Quotes & Sayings About Confounding

Life is not straightforward: relationships bifurcate; there is nothing more complicated, more confounding, than love. — Sarah Hall

We might as well give in to the tug of our spirits to explore this confounding and wondrous world. We might as well greet each other as endless pilgrims and bid each other well on our way. Because we're already on the road ... — Anthony Lawlor

To think creatively, to struggle with an opaque text or confounding idea, to seek connections between periods of history or disciplines of thought, and to search for the precise word or the right rhythm for a single sentence - these are human actions every bit as worthy as the wielding of a hammer, the manipulation of a surgical scalpel, or the making of a courtroom argument. — Roger Lundin

She's a firestorm that I won't ever smother. I'm the one who inflames her, who riles her to a new, confounding degree. She's my perfect match. — Krista Ritchie

From the corners of her mouth, thick yellow goo bubbles. It matches the mess between Vesper's fingers, the slime on her chin, on her legs, the blobs that randomly pepper things, the blast radius massive, confounding — Peter Newman

No. Has a dead man any use for money? Is it possible for a dead man to have money? What world does a dead man belong to? 'Tother world. What world does money belong to? This world. How can money be a corpse's? Can a corpse own it, want it, spend it, claim it, miss it? Don't try to go confounding the rights and wrongs of things in that way. But it's worthy of the sneaking spirit that robs a live man. — Charles Dickens

Rain brings us together in one of the last untamed encounters with nature that we experience routinely, able to turn the suburbs and even the city wild. Huddled with our fellow humans under construction scaffolding to escape a deluge, we are bound in the memory and mystery of exhilarating, confounding, life-giving rain. — Cynthia Barnett

The overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological scientific puzzles, confounding all our efforts to comprehend it, is the earth. — Lewis Thomas

By the very notion that God does not exist an atheist embodies the idea of a supreme being by pondering the very existence he wishes to refute. How can you refute something you don't believe in? Just arguing against the nature of something implies it has attributes, which then must be recognized because only something that exists has these characteristic traits. Even if the idea of no God exists in the non-believers mind, his thoughts make him more insidious than those proffesing to believe because the idea of a God is now planted in his mind and he spends all his time dwelling on the nature of something that doesn't exist, giving creation to the very thing he opposes, he has constructed his own God and it haunts him because it is with him daily as a nagging and bitter irony, that his very own mind has created, god who shall dwell within him embittering and confounding him in perpetuity. — Tom Hamilton

It has ever been my hobby-horse to see rising in America an empire of liberty, and a prospect of two or three hundred millions of freemen, without one noble or one king among them. You say it is impossible. If I should agree with you in this, I would still say, let us try the experiment, and preserve our equality as long as we can. A better system of education for the common people might preserve them long from such artificial inequalities as are prejudicial to society, by confounding the natural distinctions of right and wrong, virtue and vice. — John Adams

Many children, early on, acquire a love of places they have never been. Often, such wonder is summarily crushed on the crawl through the sludge of murky, confused adolescence on to the flat, cracked pan of adulthood with its airless vistas ever lurking beyond the horizon. Oh, well, sometimes such gifts of curiosity, delight and adventure do indeed survive the stationary trek, said victims ending up as artists, scholars, inventors and other criminals bent on confounding the commonplace and the platitudes of peaceful living. But never mind them for now, since, for all their flailing subversions, nothing really ever changes unless in service to convenience. — Steven Erikson

You discover how confounding the world is when you try to draw it. You look at a car, and you try to see its car-ness, and you're like an immigrant to your own world. You don't have to travel to encounter weirdness. You wake up to it. — Shaun Tan

Where the deepest word ends, there music begins with its supersensuous and all-confounding intimations. — Herman Melville

Moreover the present abundance3 of private cars is nothing other than the result of the non-stop propaganda through which capitalist production persuades the mob
and in this case is one of its most confounding successes
that the possession of a car is specifically one of the privileges our society reserves for its privileged members. — Tom McDonough

I like confounding expectations. I can expand what it is I am able to do, and hopefully get to do more weird, interesting projects like this. There's nothing wrong with doing comedies, and I'm not against comedies, either, but I always want to do stuff that keeps me off my guard and gets me out of my comfort zone. And how the audience perceives that ... It's out of my hands. And I don't get that frustrated by it, because I'm on to the next thing at that point. — Patton Oswalt

Etiquette was so confounding in this country. Still, looking at Mirabella-her fists balled together like small, white porcupines, her brows knitted in animal confusion-I felt a throb of compassion. How can people live like they do? I wondered. Then I congragulated myself. This was a Stage 3 thought. — Karen Russell

