Nothing is confused except the mind.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that confusion arises only in our thoughts and perceptions.
Rene Magritte's quote highlights the notion that confusion is not an inherent quality of the world around us but rather a product of our own mental processes. It emphasizes that the clarity or confusion we experience is rooted in the way we interpret and understand our thoughts and situations, thereby urging us to examine our minds more closely to find understanding and clarity.
In practice
In a discussion about mental health, this quote can be used to emphasize the importance of managing one's thoughts.
I detest my past, and anyone else's. I detest resignation, patience, professional heroism and obligatory beautiful feelings. I also detest the decorative arts, folklore, advertising, voices making announcements, aerodynamism, boy scouts, the smell of moth balls, events of the moment, and drunken people.
A thing which is present can be invisible, hidden by what it shows
Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.
Everything that is visible hides something that is invisible.
The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe”, I'd have been lying!
We must not fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world.
Too often, ill-informed rhetoric has led to emotional hysteria that obfuscates solid evidence regarding the real problems faced by poor people and, in overwhelmingly great proportions, by black people.
It may be that the human race is not ready for freedom. The air of liberty may be too rarefied for us to breathe... The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.
No white American ever thinks that any other race is wholly civilized until he wears the white man’s clothes, eats the white man’s food, speaks the white man’s language, and professes the white man’s religion.
Life, this anti-entropy, ceaselessly reloaded with energy, is a climbing force, toward order amidst chaos, toward light, among the darkness of the indefinite, toward the mystic dream of Love, between the fire which devours itself and the silence of the Cold.
I think you have a moral responsibility when you've been given far more than you need, to do wise things with it and give intelligently.
In this dilemma they evolved the theory of natural rights. If 'natural rights' means anything it means that the individual rights are to be determined by the conduct of Nature. But Nature knows nothing about rights in the sense of human conception.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.