Disentangle Quotes & Sayings

Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves. — C.S. Lewis

On one side of the ledger are the books man has written, containing such a hodgepodge of wisdom and nonsense, of truth and falsehood, that if one lived to be as old as Methuselah one couldn't disentangle the mess; on the other side of the ledger things like toenails, hair, teeth, blood, ovaries, if you will, all incalculable and all written in another kind of ink, in another script, an incomprehensible, undecipherable script. — Henry Miller

Near that a dusty paint-box, some odd hooks, A half-burnt match, an ivory block, three books, Where conic sections, spherics, logarithms, To great Laplace, from Saunderson and Sims, Lie heaped in their harmonious disarray Of figures,-disentangle them who may. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

It has been observed that I show hardly any interest in talking about myself. It is hard for me to disentangle my own person from the social processes, the ideas and activities in which it has shared, which matter more than it does and which give it value. I do not think of myself as at all an individualist: rather as a 'personalist', in that I view human personality as a supreme value, only integrated in society and history. The experience and thought of one man have no significance that deserves to last, except in this sense. — Victor Serge

Education is ... the invitation to disentangle oneself, for a time, from the urgencies of the here and now and to listen to the conversation in which human beings forever seek to understand themselves. — Michael Joseph Oakeshott

What I secretly longed for was to disentangle myself of all those lives which had woven themselves into the pattern of my own life and were making my destiny a part of theirs. To shake myself free of these accumulating experiences which were mine only by force of inertia required a violent effort. Now and then I lunged and tore at the net, but only to become more enmeshed. My liberation seemed to involve pain and suffering to those near and dear to me. Every move I made for my own private good brought about reproach and condemnation. I was a traitor a thousand times over. — Henry Miller

You have to disentangle the details. You have to hold up every one independently, and ask, "How do we know *this* detail?" Someone sketches out a picture of humanity's descent into nanotechnological warfare, where China refuses to abide by an international control agreement, followed by an arms race ... Wait a minute - how do you know it will be China? Is that a crystal ball in your pocket or are you just happy to be a futurist? Where are all these details coming from?
Where did *that specific* detail come from? — Eliezer Yudkowsky

The Christos-image
is most difficult to disentangle
from its art-craft junk-shop
paint-and-plaster medieval jumble
of pain-worship and death-symbol. — Hilda Doolittle

I perceive all this, and believe that you were born under my star. Yes, you were born under my star! Tremble! for where that is the case with mortals, the threads of their destinies are difficult to disentangle; knottings and catchings occur - sudden breaks leave damage in the web. — Charlotte Bronte

[The photograph is] still a space to reorganize our thoughts about reality and our place in the world. How do you disentangle the surface of reality? — Gilles Peress

It as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad. It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid. — Douglas Hofstadter

These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device - a means of summing up and making a knot of innumerable little threads. Innumerable threads were there; still, if I stopped to disentangle, I could collect a number. But whatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the past. — Virginia Woolf

In truly effective thinking the prime necessity is to liquidate judgments, regain an innocent eye, disentangle feelings, be curious and open-hearted. — Walter Lippmann

I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed. — Umberto Eco

I didn't say any of this to my sister. How I saw her being broken into mediocrity and motherhood; her body broken and then her mind - or did her mind go first, it's sort of hard to disentangle - and then for her to turn around and say Broken is Best, I didn't say how that made me furious beyond measure. — Anne Enright

You have my word as a gentleman." [The other man remarks that he is not a gentleman and he retorts] "Then you have my word as a scoundrel, which, I know, opens up a rather confusing paradox that I have neither the time nor inclination to disentangle. — David Liss

To disentangle the good and the bad parts of failure, we have to recognize both the reality of the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth. Left — Ed Catmull

I can imagine nothing more wonderful than always wanting to keep a man ... It's this NOT wanting to keep them, and yet not quite being able to disentangle one's self, never quite having the ruthlessness to stike at the hands on the gunwale with an oar until they let go
that's the horrible thing. — Rose Wilder Lane

The key in letting go is practice. Each time we let go, we disentangle ourselves from our expectations and begin to experience things as they are. — Sharon Salzberg

And again the feeling swept over her, taking hold of her body and shaking it so violently that in a moment she had forgotten everything else, could think only of this buffeting, this being hurled from side to side and up and down, the sense of helplesslness and loss, of the impossibility of speaking and the need to speak, if only she could find the thread, the way through, if only she could stand back and see when it all began, disentangle the memories, the events, she felt herself carried on a current, borne on the waves, if only she could stop if only she could hold on, tell it, tell it, do you understand what I'm saying it's just that there's too much for one person to say too much to have all that inside you it runs about in my head my body it needs an outlet it needs to find a way out [ ... ] — Gabriel Josipovici

He gave it its present name, and lived here shut up: day and night poring over the wicked heaps of papers in the suit, and hoping against hope to disentangle it from its mystification and bring it to a close. In the meantime, the place became dilapidated, the wind whistled through the cracked walls, the rain fell through the broken roof, the weeds choked the passage to the rotting door. When I brought what remained of him home here, the brains seemed to me to have been blown out of the house too; it was so shattered and ruined. — Charles Dickens

As I believe I told you before, there had been some slight unpleasantness between us, arising from the occasion when she had sent me over to New York to disentangle my cousin Gussie from the clutches of a girl on the music hall stage. When I tell you that by the time I had finished my operations Gussie had not only married the girl but had gone on the halls himself and was doing well, you'll understand that relations were a trifle strained between aunt and nephew. — P.G. Wodehouse

