Vague Quotes

#1. How can one not feel enthusiasm for the man who never said anything vague?

Paul Valery

#2. The desire to share is not a vague, windy sentiment, not when you see the massive rise in live concerts in response to the phenomenon of downloading music ... People want to get rid of the headphones and be part of a shared experience.

Richard Eyre

#3. The Revolution in the United States was produced by a mature and thoughtful taste for liberty, and not by a vague and undefined instinct for independence.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#4. often thought that the simple fact, the mechanical fact, is no closer to the truth than a vague feeling, rumor, vision. Why repeat the facts - they cover up our feelings.

Svetlana Alexievich

#5. Jefferson found in the religion phrases of the First Amendment no vague or fuzzy language to be bent or shaped or twisted as suited any Supreme Court Justice or White House incumbent. That amendment had built a wall, with the ecclesiastical estate on one side and the civil estate on the other.

Edwin Gaustad

#6. Moreover, behind this vague tendency to treat religion as a side issue in modern life, there exists a strong body of opinion that is actively hostile to Christianity and that regards the destruction of positive religion as absolutely necessary to the advance of modern culture.

Christopher Dawson

#7. The word Palestine always brought to my mind a vague suggestion of a country as large as the United States. I do not know why, but such was the case. I suppose it was because I could not conceive of a small country having so large a history.

Mark Twain

#8. Hey, er ... " said Zaphod, "what's your name?"
The man looked at them doubtfully.
"I don't know. Why, do you think I should have one? It seems very odd to
give a bundle of vague sensory perceptions a name.

Douglas Adams

#9. It's one of the biggest problems with the system now. Vague regulations leave the system open to abuse.

Chris Asplen

#10. In a vague way, I always knew neurosurgery was different - more delicate, more difficult, more demanding. After all, we say things like, 'I'm no brain surgeon,' for a reason.

Sam Kean

#11. The figures of our speaking are like pictures of names. Vague, weak names, but names nonetheless. Be mindful of them.

Patrick Rothfuss

#12. Who is this vague "they" we blame for so many of our problems? "They" is the obscure party we use as our whipping boy to camouflage the fact that we - you and I and other specific human beings just like us - have to start doing things differently. "They" can't fix anything. We can.

Price Pritchett

#13. Faith is only a word if there is no love at its center, so flaccid and lifeless, vague and hollow - not anything you could truly feel.

Elif Shafak

#14. With my somewhat vague aspiring mind, to be imprisoned in the rude details of a most material life was often irksome.

Edward Carpenter

#15. I don't understand it either. Obscure and vague, but intelligent. 'Everybody writes like that now,

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#16. The revolution of the United States was the result of a mature and dignified taste for freedom, and not of a vague or ill-defined craving for independence.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#17. That sometimes clear ... and sometimes vague stuff ... which is ... mathematics.

Imre Lakatos

#18. Moon-Watcher felt the first faint twinges of a new and potent emotion. It was a vague and diffuse sense of envy
of dissatisfaction with his life. He had no idea of its cause, still less of its cure; but discontent had come into his soul, and he had taken one small step toward humanity.

Arthur C. Clarke

#19. Most of the time, because of their failure to fasten on to words, my thoughts remain misty and nebulous. They assume vague, amusing shapes and are then swallowed up: I promptly forget them.

Jean-Paul Sartre

#20. Why do you say vague things if you don't want to be asked about them?

Veronica Roth

#21. sometimes I feel my heart fall to vague depths between words
there are such spaces that I can't help but feel my heart fall between the pregnant pause of all you will not say
and all i can not ask

Jewel

#22. Of course the word chaos is used in rather a vague sense by a lot of writers, but in physics it means a particular phenomenon, namely that in a nonlinear system the outcome is often indefinitely, arbitrarily sensitive to tiny changes in the initial condition.

Murray Gell-Mann

#23. I don't see how it's doing society any good to have so many members walking around with vague memories of algebraic formulas and geometric diagrams and clear memories of hating them.

Paul Lockhart

#24. We live in a vague world. And it gets vaguer all the time. In this environment, the power of the specific, measurable and useful promise made and kept is difficult to overstate.

