#confusion

Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen. ↗

— George Saunders

#life #open #possibilities #life

The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#reality #thoughts #life

In the world we live in, what we know and what we don’t know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#life #life

If the if isn't an if, what if is an if that if has to be replaced by an if that if shall never if that the place of if. ↗

— Avakruth

#confusion #life #meaning #understanding #life

I have begun to wonder where I came from. The person I am now, this fumbling, stumbling supplicant... was I built on the foundations of my old life, or did I rise from the grave a blank state? How much of me is inherited, and how much is my own creation? Questions that were once just idle musings have begun to feel strangely urgent. Am I firmly rooted to what came before? Or can I choose to deviate? ↗

— Isaac Marion

#life #philosophical-musings #reflection #life

My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do. ↗

— Anne Stevenson

#because #confusion #contrary #earlier #enjoys

Whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion...Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but aesthetic emotion harmonizes what you know with what you feel to give you a heightened awareness and a sureness of your place in reality. ↗

— Robert McKee

#art #awareness #chaos #confusion #emotion

Yes, Kālāmas, it is proper that your have doubt, that you have perplexity, for a doubt has arisen in a matter which is doubtful. Now, look you Kālāmas, do not be led by reports, or traditions, or hearsay. Be not led by the authority of religious texts, not by the delight in speculative opinions, nor by seeming possibilities, not by the idea: 'this is our teacher'. But, O Kālāmas, when you know for yourself that certain things are unwholesome, and wrong, and bad, then give them up... And when you know for yourself that certain things are wholesome and good, then accept them and follow them. ↗

— Gautama Buddha

#confusion #doubt #good-judgment #nonconformity #questioning

I don't know what he means by that, but I nod and smile at him. You'd be surprised at how far that response can get you in a conversation where you are completely confused. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#conversation #smiling #conversation

People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy. ↗

— John Cheever

#because #been #between #confusion #fiction