Circuitous Quotes & Sayings

I came to acting in a very circuitous way. — Victoria Pratt

Don't be discouraged. At times the path to truth is circuitous. The point is not to succeed, only to smile eternally. — Frederick Lenz

Our lives, I've learned, don't simply proceed nicely and directly from "birth" to "death." Instead, I see each one of us as traveling a most curious and branching-out or circuitous route, one that is creative in ways that are both known and, I'm sure now, unknown. Ah, — Jane Roberts

In these remote corners, I have discovered a center point, where East met West, and although there has been a collision of cultures, there is now a new Christian identity that is distinctly Chinese.
The circuitous mountain path in Yunnan province is red because over many years it has been soaked with blood. — Liao Yiwu

Things have a way of being richer in the end, a product better made, for the circuitous route we take to include all the elements that are necessary for a job well done. — David Whyte

The movie business can be very frustrating and very circuitous; there's no straight path. You have to have tremendous perseverance, dedication and passion. You have to want it very, very badly and you have to deal with a lot of rejection. — Denise Di Novi

The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool. The brain is a product of evolution. Human behavior-like the deepest capacities for emotional respone which drive and guide it-is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact. — E. O. Wilson

Creativity works on a winding, circuitous route. — Gail Z. Martin

By altering his arrangements and changing his plans, the skillful general keeps the enemy without definite knowledge. By shifting his camp and taking circuitous routes, he prevents the enemy from anticipating his purpose. At the critical moment, the leader of an army acts like one who has climbed up a height and then kicks away the ladder behind him. — Sun Tzu

For cleverness and wisdom are as different as are the circuitous passages of a labyrinth and the straight, upward flight of a bird. — Evangeline Walton

Though recognition's been delayed by its circuitous construction, now the pattern, long concealed, emerges into view. Is it not fine? Is it not simple, and elegant, and severe? How strange, after the long exacting toil of preparation, it takes only the slightest effort and less thought to send this brief, elaborate amusement on its breathless, hurtling race. The merest touch, no more, and everything falls into place. The pieces can't perceive as we the mischief their arrangement tempts. Those stolid law-abiding queues, so pregnant with catastrophe. Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late. — Alan Moore

London always reminds me of a brain. It is similarly convoluted and circuitous. A lot of cities, especially American ones like New York and Chicago, are laid out in straight lines. Like the circuits on computer chips, there are a lot of right angles in cities like this. But London is a glorious mess. It evolved from a score or so of distinct villages, that merged and meshed as their boundaries enlarged. As a result, London is a labyrinth, full of turnings and twistings just like a brain. — James Geary

These dons, so ponderous, so circuitous, , no sense of time. In a minute they'll be talking about the meaning of meaning. — John Le Carre

Where does it all begin? History has no beginnings, for everything that happens becomes the cause or pretext for what occurs afterwards, and this chain of cause and pretext stretches back to the Palaeolithic age, when the first Cain of one tribe murdered the first Abel of another. All war is fratricide, and there is therefore an infinite chain of blame that winds its circuitous route back and forth across the path and under the feet of every people and every nation, so that a people who are the victims of one time become the victimisers a generation later, and newly liberated nations resort immediately to the means of their former oppressors. The triple contagions of nationalism, utopianism and religious absolutism effervesce together into an acid that corrodes the moral metal of a race, and it shamelessly and even proudly performs deeds that it would deem vile if they were done by any other. — Louis De Bernieres

For it is better, with closed eyes, to follow God as our guide, than, by relying on our own prudence, to wander through those circuitous paths which it devises for us. — John Calvin

Firstly, that God moves in extremely mysterious, not to say, circuitous ways. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players,* to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time. Secondly, the Earth's a Libra. — Terry Pratchett

If I had planned this farm from the outset, it might have looked different, perhaps more deliberate. As it happened, the circuitous route of development gave this project a more 'organic' style of growth. Through successes and failures the farm took shape and now reflects my interests and skills, the nature of this soil and the climate here. — Kurt Timmermeister

All those things at which thou wishest to arrive by a circuitous road, thou canst have now, if thou dost not refuse them to thyself. — Marcus Aurelius

Sometimes the routes leading to feelings of anger are so convoluted and circuitous that it takes enormous skill to discern their original source, or fountainhead. But regardless of the reason for or the source of the anger or the relative ease or complexity in perceiving either the anger or its source - everybody, but everybody, gets angry. — Theodore Isaac Rubin

When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive; that they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up. — Adam Gopnik

She leaves him sitting there, glancing back just once before she goes through the stairwell door and observing how the cloud of smoke from his cigar gets pulled in wisps out the dark gaping hole in the glass wall
as though it is his soul, too large for his massive frame and seeping out the pores of his skin and wandering circuitous back into the wilderness where it knows itself true among the violent and the dead. — Alden Bell

I find that daydreams are oftentimes similar in this respect to real dreams, the kind we experience in an unconscious state. Our mind puts together scenic imagery and simulated interactions in a seemingly designless, irregular, and often circuitous manner. We may think the substance of the dream is simply an agglomeration of thoughts, ideas, and experiences, but in truth, it may be pulling inspiration from somewhere deep down within. It may be the result of some unfulfilled desire, or possibly the expression of some dark hidden fear (like spiders or clowns). — J.W. Lord

Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous,
Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water,
Is earth's most multiple, excited daughter;
And those she has least use for see her best,
Their paths grown craven and circuitous,
Their visions mountain-clear, their needs immodest. — Philip Larkin

Fire, brimstone and impending apocalypse have always had great success in the pulpit, and the apocalypse is always easier to imagine than the strange circuitous routes to what actually comes next. — Rebecca Solnit

That's the thing about being an evader. You have to be flexible and know when to bail before it all gets weird. Better for everyone, really. I'm a giver.

