Quotes & Sayings About State Of Confusion

I have often started off on a walk in the state called mad-mad in the sense of sore-headed, or mad with tedium or confusion; I have set forth dull, null and even thoroughly discouraged. But I never came back in such a frame of mind, and I never met a human being whose humor was not the better for a walk. — Donald C. Peattie

I've always been puzzled, and am still at this moment in a state of confusion, between the imaginative world and the real world. It is perfectly true to say that I have at some times in my life found that the imaginative world had pushed the real world right out of the way, and was literally more real. — William Golding

You may think that you are well, but you will not secure health until you think thoughts that produce health. You may persistently affirm that you are well, but so long as you live in discord, confusion, worry, fear and other wrong states of mind, you will be sick; that is, you will be as you think and not what you think you are. You may state health in your thought, but if you give worry, fear and discord to that thought, your thinking will produce discord. It is not what we state in our thoughts, but what we give to our thoughts that determine results. — Christian D. Larson

Unfortunately for happiness, your brain is sold on the idea that the next moment is more important than the one we're in. On the other hand, the moment that already passed by is more familiar - and therefore perhaps more comfortable - than this one right now. These biases of the brain are what move us all too easily into a state of confusion, ruminating on the past or bracing for an imagined future while neglecting to pause and live in the present, even though the present is all there really is. When we're focused on the past or the future, we're living in our thoughts, and not in reality. The — Mo Gawdat

After Bush was elected in 2004 - please note that I didn't say 're-elected' - and I was walking around in my befuzzed state of confusion and low-grade depression, I set out more or systematically to read writers who'd grappled with that fundamental question of what America is, why it is the way it is. — Ben Fountain

There is no New Testament basis for a linking of church and state until Christ, the King returns. The whole "Constantine mentality" from the fourth century up to our day was a mistake. Constantine, as the Roman Emperor, in 313 ended the persecution of Christians. Unfortunately, the support he gave to the church led by 381 to the enforcing of Christianity, by Theodosius I, as the official state religion. Making Christianity the official state religion opened the way for confusion up till our own day. There have been times of very good government when this interrelationship of church and state has been present. But through the centuries it has caused great confusion between loyalty to the state and loyalty to Christ, between patriotism and being a Christian.
We must not confuse the Kingdom of God with our country. To say it another way: "We should not wrap our Christianity in our national flag. — Francis A. Schaeffer

Human beings have a drive for security and safety, which is often what fuels the spiritual search. This very drive for security and safety is what causes so much misery and confusion. Freedom is a state of complete and absolute insecurity and not knowing. So, in seeking security and safety, you actually distance yourself from the freedom you want. There is no security in freedom, at least not in the sense that we normally think of security. This is, of course, why it is so free: there's nothing there to grab hold of. — Adyashanti

For it is a fact that a man can be profoundly out of step with his times. A man may have been born in a city famous for its idiosyncratic culture and yet, the very habits, fashions, and ideas that exalt that city in the eyes of the world may make no sense to him at all. As he proceeds through life, he looks about in a state of confusion, understanding neither the inclinations nor the aspirations of his peers. — Amor Towles

If childhood is still a state, it is now chiefly a state of confusion. — Phyllis McGinley

It even reached a point of such confusion that men and women were imprisoned in the same cells and used the latrine bucket in each other's presence - who cared about those niceties? Give up your gold, vipers! The interrogators did not write up charge sheets because no one needed their papers. And whether or not a sentence would be pasted on was of very little interest. Only one thing was important: Give up your gold, viper! The state needs gold and you don't. The interrogators had neither voice nor strength left to threaten and torture; they had one universal method: feed the prisoners nothing but salty food and give them no water. Whoever coughed up gold got water! One gold piece for a cup of fresh water!
People perish for cold metal. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Our souls, that is our selves, are like a jumbled heap of pins: interests, thoughts, emotions, volitions, and feelings -- our life at work, our life of play, our domestic and social life, our life in the limelight, and our life alone -- all a heap of pins pointing in all directions and getting in one another's way. But the slow approach of a magnet sorts the jumble out in a remarkable way, confusion becomes a pattern, each pin points in the same direction, and all is achieved by the focus of magnetic power. It is superfluous to add that the only magnet which can sort out all the intricacies of the human soul is God. In short the state of perfect recollection is that most characteristic expression of the work of the Holy Ghost; the creation of order out of chaos. — Martin Thornton

I am in a constant search for pain in order to find happiness. I have this sick need to throw myself in chaos because that's where i'm forced to find peace. But when i finally do achieve it, i don't no what to do with it. Then i'm suddenly at unease again. I lose the gained peace as quickly and profoundly as i found it, and i am left in a constant state of confusion and pursuit. — Anonymous