Seth Godin

#25. From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged / In rambling talk with an image of air: / Vague memories, nothing but memories.

William Butler Yeats

#26. But let my death be memoried on this disc.
Wear it, sweet friend. Inscribe no date nor deed.
But let thy heart-beat kiss it night and day,
Until the name grow vague and wear away.

Wilfred Owen

#27. Many have a vague idea that they must make some wonderful effort in order to gain the favor of God. But all self-dependence is vain. It is only by connecting with Jesus through faith that the sinner becomes a hopeful, believing child of God.

Ellen G. White

#28. The chief danger to our philosophy, apart from laziness and woolliness, is scholasticism, the essence of which is treating what is vague as if it were precise and trying to fit it into an exact logical category.

Frank P. Ramsey

#29. His mind, cool, alert, watched it sink there with a sort of vague concern at the absurdity of the occupation, till it rested at the bottom, deep down, where our unexpressed longings lie.

Joseph Conrad

#30. When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

John Updike

#31. It's easy to see from commercials the sorts of activities I should presumably be engaged in, but I'm fairly certain that American manhood is vague, internally contradictory and largely nonsensical.

Tycho Brahe

#32. The planet Mars
crimson and bright, filling our telescopes with vague intimations of almost-familiar landforms
has long formed a celestial tabula rasa on which we have inscribed our planeto-logical theories, utopian fantasies, and fears of alien invasion or ecological ruin.

David Grinspoon

#33. Nostradamus himself confessed that the vague manner in which he wrote his "prophecies" was so that 'they could not possibly be understood until they were interpreted after the event and by it.'

James Randi

#34. I have a lot of fond memories of St. Patrick's Day in Chicago. Vague, but fond.

Joel Murray

#35. They say we fear only what we don't understand. And, indeed, it's very hard to understand why doormen and ushers are so important, so arrogant, and so majestically impolite. When I read serious articles I feel exactly the same vague fear.

Anton Chekhov

#36. I am growing to hate the vague declarations of psychiatric treatment, the airy cross-your-fingers pronouncements. The treatment of mental health is an inexact science. But, as I am slowly coming to understand, depression is an inexact illness.

Sally Brampton

#37. California was almost entirely a dream, a dream vague but deep in the minds of a westering people.

Bernard DeVoto

#38. In our family histories, the frontier between fact and fiction is vague, especially in the record of events that took place before we were born, or when we were too young to record them accurately; there are few maps to these remote regions, and only the occasional sign to guide the explorer.

Adam Sisman

#39. 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

#40. Space is something that you have to define. Otherwise, it is like anxiety, which is too vague. A fear is something specific. I like claustrophobic spaces, because at least then you know your limits.

Louise Bourgeois

#41. I have forgotten all about my school days. I have a vague impression that they were detestable.

Oscar Wilde

#42. I am an impatient, temperamental reader. Anything long-winded, high-flown or gushing irritates me, so does everything that is vague and indistinct, in fact anything that unnecessarily holds the reader up, whether in a novel, a biography or an intellectual argument.

Stefan Zweig

#43. The lover heals the world not by a vague and abstract love for everybody and everything, but by becoming passionate and vowing fidelity to concrete relationships, persons, institutions, and places.

Sam Keen

#44. It occurred to Jeff that he had entered the vague phase of his life. He had a vague idea of things, a vague sense of what was happening in the world, a vague sense of having meant someone before. It was like being vaguely drunk all the time.

Geoff Dyer

#45. The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics; anything else is just a vague chatter and melts away between one's fingers.

Arthur Koestler

#46. When I watch a romantic comedy, I feel like they're selling something that doesn't exist. Two beautiful, but extremely unpleasant, people are terrible to each other for an hour, accidentally kiss, then decide to like each other during an extremely vague montage. That isn't how people fall in love.

Rainbow Rowell

#47. In his 1930 book, Dirac took for granted that measurements could be made, but was very vague about what was actually involved.

Willis Lamb

#48. The vague expression was gone from his eyes - I had a feeling it was gone forever.

