Top 98 Puzzling Quotes
#2. We have really, that I know of, no philosophical basis for high and low. Moreover, the vegetable kingdom does not culminate, as the animal kingdom does. It is not a kingdom, but a common-wealth; a democracy, and therefore puzzling and unaccountable from the former point of view.
Asa Gray
#3. Life is unresolved, confusing, bewildering, puzzling, ambiguous. You don't really know what's going to happen. The future is uncertain for everybody.
Woody Allen
#4. In America the chief accusation seems to be one of "Eroticism." This is odd, rather puzzling to my mind. Which Eros? Eros of the jaunty "amours," or Eros of the sacred mysteries? And if the latter, why accuse, why not respect, even venerate?
D.H. Lawrence
#5. Conundrum: A fun word to repeat over and over again when no one's listening. Actual meaning is as puzzling as the need to chant the word.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#6. Childhood is a fundamental part of all human lives, parents or not, since that's how we all start out. And yet babies and young children are so mysterious and puzzling and even paradoxical.
Alison Gopnik
#7. The last fact which knowledge can discover is that the world is a manifestation, and in every way a puzzling manifestation, of the universal will to live.
Albert Schweitzer
#8. The year 1866 was signalised by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and puzzling phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten.
Jules Verne
#9. The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.
Carl Sagan
#10. There is no point in trying to remember your dreams ... There is only the unspeakable joy of eavesdropping on your spirit, catching tiny glimpses of its independent life, resting for a moment in its wisdom, puzzling, laughing sometimes, over what it's up to, what it makes of you.
Marsha Norman
#11. The British constitution has always been puzzling and always will be.
Queen Elizabeth II
#12. Does it never strike you as puzzling that it is wicked to kill one person, but glorious to kill ten thousand?
Steven Pinker
#13. While reason is puzzling itself about mystery, faith is turning it to daily bread, and feeding on it thankfully in her heart of hearts.
Frederic Dan Huntington
#14. 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
#15. No one cares about the artist Kafka, who troubles us with his puzzling aesthetic, because we'd rather have Kafka as the fusion of experience and work, the Kafka who had a difficult relationship with his father and didn't know how to deal with women.
Milan Kundera
#16. In recent times no problem has been more puzzling to thoughtful people than why, in a troubled world, we make such poor use of our affluence.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#17. Organic Chemistry has become a vast rubbish heap of puzzling and bewildering compounds.
J. Norman Collie
#18. The sense of purity is a puzzling, and at times a fearful thing. It seems so noble, and it starts at one with morality. But it is a dangerous guide, and can lead us away not only from what is gracious, but also from what is good.
E. M. Forster
#19. Plants exist in the weather and light rays that surround them - waving in the wind, shimmering in the sunlight. I am always puzzling over how to draw such things.
Hayao Miyazaki
#20. puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. We
Daniel Kahneman
#21. I never thought I would write about the Book of Revelation. It's so dense; it's so complex and puzzling. But then I found I was thinking about a number of themes, one of which has to do with politics and religion.
Elaine Pagels
#22. The language of art is powerful to those who understand it, and puzzling to those who do not. What we do know is that here was the modern human mind at work, spinning symbolism and abstraction in a way that only Homo sapiens is capable of doing.
Richard Leakey
#23. 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
#24. There are countless artists whose shoes I am not worthy to polish - whose prints would not pay the printer. The question of judgment is a puzzling one.
Maxfield Parrish
#25. Whoever takes it upon himself to write an honest intellectual history of twentieth-century Europe will need a strong stomach. But he will need something more. He will need to overcome his disgust long enough to ponder the roots of this strange and puzzling phenomenon.
Mark Lilla
#26. It was puzzling to own trees - they were not owned the way a business os owned or even a house is owned. If anything, they were held in trust. In trust. Yes, for all of posterity, ...
Philip Roth
#27. 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
#28. The days began to fly now, and yet each one of them was stretched by renewed expectations and swollen with silent, private experiences. Yes, time is a puzzling thing, there is something about it that is hard to explain.
