Bewilderment Quotes - Page 2

• Our ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like.

  Noam Chomsky

  Ignorance, Knowing, Looks

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• To let God make us, instead of painfully trying to make ourselves; to follow the path that his love shows us, instead of through conceit or cowardice or mockery choosing another; to trust Him for our strength and fitness as the flowers do, simply giving ourselves back to Him in grateful service,—this is to keep the laws that give us the freedom of the city in which there is no longer any night of bewilderment or ignorance or uncertainty.

  Sarah Orne Jewett

  Flower, Grateful, Ignorance

  Sarah Orne Jewett (2008). “A Country Doctor”, p.238, Bantam Classics

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• Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in bewilderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Life, Hate, Passion

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• Then he kissed her. It was a very long time before he let her go. When he did, she looked up at him, hurt and bewilderment on her face. 'Why did you stop?' asked Tessa. 'I thought you might want to breathe,' said Guy carefully. 'Breathe?'said Tessa , shocked. 'I don’t need to breathe  when I’m with you.'

  Eva Ibbotson

  Hurt, Long, Guy

  "Magic Flutes".

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• This deep agnosticism is more than the refusal of conventional agnosticism to take a stand on whether God exists or whether the mind survives bodily death. It is the willingness to embrace the fundamental bewilderment of a finite, fallible creature as the basis for leading a life that no longer clings to the superficial consolations of certainty.

  Stephen Batchelor

  Mind, Fundamentals, Embrace

  Stephen Batchelor (2010). “Confession of a Buddhist Atheist”, p.74, Spiegel & Grau

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• I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious

  Anton Chekhov

  Religious, Men, Educated

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• Discipleship is not limited to what you can comprehend – it must transcend all comprehension. Plunge into the deep waters beyond your own comprehension, and I will help you to comprehend even as I do. Bewilderment is the true comprehension. Not to know where you are going is the true knowledge. My comprehension transcends yours.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Deep Water, Helping, Where You Are

  "The Cost of Discipleship".

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• Sell your presence and purchase bewilderment.

  Rumi

  Humor, Deep Thought, Your Presence

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• Whoever determines the truth from people alone will remain lost in the plains of bewilderment. Rather, know the truth, and you will know its people.

  Al-Ghazali

  Wisdom, Islamic, People

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• When your spirit is not in the least clouded, when the clouds of bewilderment clear away, there is the true void.

  Miyamoto Musashi

  Clouds, Void, Spirit

  Miyamoto Musashi, Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Inazo Nitobe (2010). “Honor: Samurai Philosophy of Life - The Essential Samurai Collection; The Book of Five Rings, Hagakure: The Way of the Samurai, Bushido: The Soul of Japan.”, p.45, Bottom of the Hill

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• O Lord! You are the guide of those who are passing through the Valley of Bewilderment. If I am a heretic, enlarge my heresy.

  Mansur Al-Hallaj

  Valleys, Lord, Guides

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• The darkness of racial injustice will be dispelled only by the light of forgiving love. For more that three centuries American Negroes have been frustrated by day and bewilderment by night by unbearable injustice, and burdened with the ugly weight of discrimination. Forced to live with these shameful conditions, we are tempted to become bitter and retaliate with a corresponding hate. But if this happens, the new order we seek will be little more than a duplicate of the old order. We must in strength and humility meet hate with love.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Hate, Humility, Night

  "Loving Your Enemies". Speech delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, November 17, 1957.

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• I believe in not quite knowing. A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiosity and bewilderment.

  William Trevor

  Believe, Writing, Knowing

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• Trade your cleverness for bewilderment.

  Rumi

  Trade, Cleverness

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• Christian faith, as I understand it, is not primarily a matter of signing on for the proposition that there exists a Supreme Being, but the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love.

  Terry Eagleton

  Christian, Pain, Commitment

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• To the human mind there is something almost illogical in the assertion that God became a man. It is like speaking about a square circle. Yet this is what Christmas says - and we take refuge from our bewilderment not in explanation but in adoration.

  Ralph P. Martin

  Men, Squares, Circles

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• If the task of scientific methodology is to piece together an account of what scientists actually do, then the testimony of biologists should be heard with specially close attention. Biologists work very close to the frontier between bewilderment and understanding.
  Biology is complex, messy and richly various, like real life; it travels faster nowadays than physics or chemistry (which is just as well, since it has so much farther to go), and it travels nearer to the ground. It should therefore give us a specially direct and immediate insight into science in the making.

  Peter Medawar

  Real, Science, Giving

  Peter Brian Medawar (1969). “Induction and intuition in scientific thought”

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• It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream - making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams.

  Joseph Conrad

  Dream, Struggle, Essence

  "Heart of Darkness". Book by Joseph Conrad, 1902.

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• Miles exhaled carefully, faint with rage and reminded grief. He does not know, he told himself. He cannot know... "Ivan, one of these days somebody is going to pull out a weapon and plug you, and you're going to die in bewilderment, crying, "What did I say? What did I say?" "What did I say?" asked Ivan indignantly.

  Lois McMaster Bujold

  Grief, Doe, Weapons

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• History ... may be regarded as an artificial extension and : broadening of our memories and may be used to overcome the natural bewilderment of all unfamiliar situations.

  James Harvey Robinson

  Memories, History, Overcoming

  James Harvey Robinson (1912). “The New History: Essays Illustrating the Modern Historical Outlook”

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• Both the five-year-olds looked at me with bewilderment and a bit of fearful uncertainty. I had a sudden horrifying image of the woman I might become if I'm not careful: Crazy Aunt Liz. The divorcee in the muumuu with the dyed orange hair who doesn't eat dairy but smokes menthols, who's always just coming back from her astrology cruise or breaking up with her aroma-therapist boyfriend, who reads the Tarot cards of kindergarteners and says things like, "Bring Aunty Liz another wine cooler, baby, and I'll let you wear my mood ring.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Baby, Crazy, Wine

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• The dogma of the Incarnation is the most dramatic thing about Christianity, and indeed, the most dramatic thing that ever entered the mind of man; but if you tell people so, they stare at you in bewilderment.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Men, People, Mind

  Dorothy L. Sayers (2014). “The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers Vol II: 1937-1943: From Novelist to Playwright”, p.43, St. Martin's Press

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• The context of the general teachings is one of talking to a sentient being who is experiencing uninterrupted bewilderment – one thought or emotion after another like the surface of the ocean in turmoil, without any recognition of mind essence. This confusion is continuous, without almost any break, life after life.

  Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche

  Ocean, Teaching, Talking

  Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, Erik Pema Kunsang, Marcia Binder Schmidt (1994). “As It Is”, p.82, Rangjung Yeshe Publications

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• The American citizen lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly irridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  Real, Play, Age

  "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America" by Daniel J. Boorstin, Vintage edition (p. 37), 1992.

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• A pedestrian seems in this country to be a sort of beast of passage - stared at, pitied, suspected and shunned by everyone who meets him ... Every passing coachman called out to me: "Do you want to ride on the outside?" If I met only a farm worker on a horse he would say to me companionably "Warm walking sir," and when I passed through a village the old women in their bewilderment would let out a "God Almighty!

  Karl Philipp Moritz

  Country, Horse, Village

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