Top 100 Quotes About Ambiguous
#1. The "laughter through tears of sorrow" that Pushkin noted elsewhere in his work is precisely laughter. The images it produces are too deeply ambiguous to bear any social message.
Nikolai Gogol
#2. I like presenting ambiguous situations. It seems to me a great part of our inner and outer lives are ambiguous, if we're honest about it. Maybe I'm a realist, in that respect.
Eric Basso
#3. Any American who has spent time in Iraq or Afghanistan will tell you: the closer you get, the less certain you are of anything. If you are in Iraq, if you are in Afghanistan, everything is ambiguous. Everything is murky and gray and uncertain and possibly lethal.
Dexter Filkins
#4. 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
#5. Games tell stories best when they're elliptical and ambiguous and there's a sense of roaming and freedom.
Tom Bissell
#6. If I see something that's morally ambiguous or ambiguously beautiful or has some pull in some way, I won't censor myself; I always run towards the light.
Harmony Korine
#7. Stuff that's hidden and murky and ambiguous is scary because you don't know what it does.
Jerry Garcia
#8. In today's ambiguous world, character means despotism, tyranny, absolute intolerance. At last it is time to admire a lack of character, inner weakness. Our epoch is that of noble doubts, blessed uncertainty, sacred hypersensitivity, divine wishy-washiness.
Tadeusz Konwicki
#9. You will not kill my girlfriend today, International Terrorists of Ambiguous Nationality!
John Green
#10. Words alone were ambiguous, unreliable. But what could be reliable, if not words
Julianne Donaldson
#11. From all human oracles, however self-confident, we turn at last to the inspired Word, where instead of ambiguous and untrustworthy utterances, we find teachings distinct and definite, authoritative and infallible.
Arthur Tappan Pierson
#12. Happiness can be bought with a bottle of wine and has become ambiguous through overuse.
Tim Ferriss
#13. [T]here is a methodological bias in favor of taking natural discourse literally, other things being equal. For example, unless there are clear reasons for construing discourse as ambiguous, elliptical, or involving special idioms, we should not so construe it.
Tyler Burge
#14. The United States has been ambiguous on the current situation in Nepal. They have not actually come out very strongly in terms of pushing the king to take measures on the detentions or abuses by the army. China continues to provide military equipment.
Irene Khan
#15. That ambiguous area of culture where something unfailingly political, though separate from the political choices of the day, infiltrates judgment and language.
Roland Barthes
#16. In a very complex way, things have improved in the dramatic field. Before you had the good and the bad and you couldn't mingle them. Now it's more ambiguous.
Isabelle Huppert
#17. All men are naturally included to obscure the morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#18. She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man's land between life and death, sleeping and waking.
Angela Carter
#19. What one commonly takes as 'the reality,' including the reality of one's own individual person, by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous-that there is not only one, but that there are many realities, each comprising also a different consciousness of the ego.
Albert Hofmann
#20. Why e-mail a full emotional statement when, instead, you can text a totally insignificant and ambiguous half-considered phrase?
Jami Attenberg
#21. It is precisely because the world appears to us to be multiple, ambiguous, and paradoxical, that we must strive to speak and write clearly.
Mark Dintenfass
#22. The search for the symbolic value of phonemes, each taken as a whole, runs the risk of giving rise to ambiguous and trivial interpretations because phonemes are complex entities, bundles of different distinctive features.
Roman Jakobson
#23. Before I start painting I have a slightly ambiguous feeling: happiness is a special excitement because unhappiness is always possible a moment later.
Francis Bacon
#24. The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power.
Umberto Eco
#26. That no one dies of migraine seems to someone deep in an attack as an ambiguous blessing.
Joan Didion
#27. In order to survive, we cling to all we know and understand. And label it reality. But knowledge and understanding are ambiguous. That reality could be an illusion. All humans live with the wrong assumptions. Isn't that another way of looking at it? That sharingan how much can you really se?
Masashi Kishimoto
#28. Words are such gross machinery, so primitive and ambiguous.
Frank Herbert
#29. I only like luxury fashion. You have to decide where you stand. I like well-made, authentic clothes, well-crafted tailoring. I also like the dream and fantasy of luxury, the exception and rarity of it. I have no interest at all in fast retail. It is ambiguous.
Hedi Slimane
#30. A sneeze travels at a peak velocity of two hundred miles per hour. A burp, more slowly; a fart, slower yet. But a kiss thrown by fingers- its departure is sudden, its arrival ambiguous, and there is no source that can state with authority what speeds are reached in its flight.
Tom Robbins
#31. May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best - out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters.
May Sarton
#32. I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.
James Ellroy
#33. She had understood all that he had said, with no way of knowing what he meant. It was as though he himself existed here in this town in this state in translation, ambiguous, slightly wrong, too highly colored or wrongly nuanced. Within him was the original, which no one could read.