When the examination was over, the doctor looked at his watch, and then Praskovya Fyodorovna informed Ivan Ilyich that it must of course be as he liked, but she had sent today for a celebrated doctor, and that he would examine him, and have a consultation with Mihail Danilovich (that was the name of his regular doctor). 'Don't oppose it now, please. This I'm doing entirely for my own sake,' she said ironically, meaning it to be understood that she was doing it all for his sake, and was only saying this to give him no right to refuse her request. He lay silent, knitting his brows. He felt that he was hemmed in by such a tangle of falsity that it was hard to disentangle anything from it. Everything she did for him was entirely for her own sake, and she told him she was doing for her own sake what she actually was doing for her own sake as something so incredible that he would take it as meaning the opposite. — Leo Tolstoy

Pain & suffering requires time, awareness, and an intentional practice of self-love to disentangle. — Sharon Salzberg

Lincoln spoke of slaveholders not as reprobates and sinners but as men and women enmeshed in a system from which they could not disentangle themselves. "They are just what we would be in their situation, — Eric Foner

Souls, like rays of light, exist in perfect, parallel equality, always. But for when infinitely short a time they pass through the rough and delaying mechanism of life, they separate and disentangle, encountering different obstacles, traveling at different rates, like light refracted by the friction of things in its path. Emerging on the other side, they run together once more, in perfection. For the short and difficult span when confounded by matter and time they are made unequal, they try to bind together as they always were and eventually will be. The impulse to do so is called love. The extend to which they exceed is called justice. And the energy lost in the effort is called sacriface. On the infinite scale of things, this life is to a spark what a spark is to all the time man can imagine, but still, like a sudden rapids or bend in the river, it is that to which the eye of God may be drawn from time to time out of interest in happenstance. — Mark Helprin

I explain to my patients that abused children often find it hard to disentangle themselves from their dysfunctional families, whereas children grow away from good, loving parents with far less conflict. After all, isn't that the task of a good parent, to enable the child to leave home? — Irvin D. Yalom

Music is so essential to the Cuban character that you can't disentangle it from the history of the nation. the history of Cuban music is one of cultural collisions, of voluntary and forced migrations, of religions and revolutions. — Ned Sublette

Bernd molders in the corner. Jutta moves through the world somewhere, watching shadows disentangle themselves from night, watching minders limp past in the dawnn. It was enough when Werner was a boy, wasn't it? A world of wildflowers blooming up through the shapes of rusty cast-off parts. A world of berries and carrot peels ad Frau Elena's fairy tales. Of the sharp smell of tar, and trains passing, and a voice on the radio offering a loom on which to spin his dreams. — Anthony Doerr

I know what an Act to make things simpler means. It means that the people who drew it up don't understand it themselves and that every one of its clauses needs a law-suit to disentangle it. — Dorothy L. Sayers

If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society ... It is the education which gives a man a clear, conscious view of their own opinions and judgements, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought to detect what is sophistical and to discard what is irrelevant. — John Henry Newman

No man, and least of all myself, could ever disentangle the feelings that animated him. — Thomas Eakins

It's impossible for me to disentangle how much of my storytelling urge is the product of growing up with novelist parents and how much is a genetic legacy from those same parents. — Jesse Kellerman

Of course, it's always difficult to disentangle fact from fiction in relation to, e.g., the singularity project. Many scientists I know are dismissive of transhumanist claims, BUT the last 100 years has surely taught us never to underestimate the pace and scope of scientific progress. However, even if much of this turns out to be science-fiction, it also reveals a way of thinking about human life that I find deeply troubling. — George Pattison

If alpha [the fine-structure constant] were bigger than it really is, we should not be able to distinguish matter from ether [the vacuum, nothingness], and our task to disentangle the natural laws would be hopelessly difficult. The fact however that alpha has just its value 1/137 is certainly no chance but itself a law of nature. It is clear that the explanation of this number must be the central problem of natural philosophy. — Max Born

It is easier to become entangled with an enemy than to disentangle oneself afterwards. — Aesop

There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle promise from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed. — Ezra Pound

When a woman starts to disentangle herself from patriarchy, ultimately she is abandoned to her own self. — Sue Monk Kidd

Maybe I'm inclined to what Nietzsche called "impure thought," that is to say, a kind of thought where abstractions are so mixed with the facts of life that you can't disentangle them. I feel thought in general, and in particular what is unfortunately called "philosophy," should lead a sort of clandestine life for a while, just to renew itself. By clandestine I mean concealed in stories, in anecdotes, in numerous forms that are not the form of the treatise. Then thought can biologically renew itself, as it were. — Roberto Calasso

The artist who could disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and 're-embody' it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for it in its new office, he was the supreme artist. — James Joyce

...the personal and the political are often hard to disentangle. — Yelena Baraz

Ahimsa and Truth are so intertwined that it is practically impossible to disentangle and separate them. — Mahatma Gandhi

One of the great intellectual mistakes Einstein made is that he thought that space and time are physically or ontologically entangled. In the present non-spatial universal computational program, space and time happen to be entangled to the extent that, under certain unique circumstances, changes in spatial measurements indicate changes in temporal ones. However, a change in the program itself may cause space and time to disentangle. — Kedar Joshi

A few names were known in full, some in part, some not at all. No one cared. Except in clearly unreasonable cases, a soldier was generally called by the name he preferred, or by what he called himself, and no great effort was made to disentangle Christian names from surnames from nicknames. — Tim O'Brien

But then I think, this happens sometimes, doesn't it? People you have a history with, they won't let you go, and as hard as you might try, you can't disentangle yourself, can't set yourself free. Maybe after a while you just stop trying. — Paula Hawkins

Thoughts disentangle themselves when they pass through the lips and fingertips. — Dawson Trotman