Confusion Quotes - Page 25

• A person who is trained to consider his actions, to undertake them deliberately, is in so far forth disciplined. Add to this ability a power to endure in an intelligently chosen course in the face of distraction, confusion, and difficulty, and you have the essence of discipline.

  John Dewey

  Essence, Discipline, Faces

  John Dewey (2015). “Democracy and Education: Top American Authors”, p.98, 谷月社

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• There is no appeal from the ways of the world, which must continue on its own terms or take us all down with it into chaos and confusion.

  Mark Van Doren

  Society, World, Way

  Mark Van Doren (1961). “The Happy Critic and Other Essays”

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• Oh, blank confusion! true epitome Of what the mighty City is herself, To thousands upon thousands of her sons, Living amid the same perpetual whirl Of trivial objects, melted and reduced To one identity.

  William Wordsworth

  Son, Cities, Identity

  William Wordsworth (1994). “The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth”, p.698, Wordsworth Editions

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• In history as it comes to be written, there is usually some Spirit of the Age which historians can define, but the shape of things is seldom so clear to those who live them. To most thoughtful men it has generally seemed that theirs was an Age of Confusion.

  Joseph Wood Krutch

  Thoughtful, Men, Age

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• It is the artist's function not to copy but to synthesise: to eliminate from that gross confusion of actuality which is his raw material whatever is accidental, idle, irrelevant, and select for perpetuation that only which is appropriate and immortal.

  William Ernest Henley

  Artist, Raw Materials, Select

  William Ernest Henley (1921). “The Works of William Ernest Henley: Views and reviews”

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• I think that when you're writing fiction what you're doing is reflecting life as you see it, and putting down how you think and how other people think, and the sort of confusions that you don't normally like to admit to.

  Helen Fielding

  Writing, Thinking, People

  "Dumped Bridget, wrote spy novel". Interview with John Walsh, www.theguardian.com. November 7, 2003.

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• Plurality which is not reduced to unity is confusion; unity which does not depend on plurality is tyranny.

  Blaise Pascal

  Unity, Doe, Tyranny

  Blaise Pascal (2013). “Pensées”, p.261, Courier Corporation

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• I remember, as a child, the confusion of not knowing what this place was where I was supposed to spend the night: it's a disquieting experience for a child. And what I would do was quickly unpack my books and go back to a book I knew well and make sure the same text and the same illustrations were there.

  Alberto Manguel

  Children, Book, Night

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• Life and death are nothing but the mind. Years, months, days, and hours are nothing but the mind. Dreams, illusions, and mirages are nothing but the mind. The bubbles of water and the flames of fire are nothing but the mind. The flowers of the spring and the moon of the autumn are nothing but the mind. Confusions and dangers are nothing but the mind.

  Dogen

  Dream, Spring, Flower

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• The whole motley confusion of acts, omissions, regrets and hopes which is the life of each one of us finds in death, not meaning or explanation, but an end.

  Octavio Paz

  Regret, Omission, Life And Death

  Octavio Paz (1985). “The Labyrinth of Solitude: And the Other Mexico ; Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude ; Mexico and the United States ; The Philanthropic Ogre”, p.54, Grove Press

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• Politics is the practical exercise of the art of self-government, and somebody must attend to it if we are to have self-government; somebody must study it, and learn the art, and exercise patience and sympathy and skill to bring the multitude of opinions and wishes of self-governing people into such order that some prevailing opinion may be expressed and peaceably accepted. Otherwise, confusion will result either in dictatorship or anarchy. The principal ground of reproach against any American citizen should be that he is not a politician. Everyone ought to be, as Lincoln was.

  Elihu Root

  Art, Exercise, Self

  "Men and Policies: Addresses". Book by Elihu Root, ed. Robert Bacon and James B. Scott, p. 75, "Lincoln as a Leader of Men", 1924.

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• People who have never had an ideal may hope to find one; they are in a better state than the people who allow the circumstances of life to break their ideal. To fall beneath one's ideal is to lose one's track in life; then confusion rises in the mind, and that light which one should hold high becomes covered and obscured, so that it cannot shine out to light one's path.

