Confounds Me Quotes & Sayings

Fortune confounds the wise,
And when they least expect it turns the dice. — John Dryden

Our world is not an optimal place, fine tuned by omnipotent forces of selection. It is a quirky mass of imperfections, working well enough (often admirably); a jury-rigged set of adaptations built of curious parts made available by past histories in different contexts. [ ... ] A world optimally adapted to current environments is a world without history, and a world without history might have been created as we find it. History matters; it confounds perfection and proves that current life transformed its own past. — Stephen Jay Gould

Tipping confounds me because it is not a reward but a travel tax, one of the many, one of the more insulting. No one is spared. It does not matter that you are paying thousands to stay in the presidential suite in the best hotel: the uniformed man seeing you to the elevator, inquiring about your trip, giving you a weather report, and carrying your bags to the suite expects money for this unasked-for attention. Out front, the doorman, gasconading in gold braid, wants a tip for snatching open a cab door, the bartender wants a proportion of your bill, so does the waiter, and chambermaids sometimes leave unambiguous messages, with an accompanying envelope, demanding cash. It is bad enough that people expect something extra for just doing their jobs; it is an even more dismal thought that every smile has a price. — Paul Theroux

The possession of unlimited power corrodes the conscience, hardens the heart, and confounds the understanding. — Lord Acton

God (Nature, in my view) makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil. He fores one soil to yield the products of another, one tree to bear another's fruit. He confuses and confounds time, place, and natural conditions. He mutilates his dog, his horse, and his slave. He destroys and defaces all things; he loves all that is deformed and monstrous; he will have nothing as nature made it, not even himself, who must learn his paces like a saddle-horse, and be shaped to his master's taste like the trees in his garden. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Naked Mr. America, burning frantic with self bone love, screams out: My asshole confounds the Louvre! I fart ambrosia and shit pure gold turds! My cock spurts soft diamonds in the morning sunlight! — William S. Burroughs

No particular scandal one can touch but it confounds the breather. — William Shakespeare

Pure, holy simplicity confounds all the wisdom of this world and the wisdom of the flesh. — Francis Of Assisi

God's love grounds me while His mystery confounds me. He is a personal yet all-powerful; in me yet around me; creates me yet dies for me. — Alisa Hope Wagner

Wilt thou be daunted at a woman's sight? Aye, beauty's princely majesty is such, Confounds the tongue and makes the senses rough. — William Shakespeare

Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness. — Edwin Muir

China frequently confounds stock market prognosticators because it has a penchant for straying markedly from other broad global indexes year-by-year over the decades - even from emerging markets. It's hit or miss. — Kenneth Fisher

In real life our behavior is far more complex than the textbook allows and often confounds the idea that we're purely rational. We don't save enough for retirement even though it's to our clear economic advantage to do so. We hang on to bad investments longer than we should, because we feel far sharper pain from losing money than we do from gaining the exact same amount. — Anonymous

Love is the tyrant of the heart; it darkens
Reason, confounds discretion; deaf to Counsel
It runs a headlong course to desperate madness. — John Ford

Reality confounds image. — Peter Heather

Prayer that is regular confounds both self-importance and the wiles of the world. It is so easy for good people to confuse their own work with the work of creation. It is so easy to come to believe that what we do is so much more important than what we are. It is so easy to simply get too busy to grow. It is so easy to commit ourselves to this century's demand for product and action until the product consumes us and the actions exhaust us and we can no longer even remember why we set out to do them in the first place. — Joan D. Chittister

Poetry by its very nature is subversive ... It turns words inside out, confounds meaning, changes black and white to ambiguous shades of gray. Never trust a poet. — Cristina Garcia

Holy poverty confounds cupidity and avarice and the cares of this world. — Francis Of Assisi

One's nature comes from within, not from without. The abomination occurs in subverting one's instinct in favor of a rigid code written by others. Trying to force yourself into a role that confounds your spirit will always break you. — Garth Stein

In the debate over the use of antibiotics in agriculture, a distinction is usually made between their clinical and nonclinical uses. Public health advocates don't object to treating sick animals with antibiotics; they just don't want to see the drugs lose their effectiveness because factory farms are feeding them to healthy animals to promote growth. But the use of antibiotics in feedlot cattle confounds this distinction. Here the drugs are plainly being used to treat sick animals, yet the animals probably wouldn't be sick if not for the diet of grain we feed them. — Michael Pollan

[William] Eggleston's photographs look like they were taken by a Martian who lost the ticket for his flight home and ended up working at a gun shop in a small town near Memphis. On the weekend he searches for the ticket - it must be somewhere - with a haphazard thoroughness that confounds established methods of investigation. — Geoff Dyer

Familiarity confounds all traits of distinction; interest and prejudice take away the power of judging. — William Hazlitt

Hail! natural desire! Hail! happiness! divine happiness! and pleasure of all sorts, flowers and wine, though one fades and the other intoxicates; and half-crown tickets out of London on Sundays, and singing in a dark chapel hymns about death, and anything, anything that interrupts and confounds the tapping of typewriters and filing of letters and forging of links and chains, binding the Empire together. — Virginia Woolf

