Top 100 Quotes About Ambiguity
#1. Take advantage of the ambiguity in the world. Look at something and think what else it might be.
Roger Von Oech
#2. This ambiguity is another example of a growing problem with mathematical notation: There aren't enough squiggles to go around.
Jim Blinn
#3. Writers who learn to leave holes in manuscripts to be filled later master valuable skills in writing: they learn to proceed amid ambiguity and uncertainty
Wendy Laura Belcher
#4. William pouts irritably. Socialism is not the same thing as letting one's servants muddle towards anarchy. But never mind, never mind: on a day like today, it's not worth worrying over. Soon the servant question, at least in William Rackham's household, will be resolved beyond any ambiguity.
Michel Faber
#5. in this age of great ambiguity and relentless change, so many people cut "ethical corners". Too many people think that dishonesty will get them ahead.
Robin S. Sharma
#6. In the context of Lawrence's rejection of the Freudian notion of incest and the close identification between author and character, Sons and Lovers becomes an exercise in deliberate ambiguity.
John E. Stoll
#7. The position is clear - there is no ambiguity in Sinn Fein's position. We, along with all the other parties, have signed up to a reduced rate of corporation tax of 12.5 % by 2018.
Martin McGuinness
#8. Such perfect incompleteness, suggestion and ambiguity are among the most valuable devices of the skilled poet, means by which the poem opens to let us in.
John Ciardi
#9. Standing outside the cultural hysteria the trend is fairly clear. It is a trend toward temporal compression and the emergence of ambiguity.
Terence McKenna
#10. Ambiguity lurks in generality and may thus become an instrument of severity.
Felix Frankfurter
#11. Reagan's genius as a communicator lies in his use of ambiguity ... Ambiguity is the mother of Teflon.
Robin Lakoff
#12. Ambiguity is necessary in some of my stories, not in all. In those, it certainly contributes to the richness of the story. I doubt that thematic closure is never attainable.
Gene Wolfe
#13. when you hate daylight, when you hate anything, you will develop a certain ambiguity about life and you get reckless in your habits.
Thom Jones
#14. Art actually happens somewhere in the space between clarity and ambiguity, concept and intuition, thought and feeling.
Bert Dodson
#15. Most people aren't sure what's going to happen on a first date. Given that ambiguity, every woman must be totally aware at every moment that she is responsible for every choice she makes ... protect yourselves. See trouble coming.
Camille Paglia
#16. Also, I'm drawn to moments of ambiguity, when things could go right or they could go wrong. I'm interested in discomfort. Discomfort is a place where we're still close enough to comfort to understand our unhappiness. Most of the things we desire are things that can destroy us.
Laurel Nakadate
#17. Your essential emotional tone - at ease in your deepest purpose or fearful in the ambiguity of your intent - becomes part of your children's home.
David Deida
#18. The Butcher Boy is a very great novel indeed and a very important Irish novel. The ambiguity of that is, he's writing a book about an appalling situation and he does it in a hilarious way.
Stephen Rea
#19. And I wanted to know whether it is possible to live a hopeful life in a world riddled with ambiguity, whether we can find a way to go on even when we don't get answers to questions that haunt us
John Green
#20. No scientist, engineer, writer, psychologist, artist, or physician - and certainly no scholar, and therefore no serious university faculty member - pursues his or her vocation by getting right answers from a set of prescribed alternatives that trivialize complexity and ambiguity.
Leon Botstein
#21. The mark of a mature, psychologically healthy mind is indeed the ability to live with uncertainty and ambiguity, but only as much as there really is. Uncertainty is no virtue when the facts are clear, and ambiguity is mere obfuscation when more precise terms are applicable.
Julian Baggini
#22. I wanted things to be highly coloured, simple in outline, without ambiguity, which is what most children want when it comes to the stories of their parents. They want a postcard.
Margaret Atwood
#23. The election is another element of ambiguity, .. and oil remains the crucial variable.
Hugh S. Johnson
#24. Great art projects a sense of inexhaustibility. In literature, particularly in poetry, this may be accomplished through ambiguity: Beneath each and every meaning that I can descry lie others, so that rereading holds out the prospect of new subtleties, inversions, secret codes and ineffabilities
William T. Vollmann
#25. I think there is a commitment on the part of the White House to racial justice in this country, and no ambiguity.
Richard Lugar
#26. While we mortals fumble through ambiguity, he never loses his harmony #MyExperiencewith498A
Ravi Ranjan
#27. Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader
it is never quite oneself. 2) I usually hate the sight of my handwriting
it lives too much and I dislike its life
I mean by "lives," of course, betrays too much!