My hatred of privilege and human authority was unbounded; perhaps at times I have been guilty, in my indignation, of confounding persons and things; at present I can only despise and complain; to cease to hate I only needed to know. — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

She gazes over at baby Genevieve, who is now asleep in Kevin's arms, and thinks, I really don't have any words of advice at all. The world is an endlessly confounding place. — Elin Hilderbrand

I'm a bloody fun-seeker. Whatever the role is, I'll find a way to deliver the line that is confounding. — Lucy Lawless

This reticence has little to do with trying to protect oneself and everything to do with trying to protect others from one's problems, which shouldn't be theirs; it's one reason Japan is so confounding to foreigners, as its people faultlessly sparkle and attend to one another in in public, while often seeming passive and unconvinced of their ability to do anything decisive at home. — Pico Iyer

Too many christians have been chargeable with ... confounding the Logos of Plato with that of John , and making of it a second person in the trinity, than which no two things can be more different. — Joseph Priestley

The most confounding thing of all is that we still haven't identified the cause of 20% to 30% of adult common colds. — Anthony Fauci

I'm a migrant worker picking frozen peas,
and a clodhopper hiding behind a white sheet.
I'm a shootout at Ruby Ridge,
and a freefall of flames.
I am closed for the winter,
and crawling in my playpen.
I am cold,
and quick chatter and beautiful smiles.
I am a man missing a limb,
and lettuce and tomatoes.
I am a palace,
and fresh milk and goat cheese.
I'm the great emptiness among Cubans,
and a job that requires the auditing of truth and lies.
I'm a confounding calm that will shatter fear and complacency,
and a town full of self-defined renegades and recluses.
I'm a public execution,
and a lanky husband waiting by the checkout. — Brian D'Ambrosio

The Finger of God, Whose Body might have been concealed below among the crowd of human bodies without fear of my confounding It, for that reason, with them. And so even to-day in any large provincial town, or in a quarter of Paris which I do not know well, if a passer-by who is 'putting me on the right road' shews me from afar, as a point to aim at, some belfry of a hospital, or a convent steeple lifting the peak of its ecclesiastical cap — Marcel Proust

Reference to the deadness of the past is a way of staking a claim on it. But historians must be open, as ethnographers try to be, to the shock of the unpredictability and difference of the past, which means open to the possibility of the past living in its insistence on telling its own story and so confounding us. Only in this way can the past teach us something new about ourselves, about the limits of our imaginings and ways of knowing, and even of our particular and distinctive ways of being human. — Robert A. Orsi

Confounding woman. He wanted to drag her close and kiss her senseless. — Meljean Brook

A precious performance, Blaine had called it, in that gently forbearing tone he used when they talked about novels, as though he was sure that she, with a little more time and a little more wisdom, would come to accept that the novels he liked were superior, novels written by young and youngish men and packed with things, a fascinating, confounding accumulation of brands and music and comic books and icons, with emotions skimmed over, and each sentence stylishly aware of its own stylishness. She had read many of them, because he recommended them, but they were like cotton candy that so easily evaporated from her tongue's memory. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

We worship unity in trinity, and trinity in unity; neither confounding the person nor dividing the substance. There is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost; but the Godhead of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal. — Tertullian

"Lawyers Are": Those whose interests and abilities lie in perverting, confounding and eluding the law. — Jonathan Swift

Did not at first give vague disappointment, a confounding of reality, a disenchantment of contrast with what the mind had conceived. — Zane Grey

Confounding people's expectations was a way to maintain integrity. — Lindsey Buckingham

As for us, we behave like a herd of deer. When they flee from the huntsman's feathers in affright, which way do they turn? What haven of safety do they make for? Why, they rush upon the nets! And thus they perish by confounding what they should fear with that wherein no danger lies. . . . Not death or pain is to be feared, but the fear of death or pain. Well said the poet therefore: -

Death has no terror; only a Death of shame! — Epictetus

Out of the current confusion of ideals and and confounding of career hopes, a calm recognition may yet emerge that productive labor is the foundation of all prosperity. — Matthew B. Crawford

Mace humphed. "You think I can't protect you from a few uneducated humans?" He pulled into the lot, jerked the car into park, and shut off the engine.

There was that confounding attitude again. "That's not what I mean. But now that you mention it, we haven't had a whole lot of luck keeping out of trouble, and this place screams trouble."