Dodie Smith

#49. A vague worry has started alongside my self-satisfaction: I have established, with amazing rapidity, a reputation for maniacal, self-destructive courage.

William Boyd

#50. The difference between Carter and [Ted] Kennedy: Carter has this vague religion which he believes in strongly, while Kennedy has this strong religion which he believes in vaguely.

Eugene McCarthy

#51. Over all crowds there seems to float a vague distress, an atmosphere of pervasive melancholy, as if any large gathering of people creates an aura of terror and pity.

Emile Zola

#52. Usually in France we prefer to say bad things about the Nouvelle Vague, but I'm always impressed with its freedom and the fact of not making a film to give your opinion but just as a piece of art, which to me means the Nouvelle Vague.

Arnaud Desplechin

#53. Don't place some vague moral judgment on yourself based on what others might think.

E.L. James

#54. As human beings, we can encompass a vague feeling of what the universe is, and all in this funny little brain here - so there has to be something more than just brain, it has to be something to do with spirit as well.

Jane Goodall

#55. The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague.

Bill Cosby

#56. The debates of that great assembly are frequently vague and perplexed, seeming to be dragged rather than to march, to the intended goal. Something of this sort must, I think, always happen in public democratic assemblies.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#57. Nothing: a landscape, a glass of wine, a little loveless love, and the vague sadness caused by our understanding nothing and having lost the little we're given.

Alvaro De Campos

#58. By the time you kill and mount what you catch, it has lost that very thing that made it worth having. I knew this only as a vague sense of disappointment at age 10; not until later did I recognize it as a metaphor for much of life.

Anna Quindlen

#59. I'm the opposite of someone like David Grossman, who knows how his characters walk, and how they smell. I don't allow myself to imagine what mine look like at all. My sense of them comes from the inside. They remain, by necessity, physically vague in my mind.

Nicole Krauss

#60. The weatherman is always as honest as he is vague.

Laura Kasischke

#61. Theatre is a game of hide-and-seek. For both the hiders and the seekers, the thrill is in the discovery. When the rules of the game are too vague or too complicated, however, the audience can lose its urge to play; the prize no longer seems quite worth the hunt.

John Lahr

#62. This life, so thrift and vague, nothing, but toil and worries, dread, and casts our souls into eternal journey of no return

Michael Bassey Johnson

#63. Though my plans at the moment are vague, I can assure you that I'll never run for the Senate in New York.

Laura Bush

#64. Boys have their soft and gentle moods too. You would suppose by the morning racket that nothing could be more foreign to their nature than romance and vague sadness ... But boys have hours of great sinking and sadness, when kindness and fondness are peculiarly needful to them.

Henry Ward Beecher

#65. Of course, disinformation," Quinn said. "I can do that. I'll leave out critical events, then I'll put in false information and twist everything that has happened around into a vague, shadowy history that obscures what really took place.

Terry Goodkind

#66. The characters are that vague TV high school age, but they'll be in high school as long as we need them to be.

Josh Schwartz

#67. His will to live was waning, and it made him almost transparent, as though rather than dying, he might just disappear one day, leaving behind only a vague scent of regret.

Ian Morgan Cron

#68. The parrot eyed me cautiously, like he was forming a vague memory of unhappier times, before Jimmy Buffett and ganja.
"Noisy bastard," he decided.

Rick Riordan

#69. Maybe a vague president and an incompetent and somewhat corrupt administration is what the nation needs.

P. J. O'Rourke

#70. Public opinion, - a tyrant, sitting in the dark, wrapt up in mystification and vague terrors of obscurity; deriving power no one knows from whom ... - but irresistible in its power to quell thought, to repress action, to silence conviction ...

Harriet Martineau

#71. [Harry] had always suffered from a vague restlessness, a longing for adventure that she told herself severely was the result of reading too many novels when she was a small child.

Robin McKinley

#72. Her lips touched his brain as they touched his lips, as though they were a vehicle of some vague speech and between them he felt an unknown and timid preasure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odor.