John Crowley
#34. Science now finds itself in paradoxical strife with society: admired but mistrusted; offering hope for the future but creating ambiguous choice; richly supported yet unable to fulfill all its promise; boasting remarkable advances but criticized for not serving more directly the goals of society.
J. Michael Bishop
#35. I never held Negroes to be inherently inferior. The statement in Marriage and Morals refers to environmental conditioning. I have had it withdrawn from subsequent editions because it is clearly ambiguous.
Bertrand Russell
#36. Love is life sharing, not for hurt, Love is alive both not ambiguous. Love is whole life, not an affair.
Khalil Gibran
#37. Since I don't feel like I belong solely to any one of them I find that it makes me even more interested and open to other cultures as well. It's also fun looking ethnically ambiguous because no one can quite put a finger on what I am and it's very entertaining to me!
Kina Grannis
#38. Like most people, I feel ambiguous guilt for my inferiors, ambiguous envy for my superiors, and mandatory low-spirits about the system itself.
Martin Amis
#39. War is smaller in scale than in recent memory, but it is far more ambiguous, intractable, and nasty. Money flows more quickly than ever, but it is still somehow manages to gather and puddle in certain places, for certain people rather then others.
Mark Kingwell
#40. The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values. Even when they do not panic men often sense that older ways off feeling and thinking have collapsed and that newer beginnings are ambiguous to the point of stasis.
C. Wright Mills
#41. Some men are daylight readers, who peruse the ambiguous wording of clouds or the individual letter shapes of wandering birds. Some, like myself, are librarians of the night, whose ephemeral documents consist of root-inscribed bones or whatever rustles in the thickets upon solitary walks.
Loren Eiseley
#42. I do sometimes play characters that are a bit ambiguous. You've got to be brave about that sort of stuff. I like the sense of people not feeling too secure, not immediately knowing what they have in front of them.
Andrew Scott
#43. The best mathematics is serious as well as beautiful - 'important' if you like, but the word is very ambiguous, and 'serious' expresses what I mean much better
G.H. Hardy
#44. In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.
R.D. Laing
#45. Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you ... at any time.
Harold Pinter
#46. My arguments usually convinced Erica until she felt it again: the tiny sting of possible rejection - always ambiguous, always subject to many interpretations.
Siri Hustvedt
#47. Photography appears to be an easy activity; in fact it is a varied and ambiguous process in which the only common denominator among its practitioners is in the instrument.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#48. Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species - back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire - has been ethically ambiguous.
Carl Sagan
#49. I think great art is always ambiguous and can't be pinned down.
Stephen Rea
#50. Every ambiguous, false, tearful, emotional exaggeration brings about that typically kitsch attitude which could be defined as "sentimentality."
Gillo Dorfles
#51. Real politics is messy and morally ambiguous and doesn't make for a compelling thriller.
James Surowiecki
#52. I purposefully try to make films in that grey area, where things are morally ambiguous. It's like life: good people do horrible things, and bad people do good things, and there's beauty in horror and horror in beauty.
Harmony Korine
#53. As always, there's a couple of things in the pipeline - but that pipeline is a strange and ambiguous place.
Hugh Dancy
#54. History is the only science enjoying the ambiguous fortune of being required to be at the same time an art.
Johann Gustav Droysen
#55. The Russian proposal is ambiguous. If they want to propose enrichment (only) in Russia we have said it is not acceptable. But if it is a complementary or parallel plan, we will study that.
Hamid-Reza Assefi
#56. The complicated, ambiguous milieu of human contact is being replaced with simple, scalable equations. We maintain thousands more friends than any human being in history, but at the cost of complexity and depth. Every minute spent online is a minute of face-to-face time lost.
Daniel H. Wilson
#57. The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia.
Kenzaburo Oe
#58. 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
#59. Aiming to check a new test's difficulty, ask your assistants to solve the test prior to the actual exam. If the results are not satisfactory, reevaluate all ambiguous questions and correct them.
Eraldo Banovac
#60. Some things are just too unjust for words, and too ambiguous for either speech or ideas.
Ralph Ellison
#61. A hero is someone who, for the general good, takes the initiative to solve an ambiguous problem.
James Marcus Bach
#62. And ... by the pricking of my thumbs, something morally ambiguous this way comes.
Simon R. Green
#63. Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there.
Haruki Murakami
#64. We live in times that are in many ways ambiguous. Maybe that's why kids want precision in what they read - they don't like that moral ambiguity.
Lois Lowry
#65. Nobody is ever just a straight up protagonist or antagonist - everybody's morally ambiguous.
Cheyenne Jackson
#66. I'm a filmmaker who is known for these ambiguous portraits that tell multiple sides of the story without really telling the audience what to think.
Joe Berlinger
#67. Like music my drawings transport us to the ambiguous world of the indeterminate.
