Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great. — Edward Hopper
You know, most love songs are not cheesy and corny. Most love songs are complaints, I think. Or about unrequited love, coming at it from some oblique angle. Only the ones that say "I love you" over and over are the cheesy, corny ones that people complain about — Stephin Merritt
I'm interested is the oblique as a concept deeply connected to human lived experience, not separate from it. I was listening to an interview with film director Stephen Frears on NPR the other day and he said, "People's lives are never what you think they are," or something like that. Human lives are oblique. It makes sense to me that attending to them in language is as well. — Dawn Lundy Martin
The film [Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth] opens with an Albanian blood feud and goes on to delve into, for instance, prison systems, underpaid tomato pickers, the gulf oil spill. It's all woven together in a sensuous, oblique way that's not the same as the single-message kind of documentary we're used to, with an "answer" at the end. It's more like an exploration. Sort of like what you do with Birth of a Nation. — Margaret Atwood
Style tells you a lot more about the truth than substance, because it comes at the truth in an oblique way, it comes in on a slant, it doesn't tell you what it is. It's unexpected and it makes you laugh and think. — Robert Benton
If your legs are strong it definitely gives you an advantage coming down hill. As far as specific workouts go, I get a kick out of sled pulls and driving the sled. I put a couple of 45 pound weights on it and just go until I can't feel my VMO muscles (Vastus Medialis Oblique.) That's the muscle right next to your knee, on the inside. — Brandon Spikes
If you're paying attention to human interactions - to the gap between who we are and who we think we are, or the gap between what happened and what we remember - you're going to end up thinking (obliquely or otherwise) about what it means to act ethically, and I think that's all to the good. — Roy Kesey
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