The happy State of Matrimony is, undoubtedly, the surest and most lasting Foundation of Comfort and Love ... the Cause of all good Order in the World, and what alone preserves it from the utmost Confusion. — Benjamin Franklin

As long as we're in a state of confusion, overwhelmed by the three conflicting emotions, trapped in cyclic existence, we're not happy and we can't benefit sentient beings. Even though we think we might be benefitting them, ultimately we're not. The only way to really be of benefit, to ourselves and others, is to establish the status of buddha. There's nothing better than this. But until we purify our unwholesome karma, especially that of the body, there's no buddha - the buddha will not exist for us. — Ngagpa Yeshe Dorje

As he lay there, fragments of past states of emotion, fugitive felicities of thought and sensation, rose and floated on the surface of his thoughts. It was one of those moments when the accumulated impressions of life converge on heart and brain, elucidating, enlacing each other, in a mysterious confusion of beauty. He had had glimpses of such a state before, of such mergings of the personal with the general life that one felt one's self a mere wave on the wild stream of being, yet thrilled with a sharper sense of individuality than can be known within the mere bounds of the actual. But now he knew the sensation in its fulness, and with it came the releasing power of language. Words were flashing like brilliant birds through the boughs overhead; he had but to wave his magic wand to have them flutter down to him. Only they were so beautiful up there, weaving their fantastic flights against the blue, that it was pleasanter, for the moment, to watch them and let the wand lie. — Edith Wharton

The wonder of immaculate, perfect, pure mind is that when it is in its perfect, extant state without confusion, it can be anything it wants to be. — Frederick Lenz

People who have never had an ideal may hope to find one; they are in a better state than the people who allow the circumstances of life to break their ideal. To fall beneath one's ideal is to lose one's track in life; then confusion rises in the mind, and that light which one should hold high becomes covered and obscured, so that it cannot shine out to light one's path. — Hazrat Inayat Khan

I used to go away for weeks in a state of confusion. — Albert Einstein

It's not by accident that people talk of a state of confusion as not being able to see the wood for the trees, or of being out of the woods when some crisis is surmopunted. It is a place of loss, confusion, terror and anger, a place where you can, like Dante, find yourself going down into Hell. But if it's any comfort, the dark wood isn't just that. It's also a place of opportunity and adventure. It is the place in which fortunes can be reversed, hearts mended, hopes reborn. — Amanda Craig

Church and State, will, of course, go on for ever, in spite of the fact that it is impossible for them to mingle, and that the confusion of these elements cannot lead to any consistent or even normal results, for there is falsity at the very foundation of it. Compromise between the Church and State in such questions as, for instance, jurisdiction, is, to my thinking, impossible in any real sense. My clerical opponent maintains that the Church holds a precise and defined position in the State. I maintain, on the contrary, that the Church ought to include the whole State, and not simply to occupy a corner in it, and, if this is, for some reason, impossible at present, then it ought, in reality, to be set up as the direct and chief aim of the future development of Christian society! — Anton Chekhov

My ideas were confused. In a peculiar way, the unreality of the outer world appeared to be an extension of my own disturbed state of mind. — Anna Kavan

How can we appraise a proposal if the terms hurled at our ears can mean anything or nothing, and change their significance with the inflection of the voice? Welfare state, national socialism, radical, liberal, conservative, reactionary and a regiment of others ... these terms in today's usage, are generally compounds of confusion and prejudice. If our attitudes are muddled, our language is often to blame. A good tonic for clearer thinking is a dose of precise, legal definition. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

After half a millennium of dominance, the West is being eclipsed in the global era, the United States as the lead society in the West stands on the verge of relative if not absolute decline, and much of the Christian Church in both Europe and North America is in a sorry state of weakness, confusion, unfaithfulness and cultural captivity. — Os Guinness

Mindful sitting meditation is not an attempt to escape from problems or difficulties into some cut-off "meditative" state of absorption or denial. On the contrary, it is a willingness to go nose to nose with pain, confusion, and loss, if that is what is dominating the present moment, and to stay with the observing over a sustained period of time, beyond thinking. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

In the process of burning out these confusions, we discover enlightenment. If the process were otherwise, the awakened state of mind would be a product dependent upon cause and effect and therefore liable to dissolution. Anything which is created must, sooner or later, die. If enlightenment were created in such a way, there would always be a possibility of ego reasserting itself, causing a return to the confused state. Enlightenment is permanent because we have not produced it; we have merely discovered it. — Chogyam Trungpa

