Top 158 Bewildered Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

Thus I began my systematic though half-bewildered tour of Innsmouth's narrow, shadow-blighted ways. Crossing the bridge and turning toward the roar of the lower falls, I passed close to the Marsh refinery, which seemed to be oddly free from the noise of industry. The building stood on the steep river bluff near a bridge and an open confluence of streets which I took to be the earliest civic center, displaced after the Revolution by the present Town Square.

She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.

For fear is a primary source of evil. And when the question "Who am I?" recurs and is unanswered, then fear and frustration project a negative attitude. The bewildered soul can answer only: "Since I do not understand 'Who I am,' I only know what I am not." The corollary of this emotional incertitude is snobbism, intolerance and racial hate. The xenophobic individual can only reject and destroy, as the xenophobic nation inevitably makes war.

We cut these numerous windings in our destinies daily with our own hands, while we imagine that we are pursuing a track on the royal high road of respectability and duty, and then complain of those ways being so intricate and so dark. We stand bewildered before the mystery of our own making, and the riddles of life that we will not solve, and then accuse the great Sphinx of devouring us.

When you're lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you've just wandered off the path, that you'll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it's time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don't even know from which direction the sun rises anymore.

While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination." (from "The Third and Final Continent")

For a moment she turned in a circle, staring at her hands, which she held high and useless, close to her breast. She bobbed and shambled like an ape doing a trick, and her face was the silly, bewildered face of a joker's victim. And yet she could make no move that was not beautiful. Her trapped terror was more lovely than any joy that Molly had ever seen, and that was the most terrible thing about it.

I challenged Coleman and he accepted, he said he'd fight me. I pointed at Baroni and challenged him too, he looked at me with a bewildered look on his face and asked: "Me?", I said "Thats right, You!!" I also challenged Quinton Jackson and he looked at me and said "Me too?", and I responded. If you want some, there is some for you too!

We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn't matter so much as it seemed to do - it's not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn't matter so much.

Guy Savelli's role in the War on Terror began when half-a-dozen strangers, within days of one another, contacted him via e-mail and telephone in the winter of 2003. They asked him if he had the power to psychically kill goats. Guy was bewildered. He did not go around publicizing this. Who were these men? How did they know about the goats? He feigned a casual tone of voice and said, 'Sure I can.'Then he phoned Special Forces.

What are you looking at?" Jordan demanded finally, watching her. "A dragon." When he looked bewildered she lifted her arm and pointed to the sky in the southeast. "Right there—that cloud—what do you see when you look at it?" "A fat cloud." Alexandra rolled her eyes at him. "What else do you see?" He was quiet for a moment studying the sky. "Five more fat clouds and three thin ones.

Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered?

Men do not know the natural infirmity of their mind: it does nothing but ferret and quest, and keeps incessantly whirling around, building up and becoming entangled in its own work, like silkworms, and is suffocated in it. A mouse in a pitch barrel...thinks it notices from a distance some sort of glimmer of imaginary light and truth; but while running toward it, it is crossed by so many difficulties and obstacles, and diverted by so many new quests, that it strays from the road, bewildered.

We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire's, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, "It is later than you think." But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of time.

A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people - people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.

War! When I but think of this word, I feel bewildered, as though they were speaking to me of sorcery, of the Inquisition, of a distant, finished, abominable, monstrous, unnatural thing. When they speak to us of cannibals, we smile proudly, as we proclaim our superiority to these savages. Who are the real savages? Those who struggle in order to eat those whom they vanquish, or those who struggle merely to kill?

The history of medicine proves that in so far as man seeks to know himself and face his whole nature, he has become free from bewildered fear, despondent shame, or arrant hypocrisy. As long as sex is dealt with in the current confusion of ignorance and sophistication, denial and indulgence, suppression and stimulation, punishment and exploitation, secrecy and display, it will be associated with a duplicity and indecency that lead neither to intellectual honesty nor human dignity.

I have discovered that many of the things I thought were priceless are as cheap as costume jewelry, and much of what I labeled worthless was, all the time, filled with the kind of beauty that directly nourishes my soul... Now I think that the vast majority of us "normal" people spend our lives trashing our treasures and treasuring our trash. We bustle around trying to create the impression that we are hip, imperturbable, omniscient, in perfect control, when in fact we are awkward and scared and bewildered.

When I read the documents relative to the Modernism, as it was defined by Saint Pius X, and when I compare them to the documents of the II Vatican Council, I cannot help being bewildered. For what was condemned as heresy in 1906 was proclaimed as what is and should be from now on the doctrine and method of the Church. In other words, the modernists of 1906 were, somewhat, precursors to me. My masters were part of them. My parents taught me Modernism. How could Saint Pius X reject those that now seem to be my precursors?

War is not two great armies meeting in the clash and frenzy of battle. War is a boy being carried on a stretcher, looking up at God’s blue sky with bewildered eyes that are soon to close; war is a woman carrying a child that has been injured by a shell; war is spirited horses tied in burning buildings and waiting for death; war is the flower of a race, battered, hungry, bleeding, up to its knees in filthy water; war is an old woman burning a candle before the Mater Dolorsa for the son she has given.

