Unsettle Quotes & Sayings

And so the question becomes, what you do in the meantime? And you go - if you're forever on the move, especially in the life of the mind; forever reading veraciously, writing, speaking, lecturing, trying to unsettle minds, trying to touch souls, trying to encourage and inspire, on the one hand, but also trying to unhouse and unnerve people, so that they have to reexamine themselves, society and the world on the others. There's tremendous joy in it. — Cornel West

My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects. — Robert M. Hutchins

Murder often doesn't unsettle a man. In Baltimore, it usually doesn't even ruin his day. — David Simon

I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every 20 minutes you've got to have a bump, you've got to have a change in course, you've got to unsettle the audience. It can't be too predictable so something has to happen. I think that was something that Hitchcock did very well too. You couldn't let an audience feel too settled in. — Barbara Broccoli

Alarm, when used for anything less than a fire or an air attack, is certain to muddle the mind, unsettle the senses, and, in most cases, more than double the danger. — Ken Kesey

Thank you," I whisper. Words I never thought I would say to her. They unsettle us both."
"You want to thank me, Barrow?" she mutters, kicking away the last of my bindings. "Then keep your word. And let this fucking place burn." (300) — Victoria Aveyard

Latter-day scepticism is fond of calling itself progressive; but scepticism is really reactionary. Scepticism goes back; it attempts to unsettle what has already been settled. Instead of trying to break up new fields with its plough, it simply tries to break up the plough. — G.K. Chesterton

Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul ... — Marguerite Yourcenar

Love of colors bewilders the eye and it fails to see right. Love of harmonies bewitches the ear, and it loses its true hearing. Love of perfumes fills the head with dizziness. Love of flavors ruins the taste. Desires unsettle the heart until the original nature runs amok. These five are enemies of true life. Yet these are what men of discernment claim to live for. They are not what I live for. If this is life, then pigeons in a cage have found happiness! — Zhuangzi

My fave routine is The Roller Coaster. First of all it's a great way to get into a card trick, without stating it's a card trick. The routine is so brilliantly structured as to at first, intrigue, psychologically unsettle and then blow away your audience. An extra bonus is that it will hopefully create a welcome respite from bloody invisible deck routines. Worth the price of the book. — Steve Valentine

In the matter of belief, I have always found that defenses have the same irrelevance about them as the criticisms they are meant to answer. I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things. We participate in Being without remainder. No breath, no thought, no wart or whisker, is not as sunk in Being as it could be. And yet no one can say what Being is. — Marilynne Robinson

Troubled times do call for troubled songs, songs that unsettle our souls and our spirits unapologetically. — Tavis Smiley

Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak the other within one's wall, even if for only a moment, a moment before one immures oneself again. — Rabih Alameddine

Chumps always make the best husbands. When you marry, Sally, grab a chump. Tap his head first, and if it rings solid, don't hesitate. All the unhappy marriages come from husbands having brains. What good are brains to a man? They only unsettle him. — P.G. Wodehouse

I admired anyone who could unsettle people. — J.G. Ballard

I unsettle all things. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The very last thing I want to do is to unsettle in the mind of any Christian, whatever his denomination, the concepts
for him traditional
by which he finds it profitable to represent to himself what is happening when he receives the bread and wine. I could wish that no definitions had ever been felt to be necessary; and, still more, that none had been allowed to make divisions between churches. — C.S. Lewis

The art of opposition and of revolution is to unsettle established customs, sounding them even to their source, to point out their want of authority and justice. — Blaise Pascal

If you're against globalisation, it doesn't achieve much by sort of bombing the head offices of Shell or Nestle. You unsettle people much more by blowing up an Oxfam shop because people can't understand the motive. — J.G. Ballard

It is the memory of this relief that will haunt her in the months to come. It will start to unsettle her tonight when they eat the lasagna and carve up the chocolate cake. It will continue to disturb her when Robbie leaves for boot camp, and later, when he is assigned to duty nearly three thousand miles away at Camp Lejeune. It will scald her when she learns he has been deployed to Iraq. Each day she will think back to this day and remember how she nodded and wiped her eyes. She will remember how Robbie's body seemed to loosen, open up, how he squared his shoulders and embraced her as if he'd been practicing all his life for this moment. Sometimes she thinks she will be haunted every day by the memory of the relief she felt when Robbie asked her to let him go. And she did. — Elizabeth Marro

The professor argues against measuring effectiveness in the shallow short-term in the "fierce humanities," for teaching that seeks not merely learning, but unlearning, that seeks to unsettle knowledge and assumptions in ways more fundamental than any exam can or should test. — Cary Nelson

Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible. — Robert M. Hutchins

Savings represent much more than mere money value. They are the proof that the saver is worth something in himself. Any fool can waste; any fool can muddle; but it takes something more of a man to save and the more he saves the more of a man he makes of himself. Waste and extravagance unsettle a man's mind for every crisis; thrift, which means some form of self-restraint, steadies it. — Rudyard Kipling

A church that does not provoke any crisis, preach a gospel that does not unsettle, proclaim a word of God
that does not get under anyone's skin or a word of God that does not touch the real sin of the society in which
it is being proclaimed: what kind of gospel is that? — Oscar A. Romero

The important thing for me as an educator is how to - how do we unsettle the minds and touch the souls of significant numbers of young people who don't read texts or don't read my texts. — Cornel West

For the mind and the imagination, bookstores aren't enough, college courses aren't enough, the Internet isn't enough. Those resources are all governed by the tastes and needs of the moment. Only libraries take the long view, quietly shelving the unused with the used, knowing that one of these days the two categories will be reversed by a student's discovery of those hitherto undisturbed volumes whose contents will unsettle the learned world. — Helen Vendler

