Puzzling Quotes - Page 4

• I mostly write about the working poor. Somehow, they're not being written about much anymore. I'm very interested in people who are in a situation that needs a little puzzling out. The thing that gets me started on a story is a person in a tough situation.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Writing, People, Needs

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• Ohm (a distinguished mathematician, be it noted) brought into order a host of puzzling facts connecting electromotive force and electric current in conductors, which all previous electricians had only succeeded in loosely binding together qualitatively under some rather vague statements. Even as late as 20 years ago, "quantity" and "tension" were much used by men who did not fully appreciate Ohm's law.

  Oliver Heaviside

  Science, Men, Order

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• The most puzzling thing about TV is the steady advance of the sponsor across the line that has always separated news from promotion, entertainment from merchandising. The advertiser has assumed the role of originator, and the performer has gradually been eased into the role of peddler.

  E. B. White

  Media, Roles, News

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• When I first began examining the global-warming scare, I found nothing more puzzling than the way officially approved scientists kept on being shown to have finagled their data, as in that ludicrous "hockey stick" graph, pretending to prove that the world had suddenly become much hotter than at any time in 1,000 years. Any theory needing to rely so consistently on fudging the evidence, I concluded, must be looked on not as science at all, but as simply a rather alarming case study in the aberrations of group psychology.

  Christopher Booker

  Hockey, Years, Data

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• There is nothing puzzling ... about America's gratuitously aggressive foreign policy or about the oligarchs' successful efforts to drag the Republic into five wars. What an aggressive foreign policy accomplishes by slow degrees, a state of war accomplishes in a trice. Overnight [war] kills reform, overnight it transforms insurgents into traitors and the Republic into an imperiled realm. Overnight it strangles free politics, distracts and overawes the citizenry. Overnight it blasts public hope.

  Walter Karp

  War, Successful, America

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• Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women--the quality of shifting from child to woman, theseeming helplessness one moment and the utter self-reliance the next that baffle us, that seem most difficult to understand. These are the qualities that make her a mystery, the qualities that provoked Freud to complain, "What does a woman want?

  Lillian B. Rubin

  Children, Often Is, Self

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• We must come to the Bible with the purpose of self-exposure consciously in mind. I suspect not many people make more than a token stab in that direction. It's extremely hard work. It makes Bible study alternately convicting and reassuring, painful and soothing, puzzling and calming, and sometimes dull - but not for long if our purpose is to see ourselves better.

  Larry Crabb

  Hard Work, Self, Long

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• In 1975, ... [speaking with Shiing Shen Chern], I told him I had finally learned ... the beauty of fiber-bundle theory and the profound Chern-Weil theorem. I said I found it amazing that gauge fields are exactly connections on fiber bundles, which the mathematicians developed without reference to the physical world. I added, "this is both thrilling and puzzling, since you mathematicians dreamed up these concepts out of nowhere." He immediately protested: "No, no. These concepts were not dreamed up. They were natural and real."

  Chen-Ning Yang

  Beautiful, Real, Science

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• Wittgenstein imagined that the philosopher was like a therapist whose task was to put problems finally to rest, and to cure us ofbeing bewitched by them. So we are told to stop, to shut off lines of inquiry, not to find things puzzling nor to seek explanations. This is intellectual suicide.

  Simon Blackburn

  Suicide, Philosophical, Intellectual

  Simon Blackburn (1993). “Essays in Quasi-Realism”, p.51, Oxford University Press

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• Seriously, I think what all the puzzling over parenthood I had to do to write [a novel] ROOM taught me is that children can thrive in a remarkable range of situations.

  Emma Donoghue

  Children, Writing, Thinking

  "Emma Donoghue Chats About 'Room'". The New Yorker Chat, www.newyorker.com. January 21, 2011.

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• All the dark, intricate, puzzling providences at which we were sometimes so offended...we shall [one day] see to be to us, as the difficult passage through the wilderness was to Israel, "the right way to the city of habitation".

  John Flavel

  Christian, Dark, Israel

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• To understand
  The signs that stars compose, we need depend
  Only on stars that are entirely there
  And the apparent space between them. There
  Never need be lines between them, puzzling
  Our sense of what is what.

  John Hollander

  Stars, Space, Needs

  John Hollander (1972). “Selected poems”, Harvill Secker

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• The contradiction so puzzling to the ordinary way of thinking comes from the fact that we have to use language to communicate our inner experience, which in its very nature transcends linguistics.

  D.T. Suzuki

  Thinking, Facts, Ordinary

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• There are no extra pieces in the universe. Everyone is here because he or she has a place to fill, and every piece must fit itself into the big jigsaw puzzle.

  Deepak Chopra

  Inspirational, Motivational, Spiritual

  "Oceans of Wisdom". Book by J. T. Linda, p. 91, April 23, 2013.

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• As a rule, the more bizarre a thing is, the less mysterious it proves to be.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Book, Mysterious, Language

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1892). “Adventures of Sherlock Holmes”, p.43

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• Every intellectual has a very special responsibility. He has the privilege and the opportunity of studying. In return, he owes it to his fellow men (or 'to society') to represent the results of his study as simply, clearly and modestly as he can. The worst thing that intellectuals can do - the cardinal sin - is to try to set themselves up as great prophets vis-à-vis their fellow men and to impress them with puzzling philosophies. Anyone who cannot speak simply and clearly should say nothing and continue to work until he can do so.

  Karl Popper

  Philosophy, Responsibility, Opportunity

  "In Search of a Better World: Lectures and Essays from Thirty Years".

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• It is puzzling to me that otherwise sensitive people develop a real docility about the obvious necessity of eating, at least once a day, in order to stay alive. Often they lose their primal enjoyment of flavors and odors and textures to the point of complete unawareness. And if ever they question this progressive numbing-off, they shrug helplessly in the face of mediocrity everywhere. Bit by bit, hour by hour, they say, we are being forced to accept the not-so-good as the best, since there is little that is even good to compare it with.

  M. F. K. Fisher

  Philosophy, Real, Medicine

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• For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can’t quite speak the language, and you don’t know where you’re going, and you’re pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you’re left puzzling over who you are and whom you’ve fallen in love with.

  Pico Iyer

  Country, Journey, Darkness

  "Oh to Wanderfly (and How It’ll Help You Travel)" by Jason Silva, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 20, 2010.

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• Most investors are pretty smart. Yet most investors also remain heavily invested in actively managed stock funds. This is puzzling. The temptation, of course, is to dismiss these folks as ignorant fools. But I suspect these folks know the odds are stacked against them, and yet they are more than happy to take their chances.

  Jonathan Clements

  Smart, Odds, Temptation

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• You don't understand,' she said, and there was a puzzling trace of resentment in her voice. 'Children never do. The love a parent has for a child, there's nothing else like it. No other love so consuming.

  Cassandra Clare

  Children, Voice, Parent

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• From this, one can make a deduction which is quite certainly the ultimate truth of jigsaw puzzles: despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzlemaker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.

  Georges Perec

  Moving, Jigsaw Puzzles, Games

  Georges Perec (2012). “Life: A User's Manual”, p.191, Random House

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• It took time to learn that the hard thing about writing is to let the story write itself, while one sits at the typewriter and does as little thinking as possible. It happened over and over again, and the beginner learned - when you start puzzling over an idea, and slowing down on the keys, the writing gets worse and worse.

  Richard Bach

  Writing, Thinking, Keys

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