Puzzles Quotes

Despite some remaining puzzles, there's no reason to doubt that Darwin had this point right, that all creatures on earth are biological relatives ~ Michael Behe

Women are like puzzles because prior to 1920 neither had the right to vote. Puzzles still don't. ~ Bo Burnham

While, naturally, he has to gauge risk, to read the elements, he still often bemoans the hardships of the past. He constantly puzzles over the role of remote influences, like the after-life. He wants to know why events happen as they do, how control is exercised from beyond understanding. ~ Peter Gray

What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It's a sure thing! It's sure thing in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles. ~ Nora Ephron

God's will is like a jigsaw puzzle until you put all the pieces together, you won't be able to see the whole picture. ~ Danny L. Deaube

It sometimes seems to me like we're not supposed to notice that Shug's colored, or that saying anything about it would be bad manners. That puzzles me because Shug's being colored strikes me as real obvious. And usually anybody's difference gets pounced on and picked at. This silence is a lie peculiar to a man's skin color, which makes it extra serious and extra puzzling. Daddy ~ Mary Karr

Nora was eating a piece of cold duck with one hand and working on a jig-saw puzzle with the other when I got home.
"I thought you'd gone to live with her," she said. "You used to be a detective: find me a brownish piece shaped something like a snail with a long neck."
"Piece of duck or puzzle? ... ~ Dashiell Hammett

What puzzles me is the way that some of the smaller, unknown chateaux imagine that because Chinese millionaires pay ludicrous sums for the great names, they can overcharge for their own inferior fluids. There is no trickledown effect in wine prices. ~ Simon Hoggart

Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different environments to which they are applied. That is not a relativist's position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress. ~ Thomas Kuhn

Necessity is the mother of invention but boredom is the mother of doing bafflingly stupid shit. ~ Jenny Lawson

Time and happenings and the grace of God are the best solvers of puzzles. One must leave much to these, if he is not to worry himself into premature senility. ~ Alex Dow

Puzzles are like songs - A good puzzle can give you all the pleasure of being duped that a mystery story can. It has surface innocence, surprise, the revelation of a concealed meaning, and the catharsis of solution. ~ Stephen Sondheim

Oments of transport, and of comfort, and of a bracing vastness of possibility. That was all there for me sometimes when I plunged my mind into the Bible's puzzles; and it was always there in the music of church. I wouldn't have said it this way then. But I would feel all the cells in my body as I sang hymns that connected my little life with the grandeur of the cosmos, the Christian drama across space and time. This was my earliest experience of breath and body, mind and spirit soaring together, alive to both mystery and reality, in kinship with others both familiar and unknown. That's one way I'd define the feeling of faith now. ~ Krista Tippett

He's very nice. He's something I replied. She considered this zipping her purse shut. Then she said Well everyone is. Everyone is Something. For some reason that stuck with me simple and yet not every since she'd said it. It was like a puzzle as well two vague words with one clear one between them. ~ Sarah Dessen

Our family has survived a long time. We've weathered battles and transformations, enchantments and floods and fires. We've endured being sent away, and we've coped with evildoers in our midst. If I were telling a story of Sevenwaters – and it would be a grand epic told over all the nights of a long winter – I would surely end it with a triumph. A happy ending, all well, puzzles solved, enemies defeated, the future stretching ahead bright and true. With new challenges and new adventures, certainly, because that's the way things always are. But overall it would be a very satisfying story, one to give the listener heart. ~ Juliet Marillier

I guess it means we don't understand everything, and we're not going to. Maybe the whys aren't answered here. Not because there aren't answers, but because we wouldn't understand the answers if we had them. Maybe there's a bigger purpose, a bigger picture that we only contribute a very small piece to. You know, like one of those thousand piece puzzles? There's no way you can tell by looking at one piece of the puzzle what the puzzle is going to look like in the end. And we don't have the picture on the outside of the puzzle box to guide us. Maybe everyone represents a piece of the puzzle. We all fit together to create this experience we call life. None of us can see the part we play or the way it all turns out. Maybe the miracles that we see are just the tip of the iceberg. And maybe we just don't recognize the blessings that come as a result of terrible things. ~ Amy Harmon

Our tests, our approaches...are ridiculously inadequate. They only show us deficits, they do not show us powers; they only show us puzzles and schemata, when we need to see music, narrative, play, a being conducting itself spontaneously in its own natural way. ~ Oliver Sacks

People love solving puzzles, and you always love it when somebody smarter than you is solving puzzles. ~ Rebecca Eaton

