Ambiguous Words Quotes

#1. The light of humane minds is perspicuous words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity, reason is the pace ... And, on the contrary, metaphors, and senseless ambiguous words are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities.

Thomas Hobbes

#2. Names with indeterminate connotation are not to be confounded with names which have more than one connotation, that is to say, ambiguous words.

John Stuart Mill

#3. If readers must puzzle over unfamiliar or ambiguous words, you are making them work harder than they need to.

Crawford Kilian

#4. Poetry by its very nature is subversive ... It turns words inside out, confounds meaning, changes black and white to ambiguous shades of gray. Never trust a poet.

Cristina Garcia

#5. Some things are just too unjust for words, and too ambiguous for either speech or ideas.

Ralph Ellison

#6. Custom is often only the antiquity of error.

Cyprian

#7. Words are such gross machinery, so primitive and ambiguous.

Frank Herbert

#8. Words alone were ambiguous, unreliable. But what could be reliable, if not words

Julianne Donaldson

#9. Would you be known by everybody? Then you know nobody.

Publilius Syrus

#10. There is no shortcut to holiness; it must be the business of our whole lives.

William Wilberforce

#11. Perhaps Effie Mumford was only trying to prove something she already knew: that, like all animals, she was at the whim of the general disorder and unimaginative meanness of the world surrounding her.

Joe Meno

#12. These seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words.

Felix Mendelssohn

#13. For every word their is a listener and probably my words don't suit your ears. So please don't accuse me of being ambiguous

Me

#14. The point I am trying to make is that words are a mysterious, ambiguous, ambivalent, and perfidious phenomenon. They can be rays of light in a realm of darkness ... They can equally be lethal arrows. Worst of all, at times they can be one or the other. They can even be both at once!

Vaclav Havel

#15. The sign stopped me
or rather, this text stopped me. Words are my profession; I seized these and demanded that they explain themselves, that they cease to be ambiguous.

Daniel Quinn

#16. People often complain that music is too ambiguous, that what they should think when they hear it is so unclear, whereas everyone understands words. With me, it is exactly the opposite, and not only with regard to an entire speech but also with individual words.

Felix Mendelssohn

#17. When man and women are able to respect and accept there differences the love has a chance to blossom

John Gray