Confounding Quotes

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  There is nothing nobler or more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.

  Homer

  Love, Marriage, Wedding

  Homer (1983). “The Odyssey”, Outlet

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• Confounding people's expectations was a way to maintain integrity.

  Lindsey Buckingham

  Integrity, People, Expectations

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• A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.

  Aristotle

  Philosophical, Cities, City Life

  Aristotle, Aeterna Press (2015). “Politics”, p.181, Aeterna Press

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• Secession, like any other REVOLUTIONARY ACT, may be morally justified by the extremity of oppression; but to call it a constitutional right is confounding the meaning of terms.

  Andrew Jackson

  War, May, Revolutionary

  Andrew Jackson (1835). “Annual messages, veto messages, protest, &c. of Andrew Jackson, President of the United States”, p.113

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• You discover how confounding the world is when you try to draw it. You look at a car, and you try to see its car-ness, and you’re like an immigrant to your own world. You don’t have to travel to encounter weirdness. You wake up to it.

  Shaun Tan

  Discovery, Car, Trying

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• There are many excuses for the person who made the mistake of confounding money and wealth. Like many others they mistook the sign for the thing signified.

  Millicent Fawcett

  Mistake, Wealth, Excuse

  Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1870). “Political Economy for Beginners”, p.2, London ; Cambridge : Macmillan

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• The confounding of all right and wrong, in wild fury, has averted from us the gracious favor of the gods.

  Catullus

  Favors, Gracious, Fury

  "Carmina". LXIV. 406,

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• The key of writing fiction isn't just to remove something that the reader or listener can easily imagine. It's not a matter of being coy, or withholding information. It's allowing for multiple possibilities, recognizing the complexity of human behavior, and making the world of a piece of fiction as marvelously confounding as the world we live in.

  Peter Turchi

  Writing, Keys, Fiction

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• I'm a bloody fun-seeker. Whatever the role is, I'll find a way to deliver the line that is confounding.

  Lucy Lawless

  Fun, Roles, Lines

  "SALEM: Lucy Lawless Talks Season 2, ASH VS. EVIL DEAD, and More". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. June 6, 2015.

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• The overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological scientific puzzles, confounding all our efforts to comprehend it, is the earth.

  Lewis Thomas

  Knowledge, Science, Effort

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• I like confounding expectations. I can expand what it is I am able to do, and hopefully get to do more weird, interesting projects like this. There's nothing wrong with doing comedies, and I'm not against comedies, either, but I always want to do stuff that keeps me off my guard and gets me out of my comfort zone. And how the audience perceives that... It's out of my hands. And I don't get that frustrated by it, because I'm on to the next thing at that point.

  Patton Oswalt

  Hands, Interesting, Expectations

  Interview with Scott Tobias, film.avclub.com. August 26, 2009.

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• Strawberries that in gardens grow
  Are plump and juicy fine,
  But sweeter far as wise men know
  Spring from the woodland vine.
  No need for bowl or silver spoon,
  Sugar or spice or cream,
  Has the wild berry plucked in June
  Beside the trickling stream.
  One such to melt at the tongue's root,
  Confounding taste with scent,
  Beats a full peck of garden fruit:
  Which points my argument.

  Robert Graves

  Summer, Wise, Spring

  Robert Graves (1920). “Country Sentiment”

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• Too many christians have been chargeable with... confounding the Logos of Plato with that of John , and making of it a second person in the trinity, than which no two things can be more different.

  Joseph Priestley

  Christian, Plato, Two

  Joseph Priestley (1782). “An History of the Corruption of Christianity”, p.462

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• The bizarre but all too common transformation of the woman artist from a producer in her own right into a subject for representation forms a leitmotif in the history of art. Confounding subject and object, it undermines the speaking position of the individual woman artist by generalizing her. Denied her individuality, she is displaced from being a producer and becomes instead a sign for male creativity.

  Whitney Chadwick

  Art, Creativity, Individuality

  Whitney Chadwick (2007). “Women, Art, and Society”

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• While I love to read contemporary fiction, I'm not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it's because the former journalist in me is too inhibited by the press of reality; when I think about writing of my own time I always think about nonfiction narratives. Or perhaps it's just that I find the present too confounding.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Writing, Reality, Thinking

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• Out of the current confusion of ideals and confounding of career hopes, a calm recognition may yet emerge that productive labor is the foundation of all prosperity.

  Matthew Crawford

  Careers, Confusion, Foundation

  Matthew B. Crawford (2009). “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work”, p.12, Penguin

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• We worship unity in trinity, and trinity in unity; neither confounding the person nor dividing the substance. There is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost; but the Godhead of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal.

  Tertullian

  Father, Son, Unity

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers". Book by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilber, p. 285, 1895.

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• We might as well give in to the tug of our spirits to explore this confounding and wondrous world. We might as well greet each other as endless pilgrims and bid each other well on our way. Because we're already on the road.

  Anthony Lawlor

  Giving, World, Might

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• The two commonest mistakes in judgement ... are, the confounding of shyness with arrogance - a very common mistake indeed - and the not understanding that an obstinate nature exists in a perpetual struggle with itself.

  Charles Dickens

  Mistake, Struggle, Two

  Charles Dickens (2015). “Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail and for Export”, p.2, Jester House Publishing

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• "Lawyers Are": Those whose interests and abilities lie in perverting, confounding and eluding the law.

  Jonathan Swift

  Lying, Law, Ability

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• My wife and I have long discussions about [George] Carlin, and we refuse to accept that he died an atheist. It's just, confounding. When I talked to Kelly [George Carlin's daughter] about it, she said that George Carlin once took her at about 12 years old and said, "I've figured it out." And he says it in one of his specials sort of - he goes, "We're all energy and we're all connected. That goldfish you have, you, me, that boot laying in the street, we're all pieces of light to a giant electron.

  Jay Mohr

  Daughter, Atheist, Light

  Source: underthegunreview.net

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• Art should be independent of all clap-trap - should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it; and that is why I insist on calling my works 'arrangements' and 'harmonies.

  James Whistler

  Art, Independent, Eye

  James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Peter Russell (2017). “Delphi Complete Works of James McNeill Whistler (Illustrated)”, p.620, Delphi Classics

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• The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.

  Walter Isaacson

  Reality, Hands, Style

  Walter Isaacson (2011). “Steve Jobs”, p.118, Simon and Schuster

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• We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones.

  Jeffrey Kluger

  Real, Pride, Worry

  Jeffrey Kluger (2007). “Simplexity: the simple rules of a complex world”

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• It has ever been my hobby-horse to see rising in America an empire of liberty, and a prospect of two or three hundred millions of freemen, without one noble or one king among them. You say it is impossible. If I should agree with you in this, I would still say, let us try the experiment, and preserve our equality as long as we can. A better system of education for the common people might preserve them long from such artificial inequalities as are prejudicial to society, by confounding the natural distinctions of right and wrong, virtue and vice.

  John Adams

  Horse, Kings, Freedom

  John Adams, Charles Francis Adams (1854). “Works: with a life of the author”, p.546

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