Weekend Words: Confusion
"The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes. "
On Thursday, Fiona Symon and Jennifer Thompson, reporting on the previous day’s events, wrote in the Financial Times, “Donald Trump sowed confusion over his immigration stance in a highly anticipated speech that stressed that there would be ‘no amnesty’ for illegal residents” while leaving unclear “the fate of some of the 11m undocumented immigrants in the US.”
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Confusion will be my epitaph
As I crawl a cracked and broken path
If we make it we can all sit back and laugh,
But I fear tomorrow I’ll be crying.
—Peter Sinfield, sung by King Crimson, “Epitaph”
Advertising is 85% confusion and 15% commission.
—Fred Allen
Social confusion has now reached a point at which the pursuit of immorality turns out to be more exhausting than compliance with the old moral codes.
—Denis de Rougemont
Segregation, determination, demonstration, integration,
Aggravation, humiliation, obligation to our nation.
Ball of confusion. Oh yeah, that’s what the world is today.
—Norman Whitfield & Barrett Strong, sung by the Temptations, “Ball of Confusion”
Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.
—Katherine Anne Porter
Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong-these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.
—Sir Winston Churchill, Speech, House of Commons, May 2, 1935
I want to set you free, recognize my disease
Love, sex, pain, confusion, suffering
You’re there crying, I feel not a thing
—Layne Staley, sung by Alice in Chains, “Confusion”
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
—George Santayana
I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.
—Baruch Spinoza
Lady you bereft me of all words,
Only my blood speaks to you in my veins,
And there is such confusion in my powers.
—William Shakespeare
The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes.
—James Agee
The confusion is not my invention. We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of.
—Samuel Beckett
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
By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.
—G. K. Chesterton
The approval of the public is to be avoided like the plague. It is absolutely essential to keep the public from entering if one wishes to avoid confusion. I must add that the public must be kept panting in expectation at the gate by a system of challenges and provocations.
—Andre Breton
There must be some way out of here” said the joker to the thief
“There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief”
—Bob Dylan, “All Along the Watchtower”
Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.
—James Thurber
Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don’t practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us – and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along.
—Carl Sagan
