Confusion Quotes - Page 39

• The precision provided (or enforced) by programming languages and their execution can identify lacunas, ambiguities, and other areas of potential confusion in conventional [mathematical] notation.

  Kenneth E. Iverson

  Execution, Language, Programming

  "Math for the Layman" by Kenneth E. Iverson, Ch. 10, §D, www.cs.trinity.edu. 1999.

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• The new coherent picture is not yet available. With all their immense empirical success, G(eneral)R(elativity) and Q(uantum)M(echanics) have left us with an understanding of the physical world which is unclear and badly fragmented. At the foundations of physics there is today confusion and incoherence.

  Carlo Rovelli

  Understanding, Today, Foundation

  "Quantum gravity". Book by Carlo Rovelli, 2004.

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• Attention is our first duty whenever we want to know what is our second duty. There is no such cause of confusion and worry about what we ought to do, and how to do it, as our unwillingness to hear what God would tell us on that very point.

  Henry Clay Trumbull

  Worry, Want, Firsts

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, (p. 197), 1895.

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• The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy. Its best ally is not the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies. To fight it, we must understand it.

  Ayn Rand

  Philosophy, Fighting, Civilization

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• Believing in gods always causes confusion.

  Pearl S. Buck

  Believe, Causes, Believe In God

  Pearl S. Buck (2012). “Peony: A Novel of China”, p.28, Open Road Media

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• Often, in the student's confusion, she or he directs anger at the teacher, blaming them for the pain they are experiencing, or for their own mistakes.

  Frederick Lenz

  Teacher, Pain, Mistake

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• I know of scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination as the wonderful form of cosmic order expressed by the "Law of Frequency of Error." The law would have been personified by the Greeks and deified, if they had known of it. It reigns with serenity and in complete self-effacement, amidst the wildest confusion. The huger the mob, and the greater the apparent anarchy, the more perfect is its sway. It is the supreme law of Unreason.

  Francis Galton

  Math, Errors, Self

  Natural Inheritance Normal Variability (p. 66)

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• Refined policy ever has been the parent of confusion, and ever will be so as long as the world endures. Plain good intention, which is as easily discovered at the first view as fraud is surely detected at last, is of no mean force in the government of mankind.

  Edmund Burke

  Mean, Views, Government

  Edmund Burke, James BURKE (Barrister-at-Law.) (1854). “The Speeches of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, with Memoir and Historical Introductions. By James Burke”, p.75

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• ... an inaccurate use of words produces such a strange confusion in all reasoning, that in the heat of debate, the combatants, unable to distinguish their friends from their foes, fall promiscuously on both.

  Maria Edgeworth

  Fall, Use, Heat

  Maria Edgeworth, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1824). “Works of Maria Edgeworth: Letters to literary ladies. Castle Rackrent. Leonora. Essay on Irish bulls. 1824”, p.40

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• The very thing about people that makes the human race interesting is also the thing that makes it so hard to get anything done without the most horrible confusions: no two people think exactly the same way about anything.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Thinking, Race, Two

  Katherine Anne Porter, Isabel Bayley (1994). “Letters of Katherine Anne Porter”, p.283, Atlantic Monthly Press

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• Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too. Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer's first duty is to use language well.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Lying, Needs, Use

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1998). “Steering the craft: exercises and discussions on story writing for the lone navigator or the mutinous crew”, The Eighth Mountain Press

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• Infidelity is such a pretty word, so light and delicate. Whereas the act itself is dark and thick with guilt, betrayal, confusion, pain, and (okay) sometimes enormous pleasure.

  Cynthia Heimel

  Pain, Betrayal, Dark

  Cynthia Heimel (2002). “If You Can't Live Without Me, Why Aren't You Dead Yet?!”, p.161, Grove Press

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• Physicists use 'God' as a metaphor more often than other scientists-- especially in popular writing, but in the technical literature as well. Of course, this is just a metaphor for order at the heart of confusion. A rational or aesthetic pattern underlying reality is far from a theistic God.

  Taner Edis

  Writing, Heart, Reality

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• The conventional wisdom is - people say this all the time - you should only write something when you're far enough away from it that you can have a perspective. But that's not true. That's a story that you're telling. The truth of it is here, right now. It's the only truth that we ever know. And I'm interested in that truth and the confusion being part of the experience and sorting it your way through and figuring it out.

  Charlie Kaufman

  Writing, People, Perspective

  "Charlie Kaufman" by Scott Tobias, www.avclub.com. October 22, 2008.

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• How foolish it would be if women did not obey men. The world would be all confusion!

  Marie Corelli

  Men, Would Be, World

  Marie Corelli (2015). “Thelma: A Norwegian Princess”, p.161, The Floating Press

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• If childhood is still a state, it is now chiefly a state of confusion.

  Phyllis McGinley

  Childhood, States, Stills

  Phyllis McGinley (1962). “The province of the heart”

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• Hail, blest Confusion! here are met
  All tongues, and times, and faces;
  The Lancers flirt with Juliet,
  The Brahmin talks of races.

  Winthrop Mackworth Praed

  Flirting, Race, Tongue

  Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1859). “The poetical works of Winthrop Mackworth Praed”, p.209

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• How smartly September comes in, like a racing gig, all style, no confusion.

  Eleanor Clark

  Racing, Style, Gigs

  Eleanor Clark (1978). “Eyes, etc: a memoir”, HarperCollins

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• Italy is a country which is willing to submit itself to the worst governments. It is, as we know, a country ruled by disorder, cynicism, incompetence and confusion. Nevertheless we are aware of intelligence circulating in the streets like a vivid bloodstream.

  Natalia Ginzburg

  Country, Government, Vivid

  Natalia Ginzburg (2017). “The Little Virtues: Essays”, p.31, Skyhorse Publishing Inc.

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• To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life. The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy.

  Jane Jacobs

  Art, Mistake, Order

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.373, Vintage

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• Unless we do change our whole way of thought about work, I do not think we shall ever escape from the appalling squirrel-cage of economic confusion in which we have been madly turning for the last three centuries or so, the cage in which we landed ourselves by acquiescing in a social system based upon Envy and Avarice. A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Work, Thinking, Squirrels

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• I believe the deeply rooted semantic confusion between 'man' as a male and 'man' as a species has been fed back into and vitiated a great deal of the speculation that goes on about the origins, development, and nature of the human race.

  Elaine Morgan

  Believe, Men, Race

  Elaine Morgan (1973). “The descent of woman”

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• True virtue, when she errs, needs not the eyes of men to excite her blushes; she is confounded at her own presence, and covered with confusion of face.

  Jane Porter

  Eye, Men, Needs

  Sir Philip Sidney, Jane Porter (1807). “Aphorisms of Sir Philip Sidney: With Remarks”, p.18

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• we can't be creative if we refuse to be confused. Change always starts with confusion; cherished interpretations must dissolve to make way for what's new. Great ideas and inventions miraculously appear in the space of not knowing.

  Margaret J. Wheatley

  Change, Confused, Ideas

  Margaret J. Wheatley (2002). “Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future”, p.37, Berrett-Koehler Publishers

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• The confusion and undesigned inaccuracy so often to be observed in conversation, especially in that of uneducated persons, proves that truth needs to be cultivated as a talent, as well as recommended as a virtue.

  Elizabeth Fry

  Truth, Needs, Talent

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