My plane landed half an hour ago, but I'm taking a circuitous route to what I hope is the backside of baggage claim, where my dad is supposed to pick me up. The key to avoiding uncomfortable situations is a preemptive strike: make sure you see them first. And before you accuse me of being a coward, think again. It's not easy being this screwed up. It takes planning and sharp reflexes. A devious mind. My mom says I'd make a great pickpocket, because I can disappear faster than you can say, Where's my wallet? The Artful Dodger, right here. — Jenn Bennett

And though circuitous and obscureThe feet of Nemesis how sure! — William Watson

I want to make photographs whose very ambiguity provokes thought, rather than cuts it off prematurely. I want to make pictures that work on a more mysterious level, that approach the truth by a more circuitous route. — John Pfahl

Sometimes what we call love is just a settling of old scores, or a seeking of forbidden pain, or a circuitous path to the kingdom of cruelty, or she may simply have confused lack of capital with heroism while searching for rescue without knowing from what. — Anne Roiphe

Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly. With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely. — William James

Since there is no difference of meaning between round, and a round object, it is only custom which prescribes that on any given occasion one shall be used, and not the other. We shall, therefore, without scruple, speak of adjectives as names, whether in their own right, or as representative of the more circuitous forms of expression above exemplified. — John Stuart Mill

Involved sentences, crooked, circuitous, and parenthetical, no matter how musically they may be balanced, are prejudicial to a facile understanding of the truth. — Henry Ward Beecher

Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had In his high mountain cradle in Pamere, A foiled circuitous wanderertill at last The longed-for dash of waves is heard, and wide His luminous home of waters opens, bright And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea. — Matthew Arnold

And so, by circuitous and unpredictable routes, we converge toward midcontinent and meet in Madison, and are at once drawn together, braided and plaited into a friendship. It is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it, but mutual liking. It is therefore rare. To Sally and me, focused on each other and on the problems of getting on in a rough world, it happened unexpectedly; and in all our lives it has happened so thoroughly only once. — Wallace Stegner

Poverty, we may say, surrounds a man with ready-made barriers, which if they do mournfully gall and hamper, do at least prescribe for him, and force on him, a sort of course and goal; a safe and beaten, though a circuitous, course. A great part of his guidance is secure against fatal error, is withdrawn from his control. The rich, again, has his whole life to guide, without goal or barrier, save of his own choosing, and, tempted, is too likely to guide it ill. — Thomas Carlyle

I should have had a circuitous answer; that was a non-answer. — Geraldine Ferraro

When I was in high school, I would drive into Seattle to see bands and sip coffee late into the night, and I always ended up taking the long way home. I'd be a little anxious about stalling my Datsun on one of the hills around the city, so when I saw Denny Way, I always turned onto it, even though it led away from my home to Seattle's Capitol Hill district. From there I navigated winding hills and eventually ended up at home. A quick look at a map would have revealed the freeway that heads straight to my house, but since my circuitous route was familiar, I stuck to it. I should have known better, but I was just a kid. What excuse does the richest nation on earth have for driving around in the dark like an adolescent? Just because our familiar arguments over how best to help families and the economy lead us along well-trod paths doesn't make them the best ones we could be taking. — Heather Boushey

I think that one should view with philosophic admiration the strange paths of the libido and should investigate the purposes of its circuitous ways. — Carl Jung

All war is fratricide, and there is therefore an infinite chain of blame that winds its circuitous route back and forth across the path and under the feet of every people and every nation, so that a people who are the victims of one time become the victimisers a generation later, and newly liberated nations resort immediately to the means of their former oppressors. — Louis De Bernieres

The journey home is never a direct route; it is, in fact, always circuitous, and somewhere along the way, we discover that the journey is more significant than the destination and that the people we meet along the way will be the traveling companions of our memories forever. — Nelson DeMille

The habit of pleasing by flattery makes a language soft; the fear of offending by truth makes it circuitous and conventional. — Walter Savage Landor

Two pages of the passive voice - just about any business document ever written, in other words, not to mention reams of bad fiction - make me want to scream. It's weak, it's circuitous, and it's frequently tortuous, as well. How about this: My first kiss will always be recalled by me as how my romance with Shayna was begun. Oh, man - who farted, right? A simpler way to express this idea - sweeter and more forceful, as well - might be this: My romance with Shayna began with our first kiss. I'll never forget it. I'm not in love with this because it uses with twice in four words, but at least we're out of that awful passive voice. — Stephen King