Muddle Quotes - Page 2

• It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.

  E. M. Forster

  Love, Romantic, Romance

  E.M. Forster (2012). “A Room with a View”, p.166, Courier Corporation

  40 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think it’s just as likely that someone could say that this place, right here, is heaven, hell and earth all at the same time. And we still wouldn’t know what to do differently. Everyone just muddles through, trying not to make too many mistakes.

  David Wroblewski

  Mistake, Thinking, Heaven

  4 Copy quote

• From now on there is no longer any development immanent to art. The times have passed for history of art with a logical sense. There is no longer even any consistency in absurdities; the development has been wound up, and what comes now already exists: the syncretism of a muddle of all styles and possibilities, post-history.

  Arnold Gehlen

  Art, Consistency, Style

  8 Copy quote

• i'm in a muddle about a lot of things -- i've just discovered that i've a mind, and i'm starting to read" "read what?" "everything. i have to pick and choose, of course, but mostly things that make me think.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Thinking, Mind, Starting

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2016). “This Side of Paradise”, p.100, Xist Publishing

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion faster than adults, and evasion simply muddles 'em.

  Harper Lee

  Children, Tkam, Adults

  "To Kill a Mockingbird". Book by Harper Lee, 1962.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness’ sake. But don’t make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, and evasion simply muddles ‘em. No... you had the right answer this afternoon, but the wrong reasons. Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they’re not attracting attention with it. Hotheadedness isn’t.

  Harper Lee

  Children, Tkam, Sake

  "To Kill a Mockingbird". Book by Harper Lee, July 11, 1960.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Mean, Men, Self

  29 Copy quote

• Mathematics is so much easier than words mathematics makes things clear that words merely muddle and confuse and mess up.

  John Maynard Smith

  Mathematics, Easier, Clear

  10 Copy quote

• Humanity cannot afford to muddle through the rest of the twentieth century; the risks are too great, and the stakes are too high. This may be the last opportunity to choose our own and our descendants’ destiny. Failing to choose or making the wrong choices may lead to catastrophe. But it must never be forgotten that the right choices could lead to a much better world.

  John Holdren

  Opportunity, Destiny, Choices

  4 Copy quote

• I did indulge myself in a lot of history reading, to inform myself as to who the real woman was. As far as other actresses’ portrayals, though, I tried to stay clear. It muddles your process, I find.

  Natalie

  Real, Reading, Actresses

  4 Copy quote

• But, as Bacon has well pointed out, truth is more likely to come out of error, if this is clear and definite, than out of confusion, and my experience teaches me that it is better to hold a well-understood and intelligible opinion, even if it should turn out to be wrong, than to be content with a muddle-headed mixture of conflicting views, sometimes miscalled impartiality, and often no better than no opinion at all.

  William Bayliss

  Science, Errors, Views

  7 Copy quote

• The danger of tautological propositions is considerable in discussions of the concept of normal profits. Because supernormal profits seem to invite newcomers to an industry and sub-normal profits seem to drive away those who are in an industry, some writers are inclined to define normal profits as the earnings of the fixed resources in an industry which neither grows nor declines in size or number of firms. It should be clear that such a definition is useless: it muddles together attractiveness and actual afflux, desirbility of entry and ease of entry, zero profits and monopoly rents.

  Fritz Machlup

  Zero, Numbers, Together

  4 Copy quote

• The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with page 45 [Hayek provided historical background up to page 45; after that came his theoretical model], and yet it remains a book of some interest, which is likely to leave its mark on the mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Mistake, Book, Historical

  John Maynard Keynes, Royal Economic Society (Great Britain) (1971). “The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: The general theory and after: pt. 1, Preparation”

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you ask me, what is helpful to creativity is training the eye to notice things, to observe closely and precisely, being careful not to make a muddle of it.

  Ian Graham

  Creativity, Eye, Training

  4 Copy quote

• People will then often say, 'But surely it's better to remain an Agnostic just in case?' This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I've been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would choose not to worship him anyway.)

  Douglas Adams

  Atheist, Thinking, Hair

  Douglas Adams (2005). “The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time”, p.103, Del Rey

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism.

  Walter Lippmann

  Selfish, Stupid, Socialism

  Walter Lippmann (1960). “A Preface to Morals”, p.250, Transaction Publishers

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• The world in which we live can be understood as a result of muddle and accident; but if it is the outcome of deliberate purpose, the purpose must have been that of a fiend. For my part, I find accident a less painful and more plausible hypothesis.

  Bertrand Russell

  Religion, Purpose, World

  Bertrand Russell (1957). “Why I Am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects”, p.93, Simon and Schuster

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Anti-alcoholics are unfortunates in the grip of water, that terrible poison, so corrosive that out of all substances it has been chosen for washing and scouring, and a drop of water added to a clear liquid like Absinthe, muddles it.

  Alfred Jarry

  Food, Water, Cooking

  29 Copy quote

• My chosen instrument is guitar and, fortunately, I'm able to muddle through that. I can play guitar to the point where I can express myself artistically.

  Joe Perry

  Guitar, Play, Able

  7 Copy quote

• Some people find clarity threatening. They like muddle, confusion, obscurity. So when somebody does no more than speak clearly it sounds threatening.

  Richard Dawkins

  People, Confusion, Sound

  "Richard Dawkins' Hate Mail". Interview with Rowan Hooper, www.slate.com. December 28, 2013.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• I rather like mysteries. But I do dislike muddles.

  David Lean

  Mystery, Dislike

  10 Copy quote

• It is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror--on thethings that I might have avoided.

  E. M. Forster

  Fate, Sound, Looks

  E. M. Forster (2014). “Great Novels of E. M. Forster: Where Angels Fear to Tread, The Longest Journey, A Room with a View, Howards End”, p.656, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• In fact I'm in too much of a mental muddle to know where I am - an idealist or not. I'm a mere man of letters, and I do what I can with those subjects.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Men, Letters, Too Much

  Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Burgin (1998). “Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations”, p.79, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking. Would not that same uncluttered mind also see the attempts to reconcile science and religion by disparaging the reduction of the complex to the simple as attempts guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectually dishonest emotion?

  Peter Atkins

  Powerful, Simple, Thinking

  12 Copy quote

• The best thing to do is muddle through and maybe, over time, create a solution of that, if someone really wanted to exit, the legal basis on which you could exit. Because right now there almost doesn't exist one.

  Jamie Dimon

  Exit, Bases, Things To Do

  Source: asia.nikkei.com

  6 Copy quote

  Show source