Lionel Trilling
#28. The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live.
Ron Carlson
#29. I've yet to meet a person in my life who doesn't have some moral ambiguity.
Jason Beghe
#30. One of the things Wall Street does not like is ambiguity. Now that the agreement is there, it begins to make the future look a little less cloudy, and that's positively received by Wall Street.
Philip M. Condit
#31. I love the sort of ambivalence of this, the ambiguity of something being, for instance, in a quite busy Mexican restaurant with one of these very gentle tracks playing I remember as being particularly nice.
Brian Eno
#33. I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that 'issue' I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity.
Christopher Hitchens
#34. Perhaps the moral ambiguity of money is most plainly evidenced in the popular belief that money itself has value and that the worth of other things or of men is somehow measured in monetary terms, rather than the other way around.
William Stringfellow
#35. The word "brotherhood" is, to be sure, a fine word, but we oughtn't to forget its ambiguity. The first pair of brothers in the history of the world were, according to the Bible, Cain and Abel, and the one murdered the other.
Pope Benedict XVI
#36. During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.
John Le Carre
#37. To embrace luck, you have to enhance your tolerance for ambiguity.
Twyla Tharp
#38. But our brains are always crushing ambiguity into choices.
David Eagleman
#39. I like ambiguity. I think it's so much more interesting to play than an overtly good or an overtly evil person.
Evangeline Lilly
#40. The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements - as well as one's deepest failures - is a definite symptom of maturity.
Paul Tillich
#41. My path to wisdom began when I stopped pretending to know things I didn't know. When I explicitly admitted to the limits of my knowledge, stopped building on ambiguity and ignorance, and instead realized that I knew nothing, not even the things I thought I knew.
Tucker Max
#42. All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard.
Edward Norton
#43. The ambiguity of poetic language answers to the ambiguity of human life as a whole, and therein lies its unique value. All interpretations of poetic language only interpret what the poetry has already interpreted.
Hans-Georg Gadamer
#44. The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.
Scott Turow
#45. Nobody knows what will happen after five minutes later! Strangely, this ambiguity makes life very interesting!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#46. Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity.
Richard Rohr
#47. In transitions, we must learn to be still. Being still is, in part, about learning to be comfortable with ambiguity.
Janet Rebhan
#48. The real secret to freedom seems to lie in the ability to deal with ambiguity, the capacity to tolerate noise and yet hear within its wild randomizing abandon the possibilities of innovation and transformations.
William Thompson
#49. What ambiguity there is in exalted things. We despise them a little.
Don DeLillo
#50. Psychological or spiritual development always requires a greater capacity for anxiety and ambiguity.
C. G. Jung
#51. Reality cannot be captured by language - not even the language of mathematics - since all language, by its very nature, is man-made, self-referent ambiguity.
Dee Hock
#52. The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing.
Ralph Ellison
#53. These films however, have ambiguity built into them, because it's too easy in film to make a strident work of propaganda or advertising, which are really the same thing anyway, meaning the message is unmistakable.
Godfrey Reggio
#54. Whenever there's chaos, there's ambiguity, and where there's ambiguity, there's fear. And fear gets manipulated.
Robert Redford
#55. Wherever we've gone around the world, we've found quite significant gaps: the holy texts, no matter which one you turn to, has ambiguity in it around slavery. That, we knew, was being used as justification by slavers all over the world.
Andrew Forrest
#56. It's the ambiguity that throws people; they want to know which box to put you in.
Sara Farizan
#57. Never put the story in the lead. Let 'em have a hot shot of ambiguity right between the eyes.
William Safire
#58. As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.
Simone De Beauvoir
#59. Questions that pertain to the foundations of mathematics, although treated by many in recent times, still lack a satisfactory solution. Ambiguity of language is philosophy's main source of problems. That is why it is of the utmost importance to examine attentively the very words we use.
Giuseppe Peano
#60. One of my favourite films is called 'Lacombe Lucien,' directed by Louis Malle. The lead character in that film, like the lead characters in many '70s and '80s films, has a moral ambiguity to him.
Joe Cornish
#61. Learning to sit with ambiguity can be a very important start at a life liberated from anxiety - and the way to do it is to resist the urge to chase answers to questions that may actually be unanswerable.
Kelly G. Wilson
#62. People ask me if I left the lyrics open to ambiguity. Of course I did. I wanted to make a whole series of complex statements. The lyrics had to do with the state of society at the time.
Don McLean
#63. I get a lot of people complaining about my ambiguity, often in cases which there is nothing ambigous at all. As far as I can see, people read it when they were half stoned and listening to the TV. Then they come back and say gee, it's impossible to figure out what's going on in a story.
