Confusion Quotes - Page 8

• Guilt was never a rational thing; it distorts all the faculties of the human mind, it perverts them, it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason, it puts him into confusion.

  Edmund Burke

  Men, Mind, Guilt

  William Pitt (Earl of Chatham), Edmund Burke, Thomas Erskine Baron Erskine, Jean Gabriel Peltier (1834). “Celebrated Speeches of Chatham, Burke, and Erskine: To which is Added the Arguement of Mr. Mackintosh in the Case of Peltier”, p.298

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• In their confusion and delusion, men hate the womb that gives them birth. Not all men, certainly , but enough men to run the world.

  Frederick Lenz

  Running, Women, Hate

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• I think what's happened in art criticism, or art thinking, in last 30 or 40 years is a confusion between the "what" - the subject - and the "how." Most attention goes to the "what," but it's the "how" that's the important part - how something is brought into being.

  Joe Bradley

  Art, Thinking, Years

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Why do we love the idea that people might be secretly working together to control and organise the world? Because we don't like to face the fact that our world runs on a combination of chaos, incompetence and confusion.

  Jonathan Cainer

  Running, Ideas, Our World

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• Concentration and mindfulness are the internal ways in which the mind restores itself from being out of balance and lost in confusion to a condition of ease, clarity, and wisdom. No external action needs to happen.

  Sylvia Boorstein

  Mind, Balance, Needs

  Sylvia Boorstein, Ph.D. (2008). “Happiness Is an Inside Job: Practicing for a Joyful Life”, p.14, Ballantine Books

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• I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.

  David Foster Wallace

  Thinking, People, Stupidity

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• To better understand God we must first shatter our own idea of God - maybe even day after day. Maybe he's too great to stay compressed in the human mind. Maybe he splits it wide open; this is why pretentious intellectualism so often fails to comprehend the concept of God: it is only accepting of what it can explain while in the process finding higher sources offensive. What we may confidently assert is that faith is the opening that allows God, this unpredictable, unseen power, to travel in and out of the mind without all the pains of confusion.

  Criss Jami

  Pain, Ideas, Mind

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• The Great Story of our immense journey contains crucial lessons for guiding humanity safely through the dangers and confusions evident today. This grand epic will propel us forward in a spirit of expectant curiosity. We will place our trust not only in the Whole but also in our own species' capacity to serve as the vessel through which the evolutionary impulse is most active at this time.

  Michael Dowd

  Epic, Journey, Humanity

  Michael Dowd (2008). “Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World”, p.260, Penguin

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• Men tighten the knot of confusion Into perfect misunderstanding.

  T. S. Eliot

  Men, Perfect, Knots

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950”, p.239, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Thus with most careful devotion Thus with precise attention To detail, interfering preparation Of that which is already prepared Men lighten the knot of confusion Into perfect misunderstanding, Reflecting a pocket-torch of observation.

  T. S. Eliot

  Men, Perfect, Preparation

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• There is a time when every person who encounters Jesus, who believes Jesus is the Son of God, decides that they will spend their life following Him. Some people, like the Apostle Paul, make this decision the minute they meet Him, the minute they become a Christian. Others, like the Apostle Peter, endure years of half-hearted commitment and spiritual confusion before leaping in with all their passion. Still others may enjoy some benefits of God's love and grace without entering into the true joy of a marriage with their maker.

  Donald Miller

  Christian, Spiritual, Jesus

  Donald Miller (2007). “Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God”, p.60, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• Men who have lost their conviction of what is good and what is bad find themselves without a sextant to check their position by. We are in the position of a man with an elaborate camping kit who finds himself lost in the woods without his matches; to kindle a fire he has to resort to the stratagems of the caveman. We fall back through generations into the oldest terrors and confusions of the race.

  John Dos Passos

  Fall, Men, Fire

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• No themes are so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connection of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt, so dangling before us forever that bright hard medal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody's right and ease and the other somebody's pain and wrong.

  Henry James

  Hurt, Pain, Forever

  Henry James, William Veeder, Susan M. Griffin (1986). “The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and the Practice of Fiction”, p.318, University of Chicago Press

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• I had a lot of hurts and confusions. You know, it's hard when you're a kid to be different. You're all full of things, and you don't know that it's about.

