Confusion quotes
695 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside confusion — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Grief is perhaps an unknown territory for you. You might feel both helpless and hopeless without a sense of a 'map' for the journey. Confusion is the hallmark of a transition. To rebuild both your inner and outer world is a major project."
"I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."
"I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."
"You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart."
"People asking questions, lost in confusion, well I tell them there's no problem, only solutions."
"Multitasking divides your attention and leads to confusion and weakened focus."
"Confusion now hath made his masterpiece."
"Don’t accept the habitual as a natural thing. In times of disorder, of organized confusion, of de-humanized humanity, nothing should seem natural. Nothing should seem impossible to change."
"My best works are erotic displays of mental confusions.. with intrusions of irrelevant information."
"We are experiencing a real confusion here in the United States, you know. Why is it OK to drink, but it's not OK to take drugs? Blah, blah, blah. What's a crime? What's criminality? What can you do, what can't you do, and so forth. All these things are really confusing. A lot of it is really contradictory; it doesn't really make sense."
"Plurality which is not reduced to unity is confusion; unity which does not depend on plurality is tyranny."
"Discovering what you really want saves you endless confusion and wasted energy."
"Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood."
"It's a good thing we have gravity or else when birds died they'd just stay right up there. Hunters would be all confused."
"There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind."
"What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in the immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come"
"I am amazed that Congressmen can pass a bill imposing severe penalties on anyone who burns the American flag, whereas they are responsible for burning that for which the flag stands: the United States as a territory, as a people, and as a biological manifestation. That is an example of our perennial confusion of symbols with realities."
"Some of the most serious fallacies of traditional economics have been due to confusion between optimum and equilibrium conditions; the apparent influence of Dr. Pangloss upon the development of economic thought is for the most part nothing but pure intellectual error."
"An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission."
"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."
