These arcane quotes will inspire you.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging arcane quotes, arcane sayings, and arcane proverbs.
Best Arcane Quotes
- “Science is an integral part of culture. It’s not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It’s one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.” ~ Stephen Jay Gould
- “Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed.” ~ Khalil Gibran
- “Having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be.” ~ Isaac Asimov
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“People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence.” ~ Isaac Asimov
- “The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private languages and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.” ~ Gregory Maguire
- “True literacy is becoming an arcane art, and the nation is steadily “dumbing down.”” ~ Isaac Asimov
- “People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. They are far too ready to dismiss it and to build arcane structures of extremely rickety substance in order to avoid it. I, on the other hand, see coincidence everywhere as an inevitable consequence of the laws of probability, according to which having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be.” ~ Isaac Asimov
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“We seem to have set up some very arcane rules as to when it is actually OK to applaud.” ~ Emanuel Ax
- “I’ll never be a minimalist. The fact that the prose is more tightly controlled doesn’t for a minute mean that it’s minimalist. I very much like arcane words and baroque sentence structure.” ~ China Mieville
- “We look about in puzzlement at our world, with a sense of unease and disquiet. We think of ourselves as scholars in arcane liturgies, single men trapped in worlds beyond our devising. The truth is far simpler: there are things in the darkness beneath us that wish us harm.” ~ Neil Gaiman
- “In spite of the fact that religion looks backward to revealed truth while science looks forward to new vistas and discoveries, both activities produce a sense of awe and a curious mixture of humility and arrogance in their practitioners. All great scientists are inspired by the subtlety and beauty of the natural world that they are seeking to understand. Each new subatomic particle, every unexpected object, produces delight and wonderment. In constructing their theories, physicists are frequently guided by arcane concepts of elegance in the belief that the universe is intrinsically beautiful.” ~ Paul Davies
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“For four years, I listened to stories of intelligence failures, and it wasn’t due to incompetence of anyone in the system, but that the system is so arcane.” ~ Charles Bass
- “There is an air of unreality in debating these arcane points when the world is changing in such dramatic ways right in front of our eyes because of global warming.” ~ Al Gore
- “Do not be taken in by ‘insiderisms.’ Fledgling columnists, eager to impress readers with their grasp of journalistic jargon, are drawn to such arcane spellings as ‘lede.’ Where they lede, do not follow.” ~ William Safire
- “I’ve often wished that I had some suave and socially acceptable hobby that I could fall back on in times like this. You know, play the violin (or was it the viola) like Sherlock Holmes, or maybe twiddle away on the pipe organ like the Disney version of Captain Nemo. But I don’t. I’m sort of the arcane equivalent of a classic computer geek. I do magic, in one form or another, and that’s pretty much it. I really need to get a life, one of these days” ~ Jim Butcher
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“The argument about marriage equality will one day seem as arcane and shocking to us as the fact that Rosa Parks had to get up and go to the back of the bus.” ~ Uma Thurman
- “I don’t think I would worry about an oversaturation of information if it was indeed information. It is the slovenly, hasty traffic in cliché and sensationalism and bad reasoning that bothers me. I love finding arcane primary texts on the web. The people who think to put them up are heroes of mine.” ~ Marilynne Robinson
- “Film theory has nothing to do with film.” ~ Roger Ebert
- “The impediment to scientific thinking is not, I think, the difficulty of the subject. Complex intellectual feats have been mainstays even of oppressed cultures. Shamans, magicians and theologians are highly skilled in their intricate and arcane arts. No, the impediment is political and hierarchical.” ~ Carl Sagan
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“One of the wonderful things about being a writer is that you’re constantly dredging up some arcane knowledge or long-forgotten experience, rediscovering old passions and interests.” ~ Christina Baker Kline
- “(with trout) we are touching something unrestricted, wild and arcane, beyond the reach of those who carefully maintain one-dimensional lives. There is, I tell myself, someone in the city nearby whose one contact today with unreconstructed nature will be to step into a diminutive pile of poodle excrement” ~ Russell Chatham
- “The value of market esoterica to the consumer of investment advice is a different story. In my opinion, investment success will not be produced by arcane formulae, computer programs or signals flashed by the price behavior of stocks and markets. Rather an investor will succeed by coupling good business judgment with an ability to insulate his thoughts and behavior from the super-contagious emotions that swirl about the marketplace.” ~ Warren Buffett
- “Science, the largest religion of the twentieth century, had become tarnished by images of exploding space shuttles, crack babies, and a generation of complacent Americans who allowed the television to raise their children. People were looking for something – I think they just didn’t know what. And even though they were once again starting to open their eyes to the world of magic and the arcane that had been with them all the while, they still thought I must be some kind of joke.” ~ Jim Butcher
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“Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake.” ~ Nancy Pearcey
- “The rites of passage in the academic world are arcane and, in their own way, highly romantic, and the tensions and unplesantries of dissertations and final oral examinations are quickly forgotten in the wonderful moment of the sherry afterward, admission into a very old club, parties of celebration, doctoral gowns, academic rituals, and hearing for the first time “Dr.,” rather than “Miss” Jamison.” ~ Kay Redfield Jamison
- “To be successful, you should concentrate on the world of companies, not arcane accounting mathematics.” ~ Warren Buffett
