You know history’s famous quotes — but do you understand them?

Marie Antoinette was done dirty. No, that’s not a reference to her beheading at the zealous whims of French revolutionaries. Decapitation by guillotine is over in an instant. Slander, on the other hand, lasts for centuries.

As dissidents successfully roiled public fervor against the aristocracy in the late-18th century, they launched a libelous campaign against their well-known queen. Antoinette was defamed as an Austrian spy, a libertine, and a spendthrift — in essence, the worst version of a wealthy, uncaring hussy. The kind of woman who, when told that the peasants had no bread, would flippantly reply, “Let them eat cake.”

But as we are enlightened in Eli Burnstein’s new book, Phrased & Confused: The Curious Meanings of Timeless Quotations, Antoinette never said any such thing. As he writes, “Maria Antonia Josepha, a politically powerless woman sent to the guillotine at age thirty-seven, was one of the Revolution’s greatest scapegoats.”

Phrases as art

Burnstein, a Canadian humorist based in the U.K., did not set out solely to correct the record on some of history’s most famous phrases — though he does do plenty of that. For example, Robert Frost never advocated for “the road less travelled,” nor did he take it himself. He only told himself he did. Paul the Apostle never said “money is the root of all evil.” He said the “love of money” is. Oh, and “don’t mess with Texas” didn’t originate as the tough-guy catchphrase it has morphed into. It was originally an anti-littering slogan.

In bite-sized yet wholly satisfying chapters, Burstein explains those famous quotations we often encounter but rarely interrogate intellectually. In essence, we are his guests on a tour of a literary art gallery. Because phrases like Karl Marx’s “Religion is the opium of the masses,” T.S. Eliot’s “Good artists borrow, great artists steal,” and Hannah Arendt’s “the banality of evil” aren’t mere words on pages; they are captivating works of art. Of the 42 other phrases in Burnstein’s gallery, some are baffling, some are comical, some are soaring, but all are thought-provoking.

As Burnstein writes of art in his book, it “seduces us with questions it never definitively answers, but in doing so, it sets us on an arc of imagination or ‘flight of fancy’ that structures our experience and shows us the world as if for the first time.” Written masterpieces, composed of just a few words, can do the same thing.

Confused, very confused

Often inherent in great art — auditory, visual, and literary — is confusion.

“Confusion is the animating spirit of the book,” Burnstein told Big Think. “When something is funny or beautiful, it kind of throws you off.”

What do “A rose is a rose is a rose”; “If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha”; and “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” even mean? Thankfully, Burnstein is an able guide. He extensively researched the phrases in the book by seeking out and reading the quotes in their full context, consulting the work of scholars, studying the author as well as their other publications, and, when necessary, exploring multiple translations. But he admits that “confusion struck often in the course of writing this book.”

Paradoxically, he recalled, he struggled most to get a handle on the phrases with meanings that seem outwardly transparent. Friedrich Nietzsche’s “God is dead” is a good example. “It sounds clear enough,” Burnstein said. “It’s some kind of atheistic thing.”

But it’s not that at all, he discovered, with his prior training in philosophy coming in handy here. “Nietzsche’s always saying about ten things at the same time. He’s got this polyphonic quality to his philosophy.”

“‘God is dead,’ in short, means nothing less than the sky is falling,” Burnstein elaborates in the book, “and for Nietzsche, it is the most devastating event to befall humankind. … ‘God is dead’ means our values, ethics, and ideals are dead; our sense of purpose, direction and meaning are dead; reality, stable truths, and a shared worldview are dead.”

On writing and meaning

Though we’re more than a century removed from asking Nietzsche himself, he’d likely agree that in many ways, writing and the shared meaning we derive from it are now dead, or at least gravely imperiled.

Images and the spoken word have swiftly supplanted writing for entertainment and information. When people do read and write, they’re often taking in and typing out texts, posts, and work emails. Increasingly absent are the deep reflective forms of writing our predecessors once did, such as journaling and long-form letters, mediums that encourage us to think critically about what we say.

The social media platforms where we write today often limit both what we say and how much space we have to say it, whether these rules are set in code or socially enforced. We’re rewarded for sharing one-sided takes quickly, rather than nuanced reflections slowly. This new status quo is a breeding ground for misunderstanding.

“The epistolary age of long letters is gone, and the much more perfunctory age of emails is upon us,” Burnstein summarized before offering a solution. “At the individual level the obvious answer … is to spend more time reading and more time writing.”

Burnstein’s clarion call to return to the written word brushes up against the trend toward AI-assisted writing. Wordsmithing seems destined for the same fate as addition and subtraction: automation, with large language models serving the same role as calculators. According to research published in April from the Lumina Foundation-Gallup 2026 State of Higher Education study, 54% of college students surveyed said they used AI to edit or improve their writing, and 36% said they used it for writing papers.

“I think it’s also helpful to change the way we think about reading and writing from a model of teaching to a model of training,” Burnstein said. “Simply go read great novels. What you’re doing is training your linguistic faculties.”

“Reading a great novel where you feel the power of the language will do more to develop your own skills than any kind of manual ever will … It is tied up with moments of enjoyment and beauty and intensity in writing that will make you better.”

The gravity of language

Ironically, as Burnstein recognizes, Phrased and Confused is somewhat a manual on language, but it’s one where he sought not to tell the reader what to think but to invite them to think.

“I hope you take these entries in the spirit in which they were written: not as finger-wagging correctives or last-word explanations, but as invitations to think, feel, and above all savor how a mere handful of words can baffle us, paradoxically, into heightened states of clarity,” he writes in the book’s introduction.

In that, he succeeds by offering friendly, humble interpretations. The quotes’ hodgepodge arrangement in tidy three-to-four-page chapters — where you’ll find a phrase from Plato immediately followed by one penned more than 2,000 years later by the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett — also spurs stimulating comparisons and enjoyable stray thoughts.

With that said, Burnstein purposefully closed the book with Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.”

Reading a great novel where you feel the power of the language will do more to develop your own skills than any kind of manual ever will.

“I wanted to end on a line that showed the gravity of language,” he said, lest one “walk away from the book thinking that the best that language can do on a one-liner level is be witty or clever.”

The quote arose more than half a century ago after the German and American historian and philosopher watched the trial of Adolf Eichmann, tried for his pivotal role in transporting millions of Jews to the Nazi death camps. Arendt searched for words to describe how this man could have done something so undeniably wicked. She found him not to be hate-filled but, as Burnstein describes, a “rather average bureaucrat.”

“Though we desperately want some extreme and outlandish evil to point to, Arendt’s analysis reminds us it is precisely our non-exceptionalism, our tendency to think too much alike and enclose ourselves in ever more rigid ideologies, that we must be on our guard against,” Burnstein writes.

Sometimes placards next to artwork in galleries can be dry as dust, Burnstein told Big Think, and sometimes they can be great. They can help you see the art, or in Phrased and Confused’s case, words, in a whole new, and far more illuminating, light.

This article is featured on Big Think.