Gene Wolfe
#64. A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
John Berger
#65. We walk from nowhere to nowhere, but at least during our journey we have time to think on how to be able to change this ambiguity!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#66. I've never killed men with so little regard. And it frightens me how easy I find it in war. There is no ambiguity here, no violation of moral creed. These people are warColors. They kill me or I kill them. It's simpler than the Passage.
Pierce Brown
#68. Life is easier in black and white. It's the ambiguity of a world defined in grays that has stripped me of my confidence and left me powerless.
Amy Plum
#69. I'm not sure why I'm so drawn to heroes who do bad things and to villains who think they're the good guys, but I do find that moral ambiguity and conflict makes for great characters.
Barry Eisler
#70. Entrepreneurs have only the murkiest picture of the future in which they are making their bets, and also there is ambiguity: they don't know when they push this lever or that lever that the outcome is going to be what they think it is going to be - there is the law of unanticipated consequences.
Edmund Phelps
#71. We have to live with ambiguity. We have to give ourselves over to it. The question is: How? How are we going to live in a universe where important questions will always go unanswered?
John Green
#72. It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.
Colm Toibin
#73. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
Tim Peters
#74. The great thing about 'Allen Gregory' is that we try to make it really questionable that the things he says have happened, have really happened. We like that ambiguity.
Jonah Hill
#75. When God does not answer your prayers, step back and wait. He is giving you an opportunity to trust Him in the midst of the uncertainty and ambiguity you may be feeling.
Stormie O'martian
#76. The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.
E.L. Doctorow
#77. I had to learn to get comfortable in a role of ambiguity where I had to seek out advisers and learn quickly.
Brian Chesky
#78. Leaders seem to have a high tolerance for ambiguity. Recognizing that the brain does not work in a completely linear fashion, leaders demonstrate a comfort with the chaos of exploding ideas, many of them seemingly unrelated to the stimulus that caused them.
Marlene Caroselli
#79. When I am willing to step into the realm of uncertainty and ambiguity, I open myself up to infinite possibilities.
Anita Moorjani
#80. Resentment had erased all ambiguity in our encounters with people like him; we had been polarized into "us" and "them.
Azar Nafisi
#82. Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?
John Updike
#83. Only the human brain can deliberately change perceptions, change patterns, invent concepts and tolerate ambiguity.
Edward De Bono
#84. Occasionally, the whole class struggle may be summed up in the struggle for one word against another word. Certain words struggle amongst themselves as enemies. Other words are the site of an ambiguity: the stake in a decisive but undecided battle
Louis Althusser
#85. Political activists rarely like fiction of any kind. Literature is about ambiguity, mixed emotions, and guilty pleasures. Politics is about ideals and action.
Christopher Bram
#86. Ambiguity is not, today, a lack of data, but a deluge of data.
Paul Gibbons
#87. It is easy to forget that the most important aspect of comedy, after all, its great saving grace, is its ambiguity. You can simultaneously laugh at a situation, and take it seriously.
Stephen Fry
#88. Yeah, we should all line up along the Bosphorus Bridge and puff as hard as we can to shove this city in the direction of the West. If that doesn't work, we'll try the other way, see if we can veer to the East. It's no good to be in between. International politics does not appreciate ambiguity.
Elif Shafak
#90. I love ambiguity. People are that way. People are very hard to work out. No one is just strong or just fragile, or anything like that.
Emily Blunt
#91. If truth is the main casualty in war, ambiguity is another.
Paul Fussell
#92. I have always felt that a woman has the right to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity until, perhaps, she passes into the realm of over ninety. Then it is better she be candid with herself and with the world.
Carl Sandburg
#93. The warning message we sent the Russians was a calculated ambiguity that would be clearly understood.
Alexander Haig
#94. Photography's ability to blur truth and fiction is one of its most compelling qualities. But when misused ... this ambiguity can have severe, even lethal consequences ... Photography's ambiguity, beautiful in one context, can be devastating in another.
Taryn Simon
#95. There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words.
Thomas Reid
#97. Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity
Sigmund Freud
#98. We emerge from our Cloud of Ambiguity when we are ready or willing to let go of what has held us back.
Lisa A. Mininni
#99. The extreme nature of dominant-end views is often concealed by the vagueness and ambiguity of the end proposed.
John Rawls
#100. Everything comes to us in fifteen-second sound bites and photo opportunities. All possibility for ambiguity - the most precious trait of any adequate analysis - is erased.
Stephen Jay Gould
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