Most Puzzling Quotes

#1. The most puzzling development in politics during the last decade is the apparent determination of Western European leaders to re-create the Soviet Union in Western Europe.

Mikhail Gorbachev

#2. 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

#3. One of the most puzzling things about a novel is that "the way it really was" half the time is, and half the time isn't, the way it ought to be in the novel.

Randall Jarrell

#4. It is classical music, and is considered the best and most puzzling ever manufactured. You're supposed to like it, whether you do or not, and if you don't, the proper thing is to look as if you did. Understand?

L. Frank Baum

#5. Find the most puzzling kind of art you can think of, and then go out and try to approximate it with your camera. Take a photograph that corresponds to it. (Assignment to students.)

John Baldessari

#6. Of all the things I found puzzling about Sam, this one was always the most puzzling: his sudden, self-deprecating mood swings ... Was this what it meant to be creative?

Maggie Stiefvater

#7. What a pity it is that there are so many words! Whenever one wants to say anything, three or four ways of saying it run into one's head together; and one can't tell which to choose. It is as troublesome and puzzling as choosing a ribbon ... or a husband.

Julius Charles Hare

#8. If our religion is something objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling or repellent; for it will be precisely the puzzling or the repellent which conceals what we do not yet know and need to know.

C.S. Lewis

#9. YOU. ARE. PERFECT. You are. Im talking to YOU. and dont you dare think otherwise ... embrace the entity of yourself ... you are a puzzle piece and you are meant to be puzzling.

Kaiden Blake

#10. Indeed, the history of 20th century physics was in large measure about how to avoid the infinities that crop up in particle theory and cosmology. The idea of point particles is convenient but leads to profound, puzzling troubles.

Gregory Benford

#11. The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.

Robert M. Pirsig

#12. I want to lie down and sleep, exhausted by all these puzzling, insubstantial, ridiculous, fleeting thoughts. Yes, when I feel afraid I want to go to sleep - the soul's refuge from panic.

Nina George

#13. Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

John Ashbery

#14. People have asked the question "Can a Thing exist without any Attributes belonging to it?" It is a very puzzling question, and I'm not going to try to answer it: let us turn up our noses, and treat it with contemptuous silence, as if it really wasn't worth noticing.

Lewis Carroll

#15. Chizpurfle infestations explain the puzzling failure of many relatively new Muggle electrical artifacts.

J.K. Rowling

#16. 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

#17. Stepan Arkadyevitch, who liked a joke, was fond of puzzling a plain man by saying that if he prided himself on his origin, he ought not to stop at Rurik and disown the first founder of his family
the monkey.

Leo Tolstoy

#18. We must be careful with our lives, for Christ's sake, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously.

Frederick Buechner

#19. Agatha Christie's writing is incredibly skillful because her books are incredibly intellectually puzzling and challenging.

Sophie Hannah

#20. The sight of an obese poor man - like that of a skinny rich man - is puzzling.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#21. He shivered. His coat was thin, and it was obvious he would not get his kiss, which he found puzzling. The manly heroes of the penny dreadfuls and shilling novels never had these problems getting kissed.

Neil Gaiman

#22. The whole conception of 'sin' is one which I find very puzzling, doubtless owing to my sinful nature.

Bertrand Russell

#23. Intellectual growth is when you surpass the barrier of puerility, puzzling people with your dazzling creativity.

Michael Bassey Johnson

#24. I have been both praised and criticized. The criticism stung, but the praise sometimes bothered me even more. To have received such praise and honors has always been puzzling to me.

Billy Joel

#25. As a rule, said Holmes, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#26. It was a puzzling thing as to why they packed up in towns in the way they did.

Paulette Jiles

#27. In general there is something puzzling about the fact that the most renowned figures in chess - Morphy, Pillsbury, Capablanca and Fischer - were born in America.

Garry Kasparov

#28. Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women

Lillian B. Rubin

#29. Words were so puzzling. Present should mean a present just as attack should mean to stick tacks in people.

Beverly Cleary

#30. This puzzling discrepancy prompted the development of the controversial cosmological theory known as the Strong Misanthropic Principle, which asserts that the universe exists in order to screw with us.

Robert Kroese

#31. The fact Jeff Teague has never been an All-Star is puzzling to me because he's certainly an All-Star-caliber player,

Frank Vogel

#32. 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

#33. 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' is an epistolary novel - one told in letters. I had no idea how much fun it would be, puzzling together the plot with letters and documents.

Maria Semple

#34. My life would be very puzzling to most people if they had to follow me around for a day or two.

Brad Paisley

#35. The three hundredth anniversary of the Salem witch trials of 1692 comes at a time when witchcraft commands a scholarly attention that would have been puzzling in 1892 or even in 1792.

Edmund Morgan

#36. The Humans is a laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable and impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin.

Jeanette Winterson

#37. There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.

Maria Semple

#38. I've had three of my own children and spent my professional life thinking about children. And yet I still find my relation to my children deeply puzzling.

Alison Gopnik

#39. The world is a very puzzling place. If you're not willing to be puzzled, you just become a replica of someone else's mind.

Noam Chomsky

#40. That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.

Terence McKenna

#41. The more I read, the more I see. Connections get made. Lights go on. God speaks. Often, when I am facing some difficult or puzzling situation, God reminds me of a Scripture passage I have read. And it makes all the difference.

Ann Spangler

#42. As far as I can see, even now, after years of puzzling over the field of cognitive science, there is no clear line between entities to which science attributes mind and those it regards as mindless mechanisms.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#43. It is puzzling why anyone would want to (become governor of California). It's like vying to become Roseanne Barr's next husband. Sure you'd get your name in the paper, but look at the mess you'd be getting yourself into.

Ann Coulter

#44. One day you have Einstein, puzzling over the theory of relativity, the next you've got the Manhattan Project and a big hole in the ground.

Justin Cronin

#45. The puzzling thing is that there is really a curious coincidence between astrological and psychological facts, so that one can isolate time from the characteristics of an individual, and also, one can deduce characteristics from a certain time ...

Carl Jung

#46. In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit.

Charles Krauthammer

#47. What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.

Thomas Browne

#48. Since we are on the topic of ravens, a collective noun for ravens is an unkindness. This is somewhat puzzling to Thought and Memory.

Diane Setterfield