Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jonathan Safran Foer

I never confused what I had with what I was.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Among so many conflicting ideas and so many different perspectives, the honest man is confused and distressed and the skeptic becomes wicked ... Since one must take sides, one might as well choose the side that is victorious, the side which devastates, loots, and burns. Considering the alternative, it is better to eat than to be eaten.

Napoleon Bonaparte

The first quality of the commander-in-chief is a cool head to receive a correct impression of things. He should not allow himself to be confused by either good or bad news.

Norman Mailer

Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.

Os Guinness

American views today are weak, confused, and divided. On one side, many progressive liberals still think that we humans are essentially good and getting better and better. On the other side, many postmoderns actually think it is worse to judge evil than to do evil. And in the middle, many ordinary folk plaster life with rainbows and smile buttons and wander through life on the basis of sentiment and clichés.

Orson Welles

Even if I'd stayed [in the US to finish 'The Magnificent Ambersons'] I would've had to make compromises on the editing, but these would've been mine and not the fruit of confused and often semi-hysterical committees. If I had been there myself I would have found my own solutions and saved the pictures in a form which would have carried the stamp of my own effort.

Bob Ney

This is a good, responsible bill, ... People are starting to become confused about what Shays-Meehan is anymore.

Emraan Hashmi

I was never really interested in studies and was hot-headed and rebellious in college, as I was totally confused and insecure but was not coming to terms with it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Man... knows only when he is satisfied and when he suffers, and only his sufferings and his satisfactions instruct him concerning himself, teach him what to seek and what to avoid. For the rest, man is a confused creature; he knows not whence he comes or whither he goes, he knows little of the world, and above all, he knows little of himself.

Octavio Paz

Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once.

An 18-year-old kid can get confused in that situation. It's impossible to go around and tell every player what to do on every pitch. We have to learn as a team that in the late innings, which runners matter and which ones don't, and that wasn't the time to try and make a play.

Simone de Beauvoir

The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence.

Simon Sinek

Humility, I have learned, must never be confused with meekness. Humility is being open to the ideas of others.

Tim Gunn

Why must she dress that way? I think she's confused about her gender.

Thomas Brooks

Though our private desires are ever so confused, though our private requests are ever so broken, and though our private groanings are ever so hidden from men, yet God eyes them, records them, and puts them upon the file of heaven, and will one day crown them with glorious answers and returns.

Thomas Szasz

Like Karl Kraus, [Wittgenstein] was seldom pleased by what he saw of the institutions of men, and the idiom of the passerby mostly offended his ear particularly when they happened to speak philosophically; and like Karl Kraus, he suspected that the institutions could not but be corrupt if the idiom of the race was confused, presumptuous, and vacuous, a fabric of nonsense, untruth, deception, and self-deception.

Lily Tomlin

You can't expect insights, even the big ones, to make you suddenly understand everything. But I figure: Hey it's a step in the right direction if they leave you confused in a deeper way.

Laurie Anderson

If I'm confused, I just spend some time looking at the sky and falling into it. It's not a meditation that anyone taught me, it's something I've done my whole life, and liked doing, and it made me feel like nothing.

Terry Pratchett

Cutangle: While I'm still confused and uncertain, it's on a much higher plane, d'you see, and at least I know I'm bewildered about the really fundamental and important facts of the universe. Treatle: I hadn't looked at it like that, but you're absolutely right. He's really pushed back the boundaries of ignorance. They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were only ignorant of ordinary things.

Terry Pratchett

Whatever happens, they say afterwards, it must have been fate. People are always a little confused about this, as they are in the case of miracles. When someone is saved from certain death by a strange concatenation of circumstances, they say that's a miracle. But of course if someone is killed by a freak chain of events -- the oil spilled just there, the safety fence broken just there -- that must also be a miracle. Just because it's not nice doesn't mean it's not miraculous.

Terry Gross

I've always been really curious about things and slightly confused by the world, and I think someone who feels that way is in a good position to be the one asking questions.

Marcus Aurelius

Be not careless in deeds, nor confused in words, nor rambling in thought.

Peter Kropotkin

The confused mass of rules of conduct called law, which has been bequeathed to us by slavery, serfdom, feudalism, and royalty, has taken the place of those stone monsters, before whom human victims used to be immolated, and whom slavish savages dared not even touch lest they should be slain by the thunderbolts of heaven.

Pauly Shore

My 20s were a time where I made it; my 30s were when I was away, confused, and trying to figure it all out.

Peter S. Beagle

Writing has nothing to do with publishing. Nothing. People get totally confused about that. You write because you have to - you write because you can't not write. The rest is show-business. I can't state that too strongly. Just write - worry about the rest of it later, if you worry at all. What matters is what happens to you while you're writing the story, the poem, the play. The rest is show-business.

Peter Jennings

Don't be confused that my interest in religion, faith, and spirituality is driven by any sense of faith or spirituality of my own.

Rachel Field

I used to think I had ambition... but now I'm not so sure. It may have been only discontent. They're easily confused.

Plato

Man's music is seen as a means of restoring the soul, as well as confused and discordant bodily afflictions, to the harmonic proportions that it shares with the world soul of the cosmos.

Josiah Warren

I decline all noisy, wordy, confused, and personal controversies.

James Allen

There can be no progress nor achievement without sacrifice, and a man's worldly success will be by the measure that he sacrifices his confused animal thoughts, and fixes his mind on the development of his plans, and the strengthening of his resolution and self-reliance.

Jake Gyllenhaal

I don't think I had any idea at the time how to work with someone as masterful as he is. And I don't think at the time I really understood what was happening. I think I was in a space where I was like: there are all these things. I was shooting all these takes with David [Fincher], and I was just confused, as a person, and as an actor feeling a little too big for my britches and that this thing was happening and then also not having enough skill yet, and technique to know exactly where I was, and know about the character.

Henry A. Kissinger

Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.

Helen Hayes

The good die young but not always. The wicked prevail but not consistently. I am confused by life, and I feel safe within the confines of the theatre.