Odilon Redon
#68. Beauty misleads without lying, like an ambiguous prophecy in a Greek play. We read into it our hopes, to which it is indifferent. We ask it to be true and good, but it has its own way of measuring worth, its own standard and authority.
Phillip Margulies
#69. I always considered "love" to be such an ambiguous term, often both overused and underused, but I knew that I was feeling something that I'd never felt before.
Matt Abrams
#70. I was perceiving myself as good as a man or equal to a man and as powerful and I wanted to look ambiguous because I thought that was a very interesting statement to make through the media. And it certainly did cause quite a few ripples and interest and shock waves.
Annie Lennox
#71. If you've got more ambiguous characters or stock stereotypes, the plastic comes through and they don't work as well.
Bill Watterson
#72. My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.
Odilon Redon
#73. An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence that is inadequate and ambiguous.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#74. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side you were on.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#75. I was at the University of Miami, and I still had, like, a semester or so left. And through the film school, I found out that Al Gore was launching a new TV network; they were looking for passionate young storytellers to transform television, which was, like, ambiguous but magnificent-sounding.
Jason Silva
#76. People are drawn to religion because for them there is only one thing worse than an ambiguous life, and that is an unambiguous death.
Stephen R. Harrison
#77. Granana lives on the other side of the island. She's eighty-four, I'm twelve, and Wallow's fourteen, so it's a little ambiguous as to who's babysitting whom.
Karen Russell
#78. TV is providing such amazing possibilities - you have such lively characters, fantastic stories and ambiguous messages, and viewers feel very satisfied.
Fedor Bondarchuk
#79. People who often falsely accuse, who repeatedly disbelieve the truthful, establish a relationship that makes fear signs ambiguous, likely whether their suspect is truthful or lying.
Paul Ekman
#80. Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen ...
F Scott Fitzgerald
#81. What happens when an art form becomes ambiguous, I think, is that the standards are lowered. You can say anything is jazz. So I think it's important to reflect on what made jazz so special.
Stefon Harris
#82. Life is unresolved, confusing, bewildering, puzzling, ambiguous. You don't really know what's going to happen. The future is uncertain for everybody.
Woody Allen
#84. Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens-usually .
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#85. The performances I enjoy are the ones that are hard to read or ambiguous or left-of-centre because it makes you look closer and that's what humans are like - quite mysterious creatures, hard to pinpoint.
Emily Blunt
#86. I love the ambiguous kind of endings. I think, oftentimes, that's what life really is - there's no concrete path for you to take. It's always kind of a jumble of variables. Behind this door could be a beautiful woman, and behind the same door could be a tiger, you know? You don't know.
Joe Carnahan
#87. Everything is ambiguous. It's exciting, in a way, if you can tolerate ambiguity. I can't, but I'm taking a course where it's taught, in the hope of acquiring the skill. It's called Modern Living, and you get no credit.
Sheila Ballantyne
#89. If the major powers come to practice foreign policies of manipulating a multiplicity of subsovereign units observing ambiguous and often violent rules of conduct, many based on extreme articulations of divergent cultural experiences, anarchy is certain.
Henry Kissinger
#90. I feel partly American, but I have an ambiguous relation with both America and India, the only two countries I really know. I never feel fully one way or the other.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#91. At the end of the day, the end of the movie is sort of ambiguous - it's whatever you want it to be.
Jonathan Groff
#92. Full circle from the tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb we come, an ambiguous, enigmatical incursion into a world of solid matter that is soon to melt from us like the substance of a dream.
Joseph Campbell
#93. How does a woman gain such wisdom in only twenty-nine years?" Gordon asked, escorting her across the lawns toward the mansion.
"The same way a man does."
"Which is?"
Lady Keely cast him an ambiguous smile. "Either you are born with wisdom, my lord, or you make do
without it ...
Patricia Grasso
#94. Humor is really one of the hardest things to define, very hard. And it's very ambiguous. You have it, or you don't. You can't attain it.
Heinrich Boll
#95. Black life is ambiguous, and a kaleidoscope of meanings, rich, multi-sided ... we have frozen our vision in figures that caricature, at best the complexity of our lives and leave the real artistic chore of interpretation unfinished.
Charles Bartlett Johnson
#96. I don't like answering private questions. The answers are often ambiguous and can be interpreted in different ways. Even when the other person is close to you.
Jean-Claude Izzo
#97. I enjoy having the ability to play a variety of ethnicities. Being ethnically ambiguous allows me to explore many roles, and I enjoy being free to be whoever I want to be.
Kelsey Chow
#98. Oakland Technical High School. Like any high-school experience, it was ambiguous. I was shy with girls; I had friends, but there were times I didn't feel I had the right friends. My grades were only so-so.
Frank Oz
#99. I'm pleased the administration is endorsing the need for legislation dealing with the chemical sector. In the past, the administration's position has been ambiguous.
Susan Collins
#100. Hope is ambiguous, but fear is precious.
Leo Rosten
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