"I scream trouble," Mace growled and exited the car. — Kiersten Fay

The confounding Political Economy with the Sciences and Arts to which it is subservient, has been one of the principal obstacles to its improvement. — Nassau William Senior

It takes practice to use one's eyes, even when God has opened them. And there are some believers who never get beyond confounding a doctrinal statement of a truth with a living exemplification of that truth. — Henry Clay Trumbull

After years of pretending at emotions, he'd grown to appreciate their mystery, their chaos and randomness. Sometimes they were predictable, one-dimensional, almost stupid - other times they were so confounding, complex, and exquisite that he was convinced humans really were as special as they thought themselves to be. — Kim White

Ifemelu opened her novel, Jean Toomer's Cane, and skimmed a few pages. She had been meaning to read it for a while now, and imagined she would like it since Blaine did not. A precious performance, Blaine had called it, in that gently forbearing tone he used when they talked about novels, as though he was sure that she, with a little more time and a little more wisdom, would come to accept that the novels he liked were superior, novels written by young and youngish men and packed with things, a fascinating, confounding accumulation of brands and music and comic books and icons, with emotions skimmed over, and each sentence stylishly aware of its own stylishness. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A good way to do econometrics is to look for good natural experiments and use statistical methods that can tidy up the confounding factors that Nature has not controlled for us. — Daniel McFadden

We have spent centuries of philosophy trying to solve "the problem of evil," yet I believe the much more confounding and astounding issue is the "problem of good." How do we account for so much gratuitous and sheer goodness in this world? Tackling this problem would achieve much better results. — Richard Rohr

There is nothing more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends. — Homer

Americans already believed Carter was wasting too much time on the Middle East when there were more pressing problems at home. The country was experiencing double-digit inflation coupled with high unemployment and anemic growth - a confounding phenomenon tagged "stagflation." As for the president's job performance, the two dreaded lines on the graph finally crossed in the spring of 1978, with more Americans disapproving — Lawrence Wright

The key of writing fiction isn't just to remove something that the reader or listener can easily imagine. It's not a matter of being coy, or withholding information. It's allowing for multiple possibilities, recognizing the complexity of human behavior, and making the world of a piece of fiction as marvelously confounding as the world we live in. — Peter Turchi

Good heavens!" cried the Colonel, laughing, "do you mean to say all our sympathy was wasted and your fit an imposture?" "Speaking professionally, it was admirably done," cried I, looking in amazement at this man who was forever confounding me with some new phase of his astuteness. "It is an art which is often useful, — Arthur Conan Doyle

Strawberries that in gardens grow
Are plump and juicy fine,
But sweeter far as wise men know
Spring from the woodland vine.
No need for bowl or silver spoon,
Sugar or spice or cream,
Has the wild berry plucked in June
Beside the trickling stream.
One such to melt at the tongue's root,
Confounding taste with scent,
Beats a full peck of garden fruit:
Which points my argument. — Robert Graves

We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. The clouds and curtains of darkness, the confounding vapors, these are the daily weather of this world. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

[Writing about themselves] gives them wings, so that they can rise above the confounding maze of their lives and, from that perspective, begin to see the patterns and dead ends of their pasts, and a way out. That's the funny thing about mazes; what's baffling on the ground begins to make sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself. — Wally Lamb

While I love to read contemporary fiction, I'm not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it's because the former journalist in me is too inhibited by the press of reality; when I think about writing of my own time I always think about nonfiction narratives. Or perhaps it's just that I find the present too confounding. — Geraldine Brooks

Faith aside, witchcraft served an eminently useful purpose. The aggravating, the confounding, the humiliating all dissolved in its cauldron. It made sense of the unfortunate and the eerie, the sick child and the rancid butter along with the killer cat. What else, shrugged one husband, could have caused the black and blue marks on his wife's arm? — Stacy Schiff

Secession, like any other REVOLUTIONARY ACT, may be morally justified by the extremity of oppression; but to call it a constitutional right is confounding the meaning of terms ... — Andrew Jackson

Art should be independent of all clap-trap - should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it; and that is why I insist on calling my works 'arrangements' and 'harmonies. — James Whistler

before men could speak they enjoyed confounding another with signs
they enjoyed this as much as a mirror enjoys an image
as much as the evening like a ship enjoys a sapphire grave — Frank Stanford

Steve's life wasn't a movie. It was inspiring, confounding, and unabashedly human, to the very end. — Brent Schlender

All great shows, she told me when I was little (and still learning to flex the tiny muscles in my esophagus), depend on the most ordinary objects. We can be a weary, cynical lot - we grow old and see only what suits us, and what is marvelous can often pass us by. A kitchen knife. A bulb of glass. A human body. That something so common should be so surprising - why, we forget it. We take it for granted. We assume that our sight is reliable, that our deeds are straightforward, that our words have one meaning. But life is uncommon and strange; it is full of intricacies and odd, confounding turns. So onstage we remind them just how extraordinary the ordinary can be. This, she said, is the tiger in the grass. It's the wonder that hides in plain sight, the secret life that flourishes just beyond the screen. For you are not showing them a hoax or a trick, just a new way of seeing what's already in front of them. This, she told me, is your mark on the world. This is the story that you tell. — Leslie Parry