The Holy Spirit acts mystically through the spiritual father, and then when you go out from your spiritual father, the soul feels her renewal. But if you leave your spiritual father in a state of confusion, this means that you did not confess purely and did not forgive your brother all of his sins from your heart. — Silouan The Athonite

All beauty does not inspire love; some please the sight without captivating the affections. If all beauties were to enamour and captivate, the hearts of mankind would be in a continual state of perplexity and confusion - for beautiful objects being infinite, the sentiments they inspire should also be infinite. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

"Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem to characterize our age. If we desire sincerely and passionately the safety, the welfare and the free development of the talents of all men, we shall not be in want of the means to approach such a state." — Albert Einstein

Legal systems, at both the national and international level, are therefore required to recognize, guarantee and protect religious freedom, which is a right intrinsically inherent in human nature, in man's dignity as a free being, and is also an indicator of a healthy democracy and cone of the main sources of the legitimacy of the State. Religious freedom ... favors the development of relationships of mutual respect between the different Confessions and their healthy collaboration with the State and political society, without confusion of roles and without antagonism. — Pope Francis

Confusion has become a state of mind, more of less; we're trained to be confused. Quite simply, the people in power are keeping us down, keeping us docile and keeping us consuming with this confusion. It's a cultural confusion and it is deliberate. — Yoko Ono

A place of solitude offers a retreat from the opposing forces and diverse demands of living, an entry into a state of peace and unity. Mind and body can retire from confusion and conflict to a sanctuary of clarity and harmony — Anthony Lawlor

The way we react to the Indian will always remain this nation's unique moral headache. It may seem a smaller problem than our Negro one, and less important, but many other sections of the world have had to grapple with slavery and its consequences. There's no parallel for our treatment of the Indian. In Tasmania the English settlers solved the matter neatly by killing off every single Tasmanian, bagging the last one as late as 1910. Australia had tried to keep its aborigines permanently debased - much crueler than anything we did with our Indians. Brazil, about the same. Only in America did we show total confusion. One day we treated Indians as sovereign nations. Did you know that my relative Lost Eagle and Lincoln were photographed together as two heads of state? The next year we treated him as an uncivilized brute to be exterminated. And this dreadful dichotomy continues. — James A. Michener

Brian seemed to be in a state of confusion. I thought of packing my bags and going home. The squad seemed to me to be rudderless. — Mike Catt

Drugs have a long history of use in magic in various cultures, and usually in the context of either ecstatic communal rituals or in personal vision quests. However compared to people in simple pastoral tribal situations most people in developed countries now live in a perpetual state of mental hyperactivity with overactive imaginations anyway, so throwing drugs in on top of this usually just leads to confusion and a further loss of focus.
Plus as the real Shamans say, if you really do succeed in opening a door with a drug it will thereafter open at will and most such substances give all they will ever give on the first attempt. — Peter J. Carroll

'I'm not that easy to get rid of,' Andre retorts. 'As you know well. What state are you in? Besides confusion.' — Lynn Kelling

Your generation has been the target of incredible disinformation on the subject of premarital sex, which is another enticing addictive behavior to be considered. In this instance, our own government is responsible for much of the confusion. For some thirty years, federal and state programs have promoted a concept its promoters call "safe sex," which refers to the use of condoms in sexual intercourse. Billions of dollars have been spent telling young people that they can have sex - lots of really good sex - without suffering from the consequences of it. Condoms, they say, will solve all the problems. — James C. Dobson

Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door, and say, 'Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me, I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act. "What we love that we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Happiness is a state of mind. With physical comforts if your mind is still in a state of confusion and agitation, it is not happiness. Happiness means calmness of mind. — Dalai Lama

As for my constant low-grade state of confusion - the Blur is a term that seems to be sticking - let me break it into three categories: (1) things I should know but never learned, (2) things I choose not to know, and (3) things I know but totally screw up. — Maria Semple

It is undeniable that the source of all our miseries comes from our obstinacy in maintaining that Paradise is a garden. The psychoanalysts have added to the confusion by interpreting the floating dreams as a flight into space. The mystic is the only one who knows that all states of ecstasy are a state of floating in an ambiance more heavy than air. Paradise is at the bottom of the sea, and I can also prove to you that angels are ships. They have no wings but large sails which they unfold noiselessly at night to cross eternity. — Anais Nin