  Janis Joplin

  Hurt, Kids, Different

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• In general, fire is used to throw enemies into confusion so that you can attack them.

  Du Mu

  Fire, Enemy, Used

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• Most people die in improvised circumstances of harassment and confusion, whether in hospital or out of it.

  Germaine Greer

  People, Circumstances, Harassment

  "The Madwoman's Underclothes". Book by Germaine Greer, 1986.

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• The world is full of warfare 'twixt the evil and the good;I watched the battle from afar as one who understoodThe shouting and confusion, the bloody, blundering fight-How few there are that see it clear, how few that wage it right!

  Henry Van Dyke

  Fighting, Evil, Battle

  Henry Van Dyke (1920). “The Poems of Henry Van Dyke”

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• See how today's achievement is only tomorrow's confusion;See how possession always cheapens the thing that was precious.

  William Dean Howells

  Achievement, Today, Tomorrow

  William Dean Howells (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells (Illustrated)”, p.9151, Delphi Classics

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• What is called chance is the instrument of Providence and the secret agent that counteracts what men call wisdom, and preserves order and regularity, and continuation in the whole, for ... I firmly believe, notwithstanding all our complaints, that almost every person upon earth tastes upon the totality more happiness than misery; and therefore if we could correct the world to our fancies, and with the best intentions imaginable, probably we should only produce more misery and confusion.

  Horace Walpole

  Believe, Men, Order

  Horace Walpole (1904). “The letters of Horace Walpole: fourth earl of Orford”

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• Anarchy is a word that comes from the Greek, and signifies, strictly speaking, "without government": the state of a people without any constituted authority. Before such an organization had begun to be considered possible and desirable by a whole class of thinkers, so as to be taken as the aim of a movement (which has now become one of the most important factors in modern social warfare), the word "anarchy" was used universally in the sense of disorder and confusion, and it is still adopted in that sense by the ignorant and by adversaries interested in distorting the truth.

  Errico Malatesta

  Taken, Class, Organization

  "Anarchy". Pamphlet by Errico Malatesta, www.marxists.org. 1891.

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• Until we in the community have made up our minds that what we really want is expiation, or removal, or reform, or or the discouragement of potential criminals, we shall get none of these, but only a confusion in which crime breeds more crime.

  Norbert Wiener

  Community, Mind, Want

  Norbert Wiener (1988). “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”, p.110, Da Capo Press

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• Russia, Russia - unwashed, backward, appealing Russia, so ashamed of your own backwardness, so orientally determined to conceal it from us by clever deceit. So sensitive and so suspicious in the face of the wicked, civilized west. I shall always remember you slyly, touchingly, but with great shouting and confusion - pumping hot water into our sleeping car in the frosty darkness of a December morning in order that we might not know, in order that we might never realize, to how primitive a land we had come.

  George F. Kennan

  Morning, Clever, Sleep

  "George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy". Book by David Allan Mayers, p. 30, 1988.

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• Someone who has thought rationally and deeply about how the body works is likely to arrive at better ideas about how to be healthy than someone who has followed a hunch. Medicine presupposes a hierarchy between the confusion the layperson will be in about what is wrong with him, and the more accurate knowledge available to doctors reasoning logically. At the heart of Epicureanism is the thought that we are as bad at answering the question "What will make me happy?" as "What will make me healthy?" Our souls do not spell out their troubles.

  Alain de Botton

  Heart, Medicine, Doctors

  "The Consolations of Philosophy". Book by Alain de Botton, 2000.

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• To mystify, in the active sense, is to befuddle, cloud, obscure, mask whatever is going on, whether this be experience, action, or process, or whatever is "the issue." It induces confusion in the sense that there is failure to see what is "really" being experienced, or being done, or going on, and failure to distinguish or discriminate the actual issues. This entails the substitution of false for true constructions of what is being experienced, being done (praxis), or going on (process), and the substitution of false issues for the actual issues.

  R. D. Laing

  Clouds, Issues, Done

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• In certain cases, a man blind from birth may have an operation performed which gives him his sight. The result: frequently misery, confusion, disorientation. The light that illumines the madman is an unearthly light, but I do not believe it is a projection, an emanation from his mundane ego. He is irradiated by a light that is more than he. It may burn him out.

  R. D. Laing

  Believe, Men, Light

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