- “Many faculty retreated into academic specializations and an arcane language that made them irrelevant to the task of defending the university as a public good, except for in some cases a very small audience. This has become more and more clear in the last few years as academics have become so insular, often unwilling or unable to defend the university as a public good, in spite of the widespread attacks on academic freedom, the role of the university as a democratic public sphere, and the increasing reduction of knowledge to a saleable commodity, and students to customers.” ~ Henry Giroux
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“Some string theorists prefer to believe that string theory is too arcane to be understood by human beings, rather than consider the possibility that it might just be wrong.” ~ Lee Smolin
- “Then all at once in late August’s heat, tall leafless stalks crowned with iridescent pink and purple blossoms burst from the purgatory in the earth. This arcane act of nature, though perceived by us as ordinary, is a manifestation of Maya’s phantom play, the great immensity expressed in every way. My garden is the universe. I am the universe. I am my garden. All things are the same.” ~ Duane Michals
- “The more passive one’s life in the field, the greater the need to reverse the situation when one returns home, which is why the arcane and authoritative character of academic writing may be seen, to some extent, as a vengeful reaction to the inertia, uneventfulness, and waiting one had to endure as a guest at someone else’s banquet. A way of redressing an existental imbalance, as it were reclaiming authorial will by superimposing one’s own meaning on theirs…” ~ Michael Jackson
- “One of them had a large wooden sign nailed to its door proclaiming, NO SYMPATHY! I wondered what non-arcane visitors might think of the warning.” ~ Patrick Rothfuss
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“Nothing like an arcane literary debate with your tyrannical master while you pass the time leading to your execution.” ~ Elizabeth Wein
- “Do you think I am a fool, Masha? All this time, and you speak to me as though I were a flighty pinprick of a girl. I am a magician! Did you never think, even once, that I loved lipstick and rouge for more than their color alone? I am a student of their lore, and it is arcane and hermetic beyond the dreams of alchemists. Did you never wonder why I gave you so many pots, so many creams, so much perfume?” ~ Catherynne M. Valente
- “It’s been a tough couple of years for condescending nerds. And if bookstores fall, Jon, America will be inundated with a wandering, snarky underclass of unemployable purveyors of useless and arcane esoterica.” ~ John Hodgman
- “Deep down, you see, I long to be arcane, esoteric. I would love to confound people with their own language.” ~ David Levithan
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“Unfortunately for a multitude of occultists, humor is a rare ingredient in their lives. In fact it is their very lack of humor that has impelled them into the arcane and esoteric.” ~ Anton Szandor LaVey
- “Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.” ~ Ezra Pound
- “So the freshness lives on in a lemon, in the sweet-smelling house of the rind, the proportions, arcane and acerb.” ~ Pablo Neruda
- “Amanda Petrusich’s fascinating and insightful journey into the arcane netherworld of 78 records and its bring-‘em-back-alive collectors brims with the joy and passion of discovery, along with a heartfelt affection for those who keep alight the flame of our musical heritage.” ~ Lenny Kaye
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“Economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems.” ~ Milton Friedman
- “One of the leading uses of photography by the mass media came to be called photojournalism. From the late ‘twenties’ to the early ‘fifties’ what might have been the golden age of this speciality – photographers worked largely as the possessors of special and arcane skills, like the ancient priests who practiced and monopolized the skills of pictography or carving or manuscript illumination. In those halcyon days the photographer enjoyed a privileged status.” ~ John Szarkowski
- “I didn’t expect to love being online as much as I do. I’ve met some wonderful people and discovered that however arcane some of my interests that there are people out there who are interested too.” ~ Sara Sheridan
- “The law can seem remote, arcane, the stuff of specialists. But it isn’t, because for those of us who live in democracies, the law begins with us.” ~ Shereen El Feki
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“Artspeak is an arcane writing style that can result in a vocabulary of obscurities… Today, some of the more spectacular examples are in artist’s statements.” ~ Robert Genn
- “The lingo used in the space is so arcane and out of date that investors have no context for the discussions. The failure to establish a clear, effective communication system has been the biggest sin private equity has committed.” ~ Bob Rice
- “We should take comfort in two conjoined features of nature: first, that our world is incredibly strange and therefore supremely fascinating, second, that however bizarre and arcane our world might be, nature remains potentially comprehensible to the human mind.” ~ Stephen Jay Gould
- “Film theory has nothing to do with film. Students presumably hope to find out something about film, and all they will find out is an occult and arcane language designed only for the purpose of excluding those who have not mastered it and giving academic rewards to those who have. No one with any literacy, taste or intelligence would want to teach these courses, so the bona fide definition of people teaching them are people who are incapable of teaching anything else.” ~ Roger Ebert
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“We need to think about encryption not as this sort of arcane, black art. It’s a basic protection.” ~ Edward Snowden
- “The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power–and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition. But that’s not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.” ~ Barack Obama
- “The Devil’ is, historically, the God of any people that one personally dislikes… This serpent, SATAN, is not the enemy of Man, but He who made Gods of our race, knowing Good and Evil; He bade ‘Know Thyself!’ and taught Initiation. He is ‘The Devil’ of the Book of Thoth, and His emblem is BAPHOMET, the Androgyne who is the hieroglyph of arcane perfection… He is therefore Life, and Love.” ~ Aleister Crowley
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“For a lot of arcane shipping reasons, new comics, even digital ones, have a long history of only being released on Wednesdays.” ~ Brian K. Vaughan
- “The quantum theory of parallel universes is not the problem, it is the solution. It is not some troublesome, optional interpretation emerging from arcane theoretical considerations. It is the explanation – the only one that is tenable – of a remarkable and counter-intuitive reality.” ~ David Deutsch
- “The argument about marriage equality will one day seem as arcane and shocking to us as the fact that Rosa Parks had to get up and go to the back of the bus.” ~ Uma Thurman
