Stupefy Quotes & Sayings

These memories are the memorials and pledges of the vital hours of a lifetime. These hours of afflatus in the human spirit, the springs of art, are, in their mystery, akin to the epochs of history, when a race which for centuries has lived content, unknown, behind its own frontiers, digging, eating, sleeping, begetting, doing what was requisite for survival and nothing else, will, for a generation or two, stupefy the world; commit all manner of crimes, perhaps; follow the wildest chimeras, go down in the end in agony, but leave behind a record of new heights scaled and new rewards won for all mankind; the vision fades, the soul sickens, and the routine of survival starts again. — Evelyn Waugh

They put their shoulders to the wheel during the day, stupefy themselves with drugs or television at night, and try not to think too searchingly about the world they're leaving their children to cope with. — Daniel Quinn

[H]aving heard, or more probably read somewhere, in the days when I thought I would be well advised to educate myself, or amuse myself, or stupefy myself, or kill time, that when a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping in this way to go in a straight line. — Samuel Beckett

He who runs may see that opium and such other intoxicants and narcotics stupefy a man's soul and reduce him to a level lower than that of beasts. — Mahatma Gandhi

I wish I could convey the perfection of a seal slipping into water or a spider monkey swinging from point to point or a lion merely turning its head. But language founders in such seas. Better to picture it in your head if you want to feel it ... I spent more hours than I can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet. It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses. — Yann Martel

It is neither just nor human so to grind men down with excessive labour as to stupefy their minds and wear out their bodies. — Pope Leo XIII

Her ankle was screaming like a blonde in a horror flick ...
Huffing a little, she once more wished that being a witch was lot more like Harry Potter made it out to be and a lot less like being a good cook. This whole situation would be vastly improved if all she had to do was dig her magic wand out of her bag, point it at the security guards chasing her, and shout, Stupefy! — Christine Warren

The religious superstition is encouraged by means of the institution of churches, processions, monuments, festivities ... The so-called clergy stupefy the masses ... They befog the people and keep them in an eternal condition of stupefaction. — Leo Tolstoy

Motives by excess reverse their very nature and instead of exciting, stun and stupefy the mind. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

What would happen if most people tried to act intelligently on their own behalf? Anarchy. ( ... ) So what can we do with this intelligence we don't need and can't use? Stupefy it. Valium for housewives, glue-sniffing for schoolkids, hash for adolescents, rotgut South African wine for the unemployed, beer for the workers, spirits for me and the crowd I left downstairs fifteen minutes ago. — Alasdair Gray

The People are a capricious and stupid beast that doesn't know its own strength and bears burdens and blows with patience;... it knows not what fear it inspires, or that its masters have prepared a magic potion to stupefy it. What a fantastic situation! The People beating and tying itself up with its own hands; fighting and dying for a few pennies from the King,... totally unaware that everything between heaven and earth really belongs to it and stoning to death anyone who would remind it of its rights. — Tommaso Campanella

To construct mechanically the brain of a somniferous tale, it is not enough to dissect nonsense & mightily stupefy the reader's intelligence with renowned doses, so as to paralyze his faculties for the rest of his life by the infallible law of fatigue; one must, besides, with good mesmeric fluid, make it somnambulistically impossible for him to move, against his nature forcing his eyes to cloud over at your own fixed stare. — Comte De Lautreamont

People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.
Circular Letter to My Friends in Italy — Mikhail Bakunin

What starts love is your ability to stupefy and blind yourself to the point of being able to fall in love. What stops it is waking up. — Fran Lebowitz

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us. — Theodor Adorno