Not a word had dropped from my lips, or from hers, that could unsettle either of us - and yet the same unacknowledged sense of embarrassment made us shrink alike from meeting one another alone — Wilkie Collins

Years later, my father made a passing reference to the uncanny-valley response - the human aversion to things that look almost but not quite like people. The uncanny-valley response is a hard thing to define, much less to test for. But if true, it explains why the faces of chimps so unsettle some of us. — Karen Joy Fowler

It had been a morning of vivid images: the man-made streams, the rats in the butchers' shops, the stacks of new-minted silver pennies, and then the woman's private parts. For a while, he knew, those pictures would come back to him to unsettle his meditations. — Ken Follett

The reasons why institutions fail and societies change are complex, and simplistic explanations should evoke automatic suspicion. Sometimes external causes - droughts, plagues or foreign invasions - can unsettle a nation, or its leadership may prove inadequate because of personal factors. In every case, a society faces problems, and is solutions or lack of response set a course for the future. — Thomas W. Africa

The gospel Christ taught was spectacularly designed to unsettle and disturb, not lull into pleasant serenity. — Terryl L. Givens

It's true I've got no shirts to wear;
It's true my butcher's bill is due;
It's true my prospects all look blue
But don't let that unsettle you — W.S. Gilbert

The contest, " said Pott, "shall be prolonged so long as I have health and strength, and that portion of talent with which I am gifted. From that contest, sir, although it may unsettle men's minds and excite their feelings, and render them incapable for the discharge of the every-day duties of ordinary life; from that contest, sir, I will never shrink, till I have set my heel upon the Eatanswill Independent. I wish the people of London, and the people of my country to know, sir, that they may rely upon me; - that I will not desert them, that I am resolved to stand by them, sir, to the last. — Charles Dickens

Outward attacks and troubles rather fix than unsettle the Christian, as tempests from without only serve to root the oak faster; while an inward canker will gradually rot and decay it. — Hannah More

It might not be pleasant for the listener, it might disempower and unsettle the witness to a breakdown, but crying was good. Crying was an acceptable outlet, even if it made you feel raw and empty inside, it was still better than that buildup of resentment that grew from not letting your emotions out. — Dorothy Koomson

I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things. — Marilynne Robinson

The strife of politics tends to unsettle the calmest understanding, and ulcerate the most benevolent heart. There are no bigotries or absurdities too gross for parties to create or adopt under the stimulus of political passions. — Edwin Percy Whipple

True literature should rouse the reader, unsettle him, change his view of the world, give him a resolute push over the cliff of self-knowledge — Felix J. Palma

I do not know who first invented the myth of sexual equality. But it is a myth willfully fostered and nourished by certain semi-scientists and other fiction writers. And it has done more, I suspect, to unsettle marital happiness than any other false doctrine of this myth-ridden age. — Phyllis McGinley

The things about others that irritate, annoy, and unsettle us are the very things we have not accepted and embraced about ourselves — R. Alan Woods

Do not unsettle him too much. Men often place pride before reason. — Brandon Sanderson

I'm really not comfortable with you being naked," I said, struggling for a normal tone and failing.
His brow arched. "Why should it unsettle you, pet? After all, you just said I meant nothing to you beyond mere gratitude. And you've seen a man's body before, so don't pull that blushing act with me. What could be bothering you, then? I know what's bothering me." The smoothly bantering tone changed to a low, furious growl. "What's bothering me is that you dare to stand there and tell me what I do and do not feel about last night. That kissing you and holding you meant nothing to me. Then, to top it all off, that you were only reacting to me because you were impaired! That's rich. You know what those drugs did to you in the first dose, before the second one made you comatose? They killed the bug up your arse! — Jeaniene Frost

Gabriel Wilensky's book is an excellent introduction into the history of antisemitism in Europe. His words will rightly unsettle those who have yet to come to grips with Christianity's role in shaping European attitudes and policies towards Jews into the 20th century. — Jonathan Friedman

She believed that displays of emotion signaled a certain failure between people. The only person who could upset her, make her cry or laugh in the open, was my father. He could always unsettle her face with a stern admonition or an old joke or pun in Korean. Otherwise, I thought she possessed the most exquisite control over the muscles of her face. She seemed to have the subtle power of inflection over them, the way a tongue can move air. — Chang-rae Lee

Words aren't meant to be kept inside, you see. They are free creatures, and if locked away will unsettle the stomach. — Brandon Sanderson

And even though the resurrection of Jesus, by itself, is meaningless apart from the unfolding biblical drama that begins with creation and leads to the consummation, nevertheless, by beginning with this unique event in history, we are led to a particular claim that can unsettle our settled assumptions. So that is where we must begin: with the particular and unique claim that Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead. — Michael S. Horton

My view of university training is to unsettle the minds of young men, to widen their horizons, to inflame their intellects. It is not a hardening, or settling process. Education is not to teach men facts, theories, or laws; it is not to reform them, or amuse them, or to make them expert technicians in any field; it is to teach them to think, to think straight if possible; but to think always for themselves. — Robert M

Given a blank we can't help trying to fill it in along lines of customary seeing or saying. But the best poetic lines undermine those habits, break the pre- off the -dictable, unsettle the suburbs of your routine sentiments, and rattle the tracks of your trains of thoughts. — Heather McHugh

Sudden success in golf is like the sudden acquisition of wealth. It is apt to unsettle and deteriorate the character. — P.G. Wodehouse

D/s sessions can unsettle submissives, especially new ones. When you trust someone to care for you - and they do well for you - then a bond develops. It's easy to confuse that tie with other feelings. — Cherise Sinclair