Bewilder Quotes & Sayings

With my feet upon the ground, I lose myself between the sounds and open wide to suck it in; I feel it move across my skin. Reaching up and reaching out, I'm reaching for the random or whatever will bewilder me. Following our will and wind, we may just go where no one's been. Let's ride the spiral to the end, we may just go where no one's been ... — Tool

Take myself as a good-will ambassador. I'm great - I'm taking myself as a character - for the intellectuals and the man on the street. I'm great where Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. leaves off. I'm
not so good with high society, in either North or South America, because I'm highly unconventional. Perhaps I bewilder people by being at once the esthete, the intellectual and the
vulgarian. — Orson Welles

Speak of the appetite for drink; or of a bon-vivant's relish for dinner! What are these mere animal throes and ragings compared with those fantasies of taste, of those yearning of the imagination, of those insatiable appetites of intellect, which bewilder a student in a great bookseller's temptation-hall. — Henry Ward Beecher

Reason cannot account for those moments in life that "bewilder the intellect yet utterly quiet the heart," as G.K. Chesterton observed. — Eric Weiner

I would rather be the good aunt who never says anything bad and lets the parents discipline the child. — Ellen DeGeneres

Not everything needed to rise to converge: It could just drift together into the indiscernible middle, and bewilder you. — Jonathan Lethem

Things that happen to us, even the bad stuff, can often teach us a little bit about ourselves. — R.J. Palacio

Can't help but see the wariness, the effort, the impatience. I can't help but see two people together out of a sense of genetic duty, doomed already to bewilder and disappoint each other, each honor-bound to defy the other. — Khaled Hosseini

It is probably better that the world knows only the result, not the conditions under which it was achieved; because knowledge of the artist's sources of inspiration might bewilder them, drive them away and in that way nullify the effect of the excellent work. — Thomas Mann

He liked to bewilder his pupils, it was a form of tyranny. — John Banville

SCIENCE! thou fair effusive ray
From the great source of mental Day,
Free, generous, and refin'd!
Descend with all thy treasures fraught,
Illumine each bewilder'd thought,
And bless my labour'g mind. — Mark Akenside

Heap not on this mound roses that she loved so well; why bewilder her with roses that she cannot see or smell. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

I never thought before, that there was a woman in the world who could affect me so much by saying so little. But don't be hard in your construction of me. You don't know what my state of mind towards you is. You don't know how you haunt and bewilder me. You don't know how the cursed carelessness that is over-officious in helping me at every other turning of my life WON'T help me here. You have struck it dead, I think, and I sometimes wish you had struck me dead along with it. — Charles Dickens

What people experience as obstacles in life are reflections of a decision to shut out understanding. If you shut out too much understanding, you become a victim, subject to forces that bewilder and overwhelm you. — Deepak Chopra

Rousseau introduced the idea of false needs, and showed how the systems we live in work against our growing up: they dazzle us with toys and bewilder us with so many trivial products that we are too busy making silly choices to remember that the adult ones are made by others. — Susan Neiman

We are closest to people when we help them grow. — Milton Mayeroff

There used to be, dirtside, a legal defenses called "diminished capacity" and "not guilty by reason on insanity." These concepts would bewilder a Loonie. In Luna City a man would necessarily be of diminished mental capacity to even think about rape; to carry one out would be the strongest possible proof of insanity - but among Loonies such mental disorders would not gain a rapist any sympathy. loonies do not psychoanalyze a rapist; they kill him. Now. Fast. Brutally. — Robert A. Heinlein

You wonder what I am doing? Well, so do I, in truth. Days seem to dawn, suns to shine, evenings to follow, and then I sleep. What I have done, what I am doing, what I am going to do, puzzle and bewilder me. Have you ever been a leaf and fallen from your tree in autumn and been really puzzled about it? That's the feeling.
(T.E. Lawrence to artist Eric Kennington, May 1935 ) — T.E. Lawrence

I am more than a black guy. I am a person, I'm storyteller, I'm a son, I'm a friend, so I am all those things so it is frustrating to a degree to be limited by other people's perceptions of me but at the same time, it is true that I am a black guy and it's like I'm rooted in, but not bound by. That sort of mentality, that's the one that I hold to be true. — Justin Simien

I have a theatrical temperament. I'm not interested in the middle road - maybe because everyone's on it. Rationality, reasonableness bewilder me. — Joan Didion

And still I look for the men who will dare to be
roses of England
wild roses of England
men who are wild roses of England
with metal thorns, beware!
but still more brave and still more rare
the courage of rosiness in a cabbage world
fragrance of roses in a stale stink of lies
rose-leaves to bewilder the clever fools
and rose-briars to strangle the machine. — D.H. Lawrence

Life has a tendency to obfuscate and bewilder, Such as fating us to spend the first part of our lives being embarrassed by our parents and the last part being embarrassed by our children. — Ogden Nash

He could have been married last year, but for his fascination with Lydia Charingford. The mornings when he tipped his hat to her on the street were always the brightest. He smiled when he saw her. He saw so little hope in the world, and she saw far too much. There were days he wanted to sit and watch her, to figure out where all that good cheer came from. — Courtney Milan

Some mornings you wake up fully in your body, and you know this is all there is
the air, the shape your body makes in the air, your hand, the skin that covers your hand, the air that covers your skin, the light that fills the air, a few colors in the light, this one thought, this dream dissolving
it is a dream that, in your half-awake state, embarrasses you. You don't tell it to the woman waking up beside you, the woman you love, because it is about another woman, whom you might also love. This is the dream you need to hold onto, this is your shadow speaking, attempting to bewilder you again. Sometimes, if you lay still, you can feel the air entering each cell, sometimes you can feel the blood in your lips. Sometimes, if you lay very still, you can feel the whole web tremble. — Nick Flynn

God never ceases to speak to us, but the noise of the world without and the tumult of our passions within bewilder us and prevent us from listening to him — Francois Fenelon

Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous. — Annie Dillard

Beauty and youth. What a dazzling combination. To bewilder and to sparkle. Days filled with sunshine. And men worshiping at her feet. Love was a game she played with wantonness and mischief.

-Fabulous — Jofelyn Martinez Khapra

Parents who experience pause from "the unnecessary beauty of an ice storm coating trees," while their kids - who "bewilder well," she writes - are simply looking for something to throw. — Durga Chew-Bose

My works were designed to amuse, annoy, bewilder, mystify and inspire reflection. — Man Ray

Those three means are Mystery, Miracle, and Prophecy. The first two are incompatible with true religion, and the third ought always to be suspected.
As mystery answered all general purposes, miracle followed as an occasional auxiliary. The former served to bewilder the mind, the latter to puzzle the senses. The one was the lingo, the other the legerdemain.
As Mystery and Miracle took charge of the past and the present, Prophecy took charge of the future, and rounded the tenses of faith. — Thomas Paine

Still on it creeps, Each little moment at another's heels, Till hours, days, years, and ages are made up Of such small parts as these, and men look back Worn and bewilder'd, wondering how it is. — Joanna Baillie

Facts are of not much use, considered as facts. They bewilder by their number and their apparent incoherency. Let them be digested into theory, however, and brought into mutual harmony, and it is another matter. — Oliver Heaviside

Some people give gifts in order to bewilder, confuse, and manipulate their recipients. — Mallory Ortberg