  Hazrat Inayat Khan

  Fall, Light, People

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• You get a sense of reference there. You feel part of something that's got order and balance and harmony to it. All the distraction and noise, all the confusion of misplaced, misdirected energy just don't happen there.

  Harrison Ford

  Order, Land, Balance And Harmony

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• I watch the confusion of friends all numb with love moving like stray dogs to the anthem of night long conversations of pulsing rhythms and random voltage voices in spite of themselves graceful as these raindrops creeping spermlike across the car window.

  Bruce Cockburn

  Friendship, Dog, Moving

  Song: You Pay Your Money and You Take Your Chance, Album: Inner City Front

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• As soon as one point alone is removed from the sphere of dogmatic certainty, the discussion will not simply result in a new and better formulation which will have greater consistency but may easily lead to endless debates and general confusion.

  Adolf Hitler

  Media, May, Spheres

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• I have many debates now with friends on the changes, and the continuing confusion over bringing up your children, instilling values, letting them make the right choices.

  Olivia Williams

  Children, Choices, Debate

  "Olivia Williams: 'It can be unnerving working for Polanski'" by Euan Ferguson, www.theguardian.com. April 10, 2010.

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• The corollary of constant change is ignorance. This is not often talked about: we computer experts barely know what we're doing. We're good at fussing and figuring out. We function well in a sea of unknowns. Our experience has only prepared us to deal with confusion. A programmer who denies this is probably lying, or else is densely unaware of himself.

  Ellen Ullman

  Lying, Ignorance, Sea

  Ellen Ullman (2012). “Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents”, p.110, Macmillan

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• The most obvious and yet the oldest and most stubborn error on which the appeal of inflation rests is that of confusing ‘money’ with ‘wealth’…Real wealth, of course, consists in what is produced and consumed: the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in. It is railways and roads and motor cars; ships and planes and factories; schools and churches and theaters; pianos, paintings and books. Yet so powerful is the verbal ambiguity that confuses money with wealth, that even those who at times recognize the confusion will slide back into it in the course of their reasoning.

  Henry Hazlitt

  Powerful, Real, Book

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• Whenever I take a position, I like to imagine what it would be like under the worst-case scenario. In doing so, I minimize the confusion if that situation actually develops. In my view, losses are a very important part of trading. When a loss happens, I believe in embracing it.

  Gil Blake

  Believe, Loss, Views

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• The truth is that when it comes to suffering, if we do not go to our graves in confusion, we will not go to our graves trusting. Explanations are a substitute for trust.

  Tullian Tchividjian

  Suffering, Truth Is, Graves

  "Where Is God in Our Suffering? Tullian Tchividjian's 'Glorious Ruin' Offers New Perspective". Interview with Stoyan Zaimov, www.christianpost.com. October 30, 2012.

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• The world men inhabit is rather bleak. It is a world full of doubt and confusion, where vulnerability must be hidden, not shared; where competition, not co-operation, is the order of the day; where men sacrifice the possibility of knowing their own children and sharing in their upbringing, for the sake of a job they may have chosen by chance, which may not suit them and which in many cases dominates their lives to the exclusion of much else.

  Anna Ford

  Jobs, Children, Sacrifice

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• Instant success are seldom instant and if you talk to the people behind these successes, you'll find out that they came after months of fear, uncertainty and confusion along with a flagrant lack of adoption.

  Guy Kawasaki

  People, Adoption, Months

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• We choose our leaders, political or spiritual, out of our own confusion, and so they also are confused.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Leadership, Spiritual, Confused

  Jiddu Krishnamurti (1956). “Commentaries on Living”, p.126, Penguin Books India

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• The Mind cannot be confused, but it is confusion.

  Dennis Merzel

  Buddhist, Confused, Mind

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• As the idea imparted by the term Cataclysm, Catastrophe, or Revolution, is extremely vague, and may comprehend any thing you choose to imagine, it answers for the time very well as an explanation; that is, it stops further inquiry. But it also has had the disadvantage of effectually stopping the advance of science, by involving it in obscurity and confusion.

  George Julius Poulett Scrope

  Science, Ideas, Imagination

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