Computer science is the most misunderstood field there is. You are being paid to solve puzzles. For a person who has practiced meditation in past lives, that is the way your mind works. ~ Frederick Lenz

Movies are in a much longer production conversation before an actor is even involved. I always thought of actors as the last piece of the puzzle - so you're a tool. ~ Elizabeth Olsen

Hebrews is a delight for the person who enjoys puzzles...It invites engagement in the task of defining the undefined. ~ William L. Lane

I like to be surprised by life; it's a good thing to search for the puzzle pieces. ~ Josh McDermitt

Marriage is the Rubik's Cube of the 21st Century - something young people are fascinated with but have no idea how to do. ~ Stewart Stafford

Collecting secrets was and is crucial to solving foreign policy puzzles. ~ Gregory F. Treverton

Will customers keep supporting the enormous overhead required to sustain ineffectual, unproductive stock picking across an array of thousands of individual funds devoted to every investing 'style' and economic sector or regional subgroup that some marketing idiot can dream up? Not likely. A brutal shakeout is coming and one of its revelations will be that stock picking is a grossly overrated piece of the puzzle, that cost control is what distinguishes a competitive firm from an uncompetitive one. ~ Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

I am aware I may be here reminded of the necessity of rendering instruction agreeable to youth, and of Tasso's infusion of honey into the medicine prepared for a child; but an age in which children are taught the driest doctrines by the insinuating method of instructive games, has little reason to dread the consequences of study being rendered too serious or severe. The history of England is now reduced to a game at cards, the problems of mathematics to puzzles and riddles, and the doctrines of arithmetic may, we are assured, be sufficiently acquired by spending a few hours a-week at a new and complicated edition of the Royal Game of the Goose. There wants but one step further, and the Creed and Ten Commandments may be taught in the same manner, without the necessity of the grave face, deliberate tone of recital, and devout attention hitherto exacted from the well-governed childhood of this realm. It may in the mean time be subject to serious consideration, whether those who are accustomed only to acquire instruction through the medium of amusement, may not be brought to reject that which approaches under the aspect of study; whether those who learn history by the cards, may not be led to prefer the means to the end; and whether, were we to teach religion in the way of sport, our pupils might not thereby be gradually induced to make sport of their religion. ~ Walter Scott

To remain pure, a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation. ~ Anita Brookner

We are responsible for one another. Collectively so. The world is a joint effort. We might say it is like a giant puzzle, and each one of us is a very important and unique part of it. Collectively, we can unite and bring about a powerful change in the world. By working to raise our awareness to the highest possible level of spiritual understanding, we can begin to heal ourselves, then each other and the world. ~ Betty Eadie

Mathematics, as far as he was concerned, was a Sphinx charged with deceitful puzzles whose cold malicious gaze transfixed her victims, and he gave the monster a wide berth. ~ Hermann Hesse

Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man. ~ Maria Goeppert-Mayer

It was as if I had thought all along I was a complete picture and he had revealed I was a puzzle and had taken me apart and put me back together again. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

I'm that sensitive, honest guy who likes people, wants to know why, and who puzzles everyone by continually putting himself in harm's way. ~ Poe Ballantine

Most of the teams who traded for me or signed me needed me to fill a hole in the puzzle. I feel good about that. You've got to roll with it, live your life day-by-day. Tomorrow's not promised to anyone. ~ Kenny Lofton

To me, families are puzzles that take a lifetime to work out - or not, as often is the case - and I like to explore how people within them try to connect, be it through love, duty, or circumstance. ~ Khaled Hosseini

XVXVI, or 10-5-10-5-1, yielded H-E-H-E-A, which, unless she wanted to show her derisive laughter, made no sense. ~ Laurie R. King

[Providences] often puzzle and entangle our thoughts, but bring them to the Word, and your duty will be quickly manifested. "Until I went into the sanctuary of God, then understood I their end" (Ps. 73:17). And not only their end, but his own duty, to be quiet in an afflicted condition and not envy their prosperity. ~ John Flavel

Together with the puzzle, Mozart gives you the solution. ~ Ferruccio Busoni

I don't want to retire. I'm not that good at crossword puzzles ~ Norman Mailer

Life is messy. Would that every puzzle piece fell into place, every word was kind, every accident happy, but such is not the case. Life is messy ~ Christopher Moore

The challenge coaches face is replacing players they were counting on to be major pieces of a puzzle. In a lot of cases, there is just no way to make the necessary adjustments. ~ Ron Jaworski

