Puzzling quotes:

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  • The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling. -- Robert M. Pirsig
  • The British Constitution has always been puzzling and always will be. -- Queen Elizabeth II
  • 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
  • It is a puzzling thing. 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • It is always good policy to tell the truth unless of course you are an exceptionally good liar. Jerome K. Jerome It is a puzzling thing. 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
  • This is a puzzling world, and Old Harry's got a finger in it. -- George Eliot
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • Few generals were as brilliant as Robert E. Lee and few battles as titanic -- and puzzling -- as Gettysburg. Why did Lee fail? In Lost Triumph, Tom Carhart offers a bold and provocative new assessment. Agree or disagree, it is sure to stimulate debate among even the most seasoned Civil War buffs. -- Jay Winik
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • Agatha Christie's writing is incredibly skillful because her books are incredibly intellectually puzzling and challenging. -- Sophie Hannah
  • There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator. -- Maria Semple
  • My life would be very puzzling to most people if they had to follow me around for a day or two. -- Brad Paisley
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • Despite tantalizing suggestions of fossilized microbes in meteorites, puzzling and possibly biogenic methane gas in the martian atmosphere, and a long-standing controversy over the Viking lander experiments of nearly 40 years ago, there's still no Exhibit A that points unequivocally to biology in our own back yard. -- Seth Shostak
  • 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
  • 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
  • I use doodling for a variety of reasons: I use it to get clarity around a concept, I use it to relax, I use it to communicate ideas with others and get their refinement of them, I use it to map complex systems for companies, I use it to run innovation games for business, I use it to get insight on something puzzling me. -- Sunni Brown
  • Organic Chemistry has become a vast rubbish heap of puzzling and bewildering compounds. -- J. Norman Collie
  • Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women -- Lillian B. Rubin
  • That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind. -- Terence McKenna
  • Intellectual growth is when you surpass the barrier of puerility, puzzling people with your dazzling creativity. -- Michael Bassey Johnson
  • How puzzling all these changes are! I'm never sure what I'm going to be, from one minute to another. -- Lewis Carroll
  • We find certains things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein
  • 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
  • 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
  • In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit. -- Charles Krauthammer
  • One puzzling thing about men -- they allow their sex instinct to drive them to where their intelligence never would take them. -- Joan Fontaine
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
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