Thomas Mann
#29. 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
#30. We find certains things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#31. Which is more puzzling, the existence of suffering or its frequent absence?
Franz Wright
#32. I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since.
Amy Waldman
#33. A country like Belgium, or socialist countries in central Europe spend more money on art education than the United States, which is a really puzzling thought.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
#34. My job as an author - at least the way I think of it - is to make a story that is coded and puzzling enough to entice conversation and interpretation, but also to do the opposite: to make some things clear so that it is meaningful in some way, not just a random assemblage of ideas.
Shane Carruth
#35. And now, finished with that puzzling mixture of insane intimacy and isolation which is notoriety, Velvet was able to get on quietly to her next adventures.
Enid Bagnold
#37. In my own experience, contacts with the big world outside the typewriter are puzzling and terrifying; I don't think I like reality very much. Principally, I don't understand people outside; people in books are sensible and reasonable, but outside there is no predicting what they will do.
Shirley Jackson
#38. We just didn't get it. We were weakened and exhilarated at the same time. A paranoiac's nightmare! A narcissist's dream! We didn't know how to feel: flattered or raped. Maybe both. We were puzzling at breakneck speed.
Steve Toltz
#39. This is a puzzling world, and Old Harry's got a finger in it.
George Eliot
#40. inverted memories of this immediate revelation, memories that in some puzzling fashion one might have before their subject had occurred. The
Alan Moore
#41. The test of a theory is its ability to cope with all the relevant phenomena, not its a priori 'reasonableness'. The latter would have proved a poor guide in the development of science, which often makes progress by its encounter with the totally unexpected and initially extremely puzzling.
John Polkinghorne
#42. One puzzling thing about men
they allow their sex instinct to drive them to where their intelligence never would take them.
Joan Fontaine
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. I have always found it puzzling that men believe it perfectly acceptable to take their pleasure where they may without guilt or recriminations, but when women do the same, they are branded whores and trulls.
Marsha Canham
#46. never thought about it so abstractly," he confessed. "I've been too busy puzzling over why I came here.
Jack London
#47. 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
#48. How puzzling all these changes are! I'm never sure what I'm going to be, from one minute to another.
Lewis Carroll
#49. 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
#50. That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.
Terence McKenna
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit.
Charles Krauthammer
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. Chizpurfle infestations explain the puzzling failure of many relatively new Muggle electrical artifacts.
J.K. Rowling
#64. Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women
Lillian B. Rubin
#65. 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
#66. There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.
Maria Semple
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. My life would be very puzzling to most people if they had to follow me around for a day or two.
Brad Paisley
#70. '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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. The sight of an obese poor man - like that of a skinny rich man - is puzzling.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#76. A girl? Her mother looked at her, curiously, as if the word were unknown to her; ancient and puzzling as an artifact behind a glass encasement.
Abby Slovin
#77. The rewards had to come from the joy of puzzling out the work itself, and from the private awareness I held that I had chosen a devotional path and I was being true to it.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#78. It took some time before the public learned that to appreciate an Impressionist painting one has to step back a few yards, and enjoy the miracle of seeing these puzzling patches suddenly fall into one place and come to life before our eyes.
Ernst Gombrich
#79. It is quite obvious that the temperature change during the last 100 years or so includes significant natural changes, both the linear change and fluctuations. It is very puzzling that the IPCC reports state that it is mostly due to the greenhouse effect.
Syun-Ichi Akasofu
#80. It was a puzzling thing as to why they packed up in towns in the way they did.
Paulette Jiles
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. Intellectual growth is when you surpass the barrier of puerility, puzzling people with your dazzling creativity.
Michael Bassey Johnson
#85. The whole conception of 'sin' is one which I find very puzzling, doubtless owing to my sinful nature.
Bertrand Russell
#86. 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
#87. Words were so puzzling. Present should mean a present just as attack should mean to stick tacks in people.
Beverly Cleary
#88. Agatha Christie's writing is incredibly skillful because her books are incredibly intellectually puzzling and challenging.
Sophie Hannah
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.
John Ashbery
#98. 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
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