Obvious Truths Quotes

The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe.

Success is a refined study of the obvious

You know that when Irving puts the dog in the car, it is no longer in the yard. When Edna goes to church, her head goes with her. If Doug is in the house, he must have gone through some opening unless he was born there and never left. If Sheila is alive at 9 A.M. and is alive at 5 P.M., she was also alive at noon. Zebras in the wild never wear underwear. Opening a jar of a new brand of peanut butter will not vaporize the house. People never shove meat thermometers in their ears. A gerbil is smaller than Mt. Kilimanjaro.

The usefulest truths are the plainest.

The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say - because they were too obvious.

Question everything generally thought to be obvious.

Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.

Life's simplest answers are often the easiest to overlook.

Some things you just can't question. Like you can't question why two plus two is four. So don't question it, don't try to look it up. I don't know who made it, all I know is it was put in my head that two plus two is four. So certain things happen. Why does it rain? Why am I so sexy? I don't know.

This sounds an extraordinary statement to make, but in fact all truth is very ordinary.

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

I am not going to talk about religious beliefs, but about matters so obvious that it has gone out of style to mention them.

We try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric.

Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.

Most of us are inclined to look upon success as coming in some mysterious way through advantages that we do not have. Perhaps because we do have them, we don't see them. The obvious is often unseen.

If they be principles evident of themselves, they need nothing to evidence them.

I am in a very peculiar business: I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know.

Few intellectual tyrannies can be more recalcitrant than the truths that everybody knows and nearly no one can defend with any decent data (for who needs proof of anything so obvious). And few intellectual activities can be more salutary than attempts to find out whether these rocks of ages might crumble at the slightest tap of an informational hammer.

Beware of assumptions that seem "obvious" in one decade. They may become quaint in the next.

Kids always ask the most obvious and the most difficult questions.

If you make things sound inoffensively obvious, then it is likely that no one will listen.

It is the things we think we know - because they are so elementary or because they surround us - that often present the greatest difficulties when we are actually challenged to explain them.