It may be observed, that provinces amid the vicissitudes to which they are subject, pass from order into confusion, and afterward recur to a state of order again; for the nature of mundane affairs not allowing them to continue in an even course, when they have arrived at their greatest perfection, they soon begin to decline. In the same manner, having been reduced by disorder, and sunk to their utmost state of depression, unable to descend lower, they, of necessity, reascend; and thus from good they gradually decline to evil, and from evil again return to good. The reason is, that valor produces peace; peace, repose; repose, disorder; disorder, ruin; so from disorder order springs; from order virtue, and from this, glory and good fortune. — Niccolo Machiavelli

When you have a problem, what happens? You think it out, you wallow in it, you fuss over it, you get wildly excited about it; and the more you analyze it, dig into it, polish it, worry about it, the less you understand it. But the moment you put it away from you, you understand it - the whole thing is suddenly very clear. I think most of us have had that experience. The mind is no longer in a state of confusion, conflict, and therefore it is capable of receiving or perceiving something totally new. And is it possible for the mind to be in that state so that it is never repetitive but is experiencing something new all the time? I think that depends on our understanding of this problem of the cultivation of virtue. — Anonymous

In that moment, I felt differently to myself yet the essence of who I really was.
Like a perfect state of balance. — Tim Relf

Listening to the debates about public schools on the Christian Right, one hears plenty of opposing opinions and a great deal of confusion. Some want to change the schools, others want to leave them. But the smart money seems to know what it is doing. It provides support for programs like the Good News Club, which slowly erode the support for public education in the country at large and in their own constituency in particular. And then it lays the groundwork for dismantling public education in favor of a private system of religious education funded by the state. — Katherine Stewart

I keep my stand-up comedy notes in a pile on my desk. I don't organize my act. I keep myself in a state of confusion. It stresses me out, but I prefer creative chaos. — Joy Behar

It is equally demonstrable that so far as Texas is concerned, there have been equal confusion, insecurity and injustice in the administration of the State governments. — William H. Wharton

Anarchy is a word that comes from the Greek, and signifies, strictly speaking, "without government": the state of a people without any constituted authority. Before such an organization had begun to be considered possible and desirable by a whole class of thinkers, so as to be taken as the aim of a movement (which has now become one of the most important factors in modern social warfare), the word "anarchy" was used universally in the sense of disorder and confusion, and it is still adopted in that sense by the ignorant and by adversaries interested in distorting the truth. — Errico Malatesta

Reflect how you are to govern a people who think they ought to be free, and think they are not. Your scheme yields no revenue; it yields nothing but discontent, disorder, disobedience; and such is the state of America, that after wading through up to your eyes in blood, you could only end up where you begun; that is, to tax where no revenue is to be found ... all is confusion beyond it. — Edmund Burke

I try to stay in a constant state of confusion just because of the expression it leaves on my face. — Johnny Depp

Your observations and conclusions are mirrored illusions of your inner state of being, teaching you truth through falsehoods, strength through weakness and clarity through confusion. You are seeing your Self now, disguised as the world through a lens of denial, but you will soon come to realize that what you choose to deny in yourself manifests into your world. The flaws you see in your world are your most powerful teachers. — Ka Chinery

My heroes, our time together is short," Juno said. "I am grateful that you called upon me. I have spent weeks in a state of pain and confusion...my Greek and Roman natures warring against each other. Worse, I've been forced to hide from Jupiter, who searches for me in his misguided wrath, believing that I caused this war with Gaea." "Gee," Annabeth said, "why would he think that? — Rick Riordan

Mrs. Boffin, insisting that Bella should make tomorrow's expedition in the chariot, she went home in great grandeur. Mrs. Wilfer and Miss Lavinia had speculated much on the probabilities and improbabilities of her coming in this gorgeous state, and, on beholding the chariot from the window at which they were secreted to look out for it, agreed that it must be detained at the door as long as possible, for the mortification and confusion of the neighbours. — Charles Dickens

Love must be invisible. No one ever sees it coming. It sneaks up behind you, bashes you over the head and leaves you in a state of stunned confusion for the rest of your life. — G.J. Walker-Smith

Surprise is just a paradox. Sometimes it annoys us; sometimes it shakes the tears of joy within us; sometimes it makes us ponder; sometimes it ceases our words and leaves our jaws open, and sometimes, it shuts our lips; for a moment, surprises can put our minds into a state of confusion and halt the movement of the body. Watch out for surprises for surprises are there to surprise you! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Then in October, Indian Summer, the air turned so soft, the sunlight so fragile, and each day's loveliness so poignantly doomed that even self-ignorance and restlessness felt like profound states of being, and he just wandered the empty beaches and misty headlands in a state of serene confusion and awe. — David James Duncan

Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is Thou shalt not question. — Sigmund Freud