Sometimes I'll have sections that I'm not quite sure how they fit in the puzzle of a tune, they'll get moved around; what I think was originally a verse ends up becoming the chorus, or what's an intro gets dropped as a hook, things get shifted around a lot. ~ Gotye

Doubt is the vestibule which all must pass before they can enter into the temple of wisdom; therefore, when we are in doubt and puzzle out the truth by our own exertions, we have gained a something that will stay by us, and which will serve us again. But, if to avoid the trouble of the search we avail ourselves of the superior information of a friend, such knowledge will not remain with us; we have not bought but borrowed it. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

Threatening the playable character with physical injury will make platform puzzles easier. ~ Kirejan Javier

Missing pieces do more than complete the puzzle, they fill in an empty space. ~ Luanne Rice

All joking aside, I'm a television watcher and I get frustrated with shows sometimes when they set up puzzles and then they don't give answers. It's just more questions and more questions. ~ Sarah Michelle Gellar

When it comes to God's existence, I'm not an atheist and I'm not agnostic. I'm an acrostic. The whole thing puzzles me. ~ George Carlin

I have a really hard time connecting to music that doesn't feel like I'm somehow solving a puzzle that applies to my life. ~ Andrew McMahon

A woman's heart is such a complex problem - the owner thereof is often most incompetent to find the solution to this puzzle. ~ Emmuska Orczy

Spending waiting moments doing crossword puzzles or reading a book you brought yourself. ~ Marilyn Vos Savant

The most common anxiety I hear about learning to program is that people think it requires a lot of math. Actually, most programming doesn't require math beyond basic arithmetic. In fact, being good at programming isn't that different from being good at solving Sudoku puzzles. To solve a Sudoku puzzle, the numbers 1 through 9 must be filled in for each row, each column, and each 3x3 interior square of the full 9x9 board. You find a solution by applying deduction and logic from the starting numbers. For ~ Albert Sweigart

Two puzzles that cannot be solved:
The miracle of birth and misery of death. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Humans, when you talk me about them... I more likely see them as a unsolveable unlogicalable problem... than something else. ~ Deyth Banger

He's wearing his official university sweatshirt again, which puzzles me a little. I mean I'd sort of understand it more if it said Yale or Harvard or something, because then it would be a fashion choice. But why advertise the fact that you're at a university to all the other people who are at the university with you? ~ David Nicholls

Perhaps art can help us to look beyond the immediate beauty with all its puzzles, and to glimpse that new creation which makes sense not only of beauty but of the world as a whole, and ourselves within it ... The artist can then join forces with those who work for justice and those who struggle for redemptive relationships, and together encourage and sustain those who are reaching out for a genuine, redemptive spirituality. ~ N. T. Wright

I'm patient with crossword puzzles and the most impatient golfer. ~ Brett Hull

Wittgenstein came to believe that a great many philosophical puzzles arise out of people misusing language in this way. Take, for example, the statement 'I have a pain', which is grammatically akin to 'I have a hat'. This similarity might mislead us into thinking that pains, or 'experiences' in general, are things we have in the same way that we have hats. But it would be strange to say 'Here, take my pain'. And though it would make sense to say 'Is this your hat or mine?', it would sound odd to ask 'Is this your pain or mine?' Perhaps there are several people in a room and a pain floating around in it; and as each person in turn doubles up in agony, we exclaim: 'Ah, now he's having it!'

This sounds merely silly; but in fact it has some fairly momentous implications. Wittgenstein is able to disentangle the grammar of 'I have a hat' from 'I have a pain' not only in a way that throws light on the use of personal pronouns like 'I' and 'he', but in ways which undermine the long-standing assumption that my experiences are a kind of private property. In fact, they seem even more like private property than my hat, since I can give away my hat, but not my pain. Wittgenstein shows us how grammar deceives us into thinking this way, and his case has radical, even politically radical, consequences.

The task of the philosopher, Wittgenstein thought, was not so much to resolve these inquiries as to dissolve them – to show that they spring from confusing one kind of 'l ~ Terry Eagleton

The writers job is like solving a puzzle, and finally arriving at a solution is a tremendous satisfaction. ~ William Zinsser

Finding a photograph is often like picking up a piece from a jigsaw-puzzle box with the cover missing. There's no sense of the whole. Each image is a mysterious part of something not yet revealed. ~ Susan Meiselas

each day's life comes with lot of puzzles, mysteries to unravel; being so conscious of life can make one so unconscious of life ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

We all behave like Maxwell's demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as "superintelligent," but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe. ~ James Gleick