We live in an age disturbed, confused, bewildered, afraid of its own forces, in search not merely of its road but even of its direction. There are many voices of counsel, but few voices of vision; there is much excitement and feverish activity, but little concert of thoughtful purpose. We are distressed by our own ungoverned, undirected energies and do many things, but nothing long. It is our duty to find ourselves.

...to many a mother's heart has come the disappointment of a loss of power, a limitation of influence when early manhood takes the boy from the home, or when even before that time, in school, or where he touches the great world and begins to be bewildered with its controversies, trade and economics and politics make their imprint even while his lips are dewy with his mother's kiss.

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.

He said he loved me,” she whispered. Daniel swallowed, and he had the strangest sensation, almost a premonition of what it must like to be a parent. Someday, God willing, he’d have a daughter, and that daughter would look like the woman standing in front of him, and if ever she looked at him with that bewildered expression, whispering, “He said he loved me . . .” Nothing short of murder would be an acceptable response.

The concept that a person who has a lot holds his hand out to someone who has less, or someone who isn't hurting holds his hand out to someone who is, is simply a human trait that has nothing to do with celebrity. I am confounded at the stinginess of some institutions and some people. I'm bewildered by it. You can only put away so much stuff in your closet.

Given that ever-broadening array of options and alternatives, as consumers and investors, we are often bewildered. We need guidance. That's where today's brands come in. They are not so much signals about a particular product, they are signals about good judgment, trustworthiness. A big brand, whether it's Schwab or Disney, is becoming analogous to a portal that sells us advice about where we can find great deals.

Cutangle: While I'm still confused and uncertain, it's on a much higher plane, d'you see, and at least I know I'm bewildered about the really fundamental and important facts of the universe. Treatle: I hadn't looked at it like that, but you're absolutely right. He's really pushed back the boundaries of ignorance. They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were only ignorant of ordinary things.

For I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours!' I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered. I liked white better,' I said. White!' he sneered. 'It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.' In which case it is no longer white,' said I. 'And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.' - Gandalf

I can't remember who it was - maybe Brian Eno - but some important musician guy said he recorded ambient noise from a city street and after he listened to these field recordings for the millionth time, it was like, "Oh yeah, at 1:23, that's where the car horn comes in." So when you're doing stuff like this, and you've been working on it for a year, you're like, "Oh yeah man, that makes perfect sense!" And then you forget when you give it to people, they're bewildered.

And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrassed, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers-perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.

Eyes blinded by the fog of things cannot see truth. Ears deafened by the din of things cannot hear truth. Brains bewildered by the whirl of things cannot think truth. Hearts deadened by the weight of things cannot feel truth. Throats choked by the dust of things cannot speak truth.

If you read a book about school - someone else's book - you always translate it into your own school experiences. It's describing the student: he's bewildered and lost in a large crowd in a university classroom. You'll visualize that from your own experiences. So, everything you know is what you're really writing.

Not all Americans are living the American dream by a long shot. Many can't even imagine it. There are impoverished Americans, the poor and the homeless, the hungry and the hopeless, many unable to read and write. There are Americans gone astray, the kids dragged down by drugs, the shattered families, the teenage mothers struggling to cope. Then there are Americans uneasy, troubled and bewildered by the dizzying pace of change.

Between being praised and persecuted condoned and condemned I might understandably have become bewildered particularly at the brand of ethics sometimes displayed by the staunch defenders of Christianity. But of one thing I am sure: I am sure that I fought not only for what I earnestly believed to be right but for the truest kind of religious freedom intended by the First Amendment the complete separation of church and state.

Two years ago I was on the train from Berlin to Frankfurt when I heard that the Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to my close friend, the writer Liu Xiaobo, who is imprisoned in China. To me it was confirmation that universal values and a moral code do exist, and that the point of the Nobel Prize is to encourage writers to stand up for this moral code. Last Thursday I was once again on the train from Berlin to Frankfurt when I heard that the Nobel Prize for Literature had gone to Mo Yan. He is a state poet. I am utterly bewildered. Do these universal values not exist after all?

Our concern is to help people counter the efforts of those who seek to "regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers," so that the self-designated "responsible men" will be able to run the affairs of the world untroubled by the "bewildered herd" - the general public - who are to be marginalized and dispersed, directed to personal concerns, in a well-regulated "democracy."

What parts had she discarded for the sake of her sanity? What had she cut from herself? Had he stared into her pupils he would have emerged, bewildered and blinking, on the far side of the earth. Was he awed by her? Absolutely. Did he respect her? Unequivocally. Want to be anything like her? No, never, not at all.

Happy is the man who has that in his soul which acts upon the dejected as April airs upon violet roots. Gifts from the hand are silver and gold, but the heart gives that which neither silver nor gold can buy. To be full of goodness, full of cheerfulness, full of sympathy, full of helpful hope, causes a man to carry blessings of which he is himself as unconscious as a lamp is of its own shining. Such a one moves on human life as stars move on dark seas to bewildered mariners; as the sun wheels, bringing all the seasons with him from the south.