The enemies of the Soviet state calculate that the heavy loss we have borne will lead to disorder and confusion in our ranks. But their expectations are in vain: bitter disillusionment awaits them. He who is not blind sees that our party, during its difficult days, is closing its ranks still more closely, that it is united and unshakable. — Lavrentiy Beria

In the world we live in, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion. — Haruki Murakami

To be in the middle of composing a book is almost always to feel oneself in a state of confusion, doubt and mental imprisonment ... — Joseph Epstein

In Star Wars, there was monetary confusion and competition. Despite being backed by metals, credits were refused by planets during periods of uncertainty, such as the Clone Wars. The credit was later known as the "Imperial Credit" and was used by Luke Skywalker to pay Han Solo for transport to the planet Alderaan. Yet smugglers avoided using state-sanctioned money and opted for precious metals like platinum. Those in the Ferengi Alliance traded gold-pressed latinum, a material that could not — Kabir Sehgal

Sometimes people misunderstand being scared and cautious. The former is when you are intimidated into the state of anxiety and confusion, while the later is when you acknowledge a risk but undoubtedly expecting positive outcome. — Uzoma Nnadi

Mathematics is the music of reason. To do mathematics is to engage in an act of discovery and conjecture, intuition and inspiration; to be in a state of confusion - not because it makes no sense to you, but because you gave it sense and you still don't understand what your creation is up to; to have a break-through idea; to be frustrated as an artist; to be awed and overwhelmed by an almost painful beauty; to be alive, damn it. — Paul Lockhart

Ignorance is the worst liberation. To know even a few is better than knowing nothing at all. — Michael Bassey Johnson

I have begun to wonder where I came from. The person I am now, this fumbling, stumbling supplicant ... was I built on the foundations of my old life, or did I rise from the grave a blank state? How much of me is inherited, and how much is my own creation? Questions that were once just idle musings have begun to feel strangely urgent. Am I firmly rooted to what came before? Or can I choose to deviate? — Isaac Marion

People want the here and now, rather than the there and after; as most are living in the where and what. — Anthony Liccione

As far as I understand it, and it's impossible not to understand it, you yourself, at the beginning and then again, very eloquently - albeit too theoretically - have been developing a picture of a Russia covered with an endless network of knots. For their part, each of the active groups, by proselytizing and branching out ad infinitum, has the task, through systematic denunciatory propaganda of constantly undermining the authority of the local authorities, creating confusion in the villages, fostering cynicism, scandals and an utter lack of belief in anything at all, a burning desire for something better, and finally, using fires as a measure that appeals primarily to the common people, to throw the country, at a designated moment, if necessary, even into a state of despair. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

From heat and protons, to hearts, central nervous systems, minds and cluster bombs, this is Creation's single compulsion, its one and only passion; a relentless, arguably reckless passage from a state of ancestral simplicity to contemporary complexity, where complexity - and the specialisation it affords - parents a wretched and forever diversifying family of more devoted fears and faithful anxieties, more pervasive ailments and skilful parasites, more virulent toxins, more capable diseases, and more affectionate expressions of pain, ruin, psychosis and loss. In the simplest possible statement: Creation is a vast entanglement apparatus - a complexity machine - whose single-minded mindless state of employment is geared entirely towards a greater potency and efficiency in the delivery and experience of misery and confusion, not harmony and peaceful accord. — John Zande

There was an old military saying that Fred Colon used to describe total bewilderment and confusion. An individual in that state, according to Fred, 'couldn't tell if it was arsehole or breakfast time.'


This had always puzzled Vimes. He wondered what research had been done. Even now, with his mouth tasting of warmed-over yesterday and everything curiously sharp in his vision, he thought he'd be able to tell the difference. Only one was likely to include a cup of coffee, for a start. — Terry Pratchett

I think spring is inside me. I feel spring awakening, I feel it in my entire body and soul. I have to force myself to act normally. I'm in a state of utter confusion, don't know what to read, what to write, what to do. I only know that I'm longing for something ... — Anne Frank

I grew up then, into this life of jazz, and fell immediately into the state of almost audible confusion. Life stood over me like an immoral schoolmistress, editing my thoughts. It seemed to me that there was no ultimate goal for man. Man was beginning a grotesque and bewildered fight with nature, that by the divine and magnificent accident has brought us to where we could fly in her face. We produce a Christ who can raise up the leper and presently, it's the salt of the Earth. If any one can find lesson in that, let him stand forth. Am I crazy trying to pierce the darkness of political idealism with some wild, despairing urge towards truth? Trying to separate the knowable from the unknowable? — F Scott Fitzgerald