I'm a games and theory kind of guy. I love puzzles, so it was fun dissecting Shakespeare's prose. ~ Neil Patrick Harris

Yeah, I could go rock on the back porch and do crossword puzzles - but I've got six kids, ages 9 to 16, and someone in the family should work. That's me. ~ David Duffield

There seem to be two main types of people in the world, crosswords and sudokus. ~ Rebecca McKinsey

Some people do crossword puzzles. I do books. ~ Betty Smith

Sorry, it's all those crossword puzzles I do. I love words ... ~ Dakota Cassidy

Crossword puzzles, Sudoku ... I'm good at all those things. It's not daily, but I'll do stuff on the airplane. I love playing chess. It's my favorite game. ~ Larry Fitzgerald

Most crime fiction plots are not ambitious enough for me. I want something really labyrinthine with clues and puzzles that will reward careful attention. ~ Sophie Hannah

One only wants puzzles to be difficult after they're finished. That way one can feel proud of one's accomplishment. However, while we're in the act of doing them, it is preferred that they are easy. ~ Galen Beckett

Honestly, as an actor, all I need to know, the way I kind of look at a scene, is like a puzzle. There are certain puzzle pieces that are bigger than others, and all I need to know is if this is going to fit here to make this part of the puzzle work. ~ Sarah Shahi

Life is like a jigsaw puzzle, you have to see the whole picture, then put it together piece by piece! ~ Terry McMillan

But I'm really enjoying my retirement. I get to sleep in every day. I do crossword puzzles and eat cake. ~ Derek Landy

Looking back, it puzzles me that my parents decided to stay in Shanghai when they must have known that war was imminent. But the cotton works were my father's responsibility, and duty then counted for something. ~ J.G. Ballard

There are people like this wherever you go. They are part of the same mystery as you are, but you can't quite tell how you fit together. The world is a puzzle, and we cannot solve it alone. ~ Lemony Snicket

I have arranged the passages that I have chosen for reflection in roughly chronological order. The book of Jeremiah is not itself arranged chronologically, and there is far more in it than biography. That means that readers not infrequently puzzle over transitions and wrestle to find the appropriate settings for the sayings. I have not attempted to sort out these puzzles or explain the difficulties. ~ Eugene H. Peterson

Winwood Reade is good upon the subject," said Holmes. "He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

What's popularly known as the evolution of consciousness, in other words that the expansion of cognitive repertoire that occurs in human beings, which has always been a great puzzle to evolutionary theory, I believe, occurred in the presence of a kind of catalyst for the human imagination. ~ Terence McKenna

You can involve yourself in electronics, computers, puzzles ... there's a lot of creativity and brain working. There's a lot to model trains that people don't realize. ~ Gary Coleman

It isn't just you. It's the whole Galaxy. Pirenne heard Lord Dorwin's idea of scientific research. Lord Dorwin thought the way to be a good archaeologist was to read all the books on the subject - written by men who were dead for centuries. He thought that the way to solve archaeological puzzles was to weigh the opposing authorities. And Pirenne listened and made no objections. Don't you see that there's something wrong with that? ~ Isaac Asimov

Something else that puzzles me about other people is that a lot of them don't know their purpose in life. This usually does bother them - more than not being able to remember being born, anyway - but I can't even imagine it. Part of knowing who I am is knowing why I am, and I've always known who I am, from the first moment. ~ Matt Ruff

We have three rules we require you to follow," the Caretaker continued, oblivious of her fear, "which are for your own benefit and that of your species. The first is to solve the enrichment puzzles. This will strengthen your physical and mental conditioning. The second rule is to maintain your health by eating the food we provide for you, getting ample sleep, and cooperating in routine health assessments. The third rule is to ensure the continuation of your species by engaging in procreative activities. ~ Megan Shepherd

The questions we don't ask become the puzzles we don't solve. ~ A.J. Darkholme

In these and other respects a discussion of puzzles and rules illuminates the nature of normal scientific practice. Yet, in another way, that illumination may be significantly misleading. Though there obviously are rules to which all the practitioners of a scientific specialty adhere at a given time, those rules may not by themselves specify all that the practice of those specialists has in common. ~ Thomas S. Kuhn

The monkeys solved the puzzle simply because they found it gratifying to solve puzzles. They enjoyed it. The joy of the task was its own reward. ~ Daniel H. Pink