James Joyce

#73. But it wasn't that I wasn't big on socializing. It was that I wasn't very good at mingling. Small talk did nothing for me. Connecting in a vague way that was meaningless left me cold.

Kristen Ashley

#74. Dreams are vague and far away. Goals are tangible and achievable.

Robin Roberts

#75. Everybody who writes about Blake begins by saying that he was a visionary. It is a vague term. All artists, even the most realistic, start with some kind of vision - that is what leads them to select what they need from the infinite diversity of appearances.

Kenneth Clark

#76. And even if one tried, it would be very hard to give a true account, for there were no thoughts in Ivan's mind but something very vague. He felt that he had lost his bearings.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#77. This was the best time of the day, when I could lie in the vague twilight, drifting off to sleep, making up dreams inside my head the way they should go.

Sylvia Plath

#78. There had been vague threats and seductive hands and nachos and beer, but Oscar hadn't noticed an offer, per se.

Steve Himmer

#79. that is just why a vague religion - all about feeling God in nature, and so on - is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work:

C.S. Lewis

#80. What happened in the late Fifties, early Sixties in French cinema was a fantastic revolution. I was in Italy, but completely in love with the nouvelle vague movement, and directors like Godard, Truffaut, Demy. 'The Dreamers' was a total homage to cinema and that love for it.

Bernardo Bertolucci

#81. I have vague memories, like impressions on glass plates ...

Patti Smith

#82. I don't do vague. If I want to call you a coward, I will bock at you in no uncertain terms.

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#83. I am a vague, conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#84. He had the vague sense of standing on a threshold, the crossing of which would change everything.

Kate Morton

#85. Vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs.

George Eliot

#86. The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.

Antonin Artaud

#87. When I started, they told me I only needed 3 chords and the truth ... It turned out I could manage with 2 and some vague ideas.

Joe Strummer

#88. I cannot organize my behaviour optimally if my goal is merely "to do my best." The assignment is too vague.

Nathaniel Branden

#89. Hey. Not sure what's going on-gonna go find out. Be careful and don't do anything stupid. Don't come after me-your better on your own. See you. F
I sat on the edge of the bed, holding the note.
Okay, so Fang had looked up vague in the dictionary and this was what it had said to write.

James Patterson

#90. A doctor is not a religious man. You should never give people vague hope or possibility.

Kim Du-han

#91. I have a vague memory of seeing an image of a child in an iron lung and the phrase "sad little breathing machine" coming into my head. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that on certain days - the worse ones - we could all be described as sad little breathing machines.

Matthea Harvey

#92. Athirst for personal salvation, the West forgets that many religions had but a vague notion of the life beyond the grave; true, all great religions stake a claim on eternity, but not necessarily on man's eternal life.

Andre Malraux

#93. I have always been suspicious of the phrase, the glow of pregnancy, and my suspicions were only confirmed by Lillian's appearance. Instead of a glow, her whole body seemed to become more and more dull, sallow and sickly sweet and vague, like a candle burning out or a line of smudged writing.

John Burnside

#94. Courtship consists in a number of quiet attentions, not so pointed as to alarm, nor so vague as not to be understood.

Laurence Sterne

#95. In the deep shadow of the tree there was a deeper shadow yet, black, inchoate, vague - a crouching form full of savage vigor and menace. It

Arthur Conan Doyle

#96. I have been ranting and raving about this ever since the idea of the Cloud Ark was announced. So far all I get in return, from the powers that be, are vague answers and hand-wavy happy talk.

Neal Stephenson

#97. So often we have a kind of vague, wistful longing that the promises of Jesus should be true. The only way really to enter into them is to believe them with the clutching intensity of a drowning man.

William Barclay

#98. You will perceive that economy, scientifically speaking, is a very contracted science; it is in fact a sort of vague mathematics which calculates the causes and effects of man's industry, and shows how it may be best applied.

William Stanley Jevons

#99. There was an air of vague and unsettling paranoia, an undercurrent of rumors, snatched fragments of conversation anticipating future revolution.

Patti Smith

#100. Okay, this might sound vague, but do you know this one girl with hair like this?

Bryan Lee O'Malley