Top 57 Quotes About Vagueness
#1. Science fiction rarely is about scientists doing real science, in its slowness, its vagueness, the sort of tedious quality of getting out there and digging amongst rocks and then trying to convince people that what you're seeing justifies the conclusions you're making.
Kim Stanley Robinson
#2. No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.
Eudora Welty
#4. She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose.
Virginia Woolf
#5. After all we speak of people 'taking refuge' in vagueness -the more precise you are, in general the more likely you are to be wrong, whereas you stand a good chance of not being wrong if you make it vague enough.
J.L. Austin
#6. Such mental haziness is in order, given the delightful vagueness of the terrain.
William T. Vollmann
#7. My struggle has been to return painting to the tangible object, which is like returning the personality to touching and feeling the world around it, to offset the tendency to vagueness and abstraction. To remind people of practical activity, to suggest the sense and not to escape from the senses.
Claes Oldenburg
#8. It is in the early morning hour that the unseen is seen, and that the far-off beauty and glory, vanquishing all their vagueness, move down upon us till they stand clear as crystal close over against the soul.
Sarah Smiley
#9. This was a fight the likes of which only existed in fiction, a war that was black and white and had no vagueness in where the line was drawn.
Evan Currie
#10. Noise is the typographical error and the poorly designed page ... Ambiguity is noise. Redundancy is noise. Misuse of words is noise. Vagueness is noise. Jargon is noise.
William Zinsser
#11. We cannot afford to have any large section of the business world in doubt whether they have broken the laws or not, and we cannot let the laws become a dead letter through vagueness. In this view it is clear that an administrative commission can render invaluable service.
John Bates Clark
#12. Life shouldn't be measured in hours for the vagueness in which they exist, but moments; moments are memorable and we could easily say that a short life filled with a stock of extraordinary memories is worth a thousand times what a long, boring and loveless one is.
Emiliano Campuzano
#14. But, as we have before been led to remark, most of Mr. Darwin's statements elude, by their vagueness and incompleteness, the test of Natural History facts.
Richard Owen
#15. Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.
Stendhal
#16. Any useful logic must concern itself with Ideas with a fringe of vagueness and a Truth that is a matter of degree.
Norbert Wiener
#17. Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness.
Sinclair Lewis
#18. A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people
Edgar Degas
#19. Perhaps I became so vague, so exhilarated with vagueness, precisely in order to forestall a recognition of the final term of the syllogism that begins: If one man loves another he is a homosexual; I love a man ...
Edmund White
#20. The danger, when not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human thought. The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the dullness of exhausted emotion.
Joseph Conrad
#21. The extreme nature of dominant-end views is often concealed by the vagueness and ambiguity of the end proposed.
John Rawls
#22. In abandoning the vagueness of the sketch the artist shows more of his personality by revealing the range but also the limitations of his talent.
Eugene Delacroix
#23. Just, harmonious, temperate as is the spirit of liberty, there is in the name and mere notion of it a vagueness so opposite to the definite clearness of the moral law ...
Augustus William Hare
#24. We live in a day of abounding vagueness and indistinctness on doctrinal subjects in religion. Now, if ever, it is the duty of all advocates of clear, well-defined, sharply-cut theology, to supply proof that their views are thoroughly borne out by Scripture.
J.C. Ryle
#25. Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.
John Updike
#26. None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error.
Bertrand Russell
#27. A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.
Sebastian Faulks
#28. Vagueness is at times an indication of nearness to a perfect truth.
Charles Ives
#29. I didn't like it when other people criticized Laura - her vagueness, her simplicity, her feckleness. Criticism of Laura was reserved for me.
Margaret Atwood
#30. The writer who has a definite meaning to express will not take refuge in such vagueness.
William Strunk Jr.
#31. Front, projected a glow upon the dusky vagueness of the Common, and as I passed it I heard in
Henry James
#32. And for many of the other questions, the answers I received were cloaked in the sort of highly polished public relations vagueness that makes responses so measured and couched in nuance that they are essentially meaningless.
Ammon Shea
#33. You only demand clarity because you're too comfortable within your vagueness
Albert Camus
#34. Pain can be vitalising; it gives intensity in the place of vagueness and emptiness. If we don't suffer, how do we know that we live?
Sebastian Horsley
#35. I am only conscious of any satisfaction in Scientific Reading or thinking when it rounds off into a poetical generality and vagueness.
Wilfred Owen
#36. And the vagueness of his alarm added to its terrors; when once you have taken the Impossible into your calculations its possibilities become practically limitless.
Saki
#37. You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin , or even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things.
Walt Whitman
#38. Ask a man which way he is going to vote, and he will probably tell you. Ask him, however, why, and vagueness is all.
Bernard Levin
#40. Our political vagueness divides men, it does not fuse them.
G.K. Chesterton
#41. Human relations are built on feeling, not on reason or knowledge. And feeling is not an exact science; like all spiritual qualities, it has the vagueness of greatness about it.
Amelia Barr
#42. You start meditation as an average human being who is filled with vagueness and not much purpose or definition, who is controlled by their desires, your mind spins all over the place, your senses spin all over the place, out of control.
Frederick Lenz
#43. Maybe vagueness has been good for me. The word means two different things in Tokyo and Osaka, you know. In Tokyo it means stupidity, but in Osaka they talk about vagueness in a painting and in a game of Go.
Yasunari Kawabata
#44. A poem is never a put-up job ... It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a loneliness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness.
Robert Frost
#45. Neither the colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship, is the goal of human history.
Rabindranath Tagore
#47. People who have nothing much in mind for next week speak instead about the next century or millennium.
George F. Will
#48. Spiritual activity, education, civilization, culture, the idea are all vague, indefinite concepts, under the banner of which it is quite convenient to use words that have a still less clear meaning and therefore can easily be plugged into any theory.
Leo Tolstoy
#49. An automobile piston should be round; but this phrase means nothing unless there is a way to measure the roundness of a particular piston.
David Salsburg
#50. I can't be friends with a man who blows hot and cold with the same breath.
Aesop
#51. For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules
it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus preceding to exact rules.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#52. The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.
William James
#53. Haydon was more than his model, he was his inspiration, the torch-bearer of a certain kind of English calling which - for the very reason that it was vague and understated and elusive - had made sense of Guillam's life till now.
John Le Carre
#56. A story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes.
George Orwell
#57. But to my questions he gave replies so vague that one could not tell whether they came from the mountains or the sea.
Soseki Natsume
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
