Every path to a new understanding begins in confusion.

- Mason Cooley

I think it saves much confusion to regard religion as quite distinct from morality, or the right conduct of life-as having necessarily nothing to do with these, but as a system of faith and worship, a belief in something extranatural.... Indeed, the most religious people are by no means the most moral. Hence it is that religion so rarely changes the man, or makes him practically any better. Let us keep things separated, religion by itself, and morality by itself. Religion implies a belief in the supernatural; in a personal deity who takes sides with or against us. A man may be pure, noble, virtuous, high-minded, spiritual, and not have a religion.

- John Burroughs

The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.

- Basil Bunting

Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.

- George Santayana

Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.

- Paul Klee

The buds swell imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion, as if the short spring days were an eternity.

- Henry David Thoreau

Yet I suppose what seems to us confusion
Is not confusion, but the form of forms,
The serpent's tail stuck down the serpent's throat....

- Robert Frost

A superstition which pretends to be scientific creates a much greater confusion of thought than one which contents itself with simple popular practices.

- Johan Huizinga

Let nothing be called natural
In an age of bloody confusion,
Ordered disorder, planned caprice,
And dehumanized humanity, lest all things
Be held unalterable!

- Bertolt Brecht

...and every man's sword was against his fellow, and there was a very great discomfiture.

- I Samuel, 14:20 (Bible, KJV)

The sun rarely shines in history, what with the dust and confusion; and when we meet with any cheering fact which implies the presence of this luminary, we excerpt and modernize it.

- Henry David Thoreau

The world men inhabit is rather bleak. It is a world full of doubt and confusion, where vulnerability must be hidden, not shared; where competition, not co-operation, is the order of the day; where men sacrifice the possibility of knowing their own children and sharing in their upbringing, for the sake of a job they may have chosen by chance, which may not suit them and which in many cases dominates their lives to the exclusion of much else.

- Anna Ford

Lovers should guard their strangeness. If they forgive too much, all slides into confusion and meanness.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Logic is the last scientific ingredient of Philosophy; its extraction leaves behind only a confusion of non-scientific, pseudo problems.

- Rudolf Carnap

Is light enough when this bewilderment crying against the dark shuts down the shades?
Dilute confusion. Find and explode our mist.

- Gwendolyn Brooks

'Tis this desire of bending all things to our own purposes which turns them into confusion and is the chief source of every error in our lives.

- Sarah Fielding

History and experience tell us that moral progress comes not in comfortable and complacent times, but out of trial and confusion.

- Gerald R. Ford

Any effort in philosophy to make the obscure obvious is likely to be unappealing, for the penalty of failure is confusion while the reward of success is banality. An answer, once found, is dull; and the only remaining interest lies in a further effort to render equally dull what is still obscure enough to be intriguing.

- Nelson Goodman

... in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquillity will return again.

- Anne Frank

It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content ... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.

- René Daumal

A computer does not think, it feels nothing, and what it is said to "know"-bits of information all cast in the digital mode-has no fringe. Nor has it a memory, only storage room. On any point called for, the answer is all or none. Vagueness, intelligent confusion, original punning on words or ideas never occur, the internal hookups being unchangeable; they were determined once for all by the true minds that made the machine and program. When plugged in, the least elaborate computer can be relied on to work to the fullest extent of its capacity; the greatest mind cannot be relied on for the simplest thing; its variability is its superiority.

- Jacques Barzun

Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That in a spleen unfolds both heaven and earth,
And, ere a man hath power to say "Behold!"
The jaws of darkness do devour it up.
So quick bright things come to confusion.

- William Shakespeare

If you wish to feign confusion in order to lure the enemy on, you must first have perfect discipline; if you wish to display timidity in order to entrap the enemy, you must have extreme courage; if you wish to parade your weakness in order to make the enemy over- confident, you must have exceeding strength.

- Sun Tzu