In its confounding of the logic that maintains terms like high and low, or base and sacred as polar opposites, it is this play of the contradictory that allows one to think the truth that Bataille never tired of demonstrating: that violence has historically been lodged at the heart of the sacred; that to be genuine, the very thought of the creative must simultaneously be an experience of death; and that it is impossible for any moment of true intensity to exist apart from a cruelty that is equally extreme. — Rosalind E. Krauss

The two commonest mistakes in judgement ... are, the confounding of shyness with arrogance - a very common mistake indeed - and the not understanding that an obstinate nature exists in a perpetual struggle with itself. — Charles Dickens

Washington, D.C., with its wide streets, confounding roundabouts, marble statues, Doric columns, and domes, is supposed to feel like ancient Rome (that is, if the streets of ancient Rome were lined with homeless black people, bomb-sniffing dogs, tour buses, and cherry blossoms). — Paul Beatty

This exquisite, tremendous, and endlessly confounding life — Elin Hilderbrand

Writing made it tolerable to be human in a way nothing else ever had. It gave me a place to thrive, to exorcise, to cultivate some understanding of aspects of being human that were otherwise confounding. — Camilla Gibb

We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones. — Jeffrey Kluger

There are many excuses for the person who made the mistake of confounding money and wealth. Like many others they mistook the sign for the thing signified. — Millicent Fawcett

He'd fallen for her - for her sometimes amusing, sometimes confounding combination of strength, brains, drive, vulnerability, and mile-wide stubborn streak. He'd fallen for the whole complicated package, screwed-up father included. — Samanthe Beck

The bizarre but all too common transformation of the woman artist from a producer in her own right into a subject for representation forms a leitmotif in the history of art. Confounding subject and object, it undermines the speaking position of the individual woman artist by generalizing her. Denied her individuality, she is displaced from being a producer and becomes instead a sign for male creativity. — Whitney Chadwick

But Sonja was more freakish, more wondrously confounding than the one-armed guard; rather than limbs she had, somehow, amputated expectations. She didn't have a husband, or children, or a house to clean and care for. She was capable of the work, school, time, commitment, and everything else it took to run a hospital. So even if Sonja was curt and short-tempered, Havaa could forgive her these shortcomings, which were shortcomings only in that they were the opposite of what a woman was supposed to be. The thick, stern shell hid the defiance that was Sonja's life. — Anthony Marra

I went in - after making every possible noise in the kitchen, short of pushing over the stove - but I don't believe they heard a sound. They were sitting at either end of the couch, looking at each other as if some question had been asked, or was in the air, and every vestige of embarrassment was gone. Daisy's face was smeared with tears, and when I came in she jumped up and began wiping at it with her handkerchief before a mirror. But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room. — F Scott Fitzgerald

God Himself, "One God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible," and "One Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God; begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God; begotten, not made; being of one substance with the Father," and "the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, Who proceedeth from the Father and the Son, Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified." Yet this holy Trinity is One God, for "we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one: the glory equal and the majesty co-eternal." So in part run the ancient creeds, and so the inspired Word declares. — A.W. Tozer

Normal. What did normal mean, Ferguson asked himself , and why wasn't it normal for him to feel the way he did about wanting to kiss and make love to other boys, the sex of one-sex was just as normal and natural as the sex of two-sex sex, maybe even more normal and more natural because a cock was something boys understood better than girls, and therefore it was easier to know what the other person wanted without having to guess, without having to play the courtship and seduction games that could make the sex of two-sex sex confounding, and why did a person have to choose between one or the other, why block out one-half of the humanity in the name of normal or natural when the truth was that everyone was Both, and people and society and the laws and religions of people in different societies were just too afraid to admit it. — Paul Auster

To us, the argument for material well-being might seem uncontroversial. But in the eighteenth century, material prosperity was frequently condemned as "luxury" by religious and civic moralists. It was not a morally neutral word but a pejorative one, connoting not comfort but excess, the possession of nonnecessities. The notion of luxury was intricately connected with the existence of a recognized social hierarchy: what was necessary for those of high status was regarded as excessive for those of low status. Luxury meant the enjoyment of material goods not appropriate to one's station in life. Critics of luxury saw it as confounding social ranks. P. 40 — Jerry Z. Muller

I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his perhaps being innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I? — Henry James