[Socialists claim] that we reject fraternity, solidarity, organization, and association; and they brand us with the name of individualists. We can assure them that what we repudiate is not natural organization, but forced organization. It is not free association, but the forms of association that they would impose upon us. It is not spontaneous fraternity, but legal fraternity. It is not providential solidarity, but artificial solidarity, which is only an unjust displacement of responsibility. Socialism ... confounds Government and society. — Frederic Bastiat

Space is so dark that looking out at it confounds the brain. The more you stare at the vastness of it, at the hanging stars and the swirling galaxies, the more you start to notice how imprecise words like 'dark' and 'black' and 'endless' are. There are so many gradients of shadow, all of them terrifying to me. That's why I keep the lights on. — Holly Black

Which scientific puzzle confounds the genius of Hawking? "Women," he said. "They are a complete mystery. — John M. Gottman

In setting down these recollections of my early years so far removed from their unfolding, I am fooled, as all are, by time itself. My parents, long gone from my world, live again. Memory, which so confounds our waking life with anticipation and regret, may well be our one true earthly consolation when time slips out of joint." Chapter 6, The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue

"Assembled in a small circle, our faces glowed in the flickering light of the campfire, signs of anxious weariness in our tired eyes, but the meal would prove revitalizing. As the fire burnt down and our bellies filled, a calm complacency settled upon us, like a blanket drawn around our shoulders by absent mothers." Chapter 20, The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue — Keith Donohue

Sometimes the amount of stupid in this world confounds me. I swear some of these citizens are evolving backwards. — Charlie Cochet

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good. — Edmund Burke

Holy charity confounds all diabolical and fleshly temptations and all fleshly fears. — Francis Of Assisi

Without compunction, pity or shame,
they've built towering walls around me.
Desperate, I sit and think one thing:
alone here this fate confounds me.
For there were many things I'd hoped to do out there.
With all the construction, how was I not aware?
Yet the crack and clang of hammers I never once heard.
Imperceptibly they've confined me from the outside world.
("Walls") — Constantine P. Cavafy

The Book of Mormon exposes the enemies of Christ. It confounds false doctrines and lays down contention. — Ezra Taft Benson

My cartoons appear in newspapers, which are full of words, but there's something about having it in this little box that confounds people's expectations. — Tom Tomorrow

As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself. — Leonardo Da Vinci

The attempt and not the deed confounds us. — William Shakespeare

He that commends me to mine own content
Commends me to the thing I cannot get.
I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself:
So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself. — William Shakespeare

After Death nothing is, and nothing, death,
The utmost limit of a gasp of breath.
Let the ambitious zealot lay aside
His hopes of heaven, whose faith is but his pride;
Let slavish souls lay by their fear
Nor be concerned which way nor where
After this life they shall be hurled.
Dead, we become the lumber of the world,
And to that mass of matter shall be swept
Where things destroyed with things unborn are kept.
Devouring time swallows us whole.
Impartial death confounds body and soul.
For Hell and the foul fiend that rules
God's everlasting fiery jails
(Devised by rogues, dreaded by fools),
With his grim, grisly dog that keeps the door,
Are senseless stories, idle tales,
Dreams, whimseys, and no more. — John Wilmot

They Whatever can make life truly happy is absolutely good in its own right because it cannot be warped into evil From whence then comes error In that while all men wish for a happy life they mistake the means for the thing itself and while they fancy themselves in pursuit of it they are flying from it for when the sum of happiness consists in solid tranquillity and an unembarrassed confidence therein they are ever collecting causes of disquiet and not only carry burthens but drag them painfully along through the rugged and deceitful path of life so that they still withdraw themselves from the good effect proposed the more pains they take the more business they have upon their hands instead of advancing they are retrograde and as it happens in a labyrinth their very speed puzzles and confounds them — Seneca.

The day my father died seemed longer than my entire childhood. The day I felt my first success seemed fleeting, hour-long, not long enough perhaps. I wondered where it went. Even the cycle of time confounds me. I work the dark until sunrise on most days and fall asleep as the world awakens to light. My friends call me an owl, I like to think of myself as a bat ... Batman ... the prince of darkness. — Shahrukh Khan

A fool's wild speech confounds the wise. — Walter Scott

Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? This Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet it is bright with many a gem; I, the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzling confounds. 'Tis Iron - that I know - not gold. — Herman Melville

Holy obedience confounds all bodily and fleshly desires and keeps the body mortified to the obedience of the spirit and to the obedience of one's brother and makes a man subject to all the
men of this world and not to men alone, but also to all beasts and wild animals, so that they may do with him whatsoever they will, in so far as it may be granted to them from above by the
Lord. — Francis Of Assisi

When Heaven is about to confer a great office on a man, it first exercises his mind with suffering, and his sinews and bones with toil ; it exposes his body to hunger, and subjects him to extreme poverty ; it confounds his undertakings. By all these methods it stimulates his mind, hardens his nature, and supplies his incompetencies. — Mencius

Most poetry just confounds me. I really want to like it, but I can't help thinking it's a hoax. (p. 24) — Stephan Pastis

Holy wisdom confounds Satan and all his wickednesses. — Francis Of Assisi

Passion is a sickness. It confounds and makes you do things just to please the other person. Quite different from love. In love you find delight despite the person's flaws. — Cristiane Serruya