These are the real puzzles that will face humanity. There is, he claims, a single theory that will explain not only why the queue you choose at a supermarket is always the slowest but why trains always leave on time when you are late and leave late when you are on time." "There isn't an answer to those," murmured Madeleine doubtfully. "It just happens." "That's what they used to say about lightning," replied Pandora, "and rainbows. ~ Jasper Fforde

The scientific enterprise as a whole does from time to time prove useful, open up new territory, display order, and test long-accepted belief. Nevertheless, the individual engaged on a normal research problem is almost never doing any one of these things. Once engaged, his motivation is of a rather different sort. What then challenges him is the conviction that, if only he is skillful enough, he will succeed in solving a puzzle that no one before has solved or solved so well. Many of the greatest scientific minds have devoted all of their professional attention to demanding puzzles of this sort. On most occasions any particular field of specialization offers nothing else to do, a fact that makes it no less fascinating to the proper sort of addict. ~ Thomas S. Kuhn

Fighting with him was like trying to solve a crossword and realizing there's no right answer ~ Taylor Swift

The whole thing with comedy is that you are always in control. Writer, director, actor, producer, and sometimes bouncer. And you are just a piece of their puzzle. ~ Dane Cook

Who knows, Watson? Woman's heart and mind are insoluble puzzles to the male. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

There's something in the human personality which resents things that are clear, and conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories. ~ Stanley Kubrick

THE ALMOST-INCORPOREAL VASTNESS PUZZLES, LISTENING AS LEVIATHAN MIGHT PUZZLE OVER THE PROBLEMS OF AN ATOM. ~ James Tiptree Jr.

So now it is time to disassemble the parts of the jigsaw puzzle or to piece another one together, for I find that, having come to the end of my story, my life is just beginning. ~ Conrad Veidt

I think these days an SF connection would be a boost to other books; I'm sure more people have read my two little detective puzzles because of the SF connection. ~ John Sladek

Mathematical problems, or puzzles, are important to real mathematics (like solving real-life problems), just as fables, stories and anecdotes are important to the young in understanding real life ~ Terence Tao

One of the things that puzzles me is that so few people want to look at life as a totality and to recognize that death is no more extraordinary than birth. When they say it's the end of everything they don't seem to recognize that we came from somewhere and it would be very, very strange indeed to suppose that we're not going somewhere. ~ Robertson Davies

Some people like doing crossword puzzles or Sudoku. I love auditioning. On camera, I hated auditioning. But voiceovers I like trying to figure it out, then getting in there and seeing how close you can get. ~ Tom Kenny

Well, my epic freedom moment was short-lived, because I realized my cell phone was dead. I walked down the road to a gas station and asked if I could use the phone. I called Tracy and told her where I was and asked her to pick me up. When Tracy arrived I hopped in the car and the very first thing I said to her was "I gotta get home. I have to print out some TV guides and I need to write a letter to some of the guys in there." She started laughing and when she could compose herself enough to talk said, "My sisters and I all said we guarantee Noah is going to come out of jail with new friends. He's going to be friends with everybody."
I got home and immediately wrote a letter to Michael Bolton. I put my email address at the bottom. I printed out TV guides. I printed out crossword puzzles. I even printed a couple of pages of jokes and riddles and whatever would be fun to read and do and folded them up and put them in an envelope. All that was left to do was to write the address, put a stamp on the envelope, and put it in the mailbox. I put the envelope in the car in between the seat and the center console to take to the post office.
I must have been distracted or had to do something else because the envelope sat there for months. Every so often I would look at it and go, Oh crap, I haven't sent that yet. And then at some point I spilled something on it so I knew I would never send it now. I threw it out.
To this day I'm worried that one day I'm going to be at the ~ Noah Galloway

I think that if in your heart, you are seeking out a real puzzle, and you're not looking to frighten anybody, you're not looking to upset anybody, and you're looking to discuss a subject that you yourself went through when you were nine - you just don't remember the difficulties of one's own childhood. ~ Maurice Sendak

My being a writer and playing Scrabble are connected. If I have a good writing day, I'll take a break and play online Scrabble. My favorite word as a child was 'carrion,' before I knew what it meant. I later created crossword puzzles, which was a lot about puns, and how words would create these strange, strange things. ~ Meg Wolitzer

Life is a puzzle that I feel like we'll never fully put together. ~ Josh McDermitt

Luck took me right out of myself - I read it in one gulp, and it never let me down. Sharp and surprising but always responsible, no tricks for tricks' sake; so satisfying, with its shifting and puzzles. So much fiction turns out to be diversion, in spite of fancy claims, and doesn't really look at anything. Well - this does. ~ Alice Munro