I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous. — Keith Richards
Screw ambiguity. Perversion and corruption masquerade as ambiguity. I don`t trust ambiguity. John Wayne — John Wayne
The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition. — Marilyn Hacker
Learning to live with ambiguity is learning to live with how life really is, full of complexities and strange surprises. — James Hollis
I left the ending ambiguous, because that is the way life is. — Bernardo Bertolucci
Vagueness is at times an indication of nearness to a perfect truth. — Charles Ives
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
From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity. — Simone de Beauvoir
Problems are often stated in vague terms... because it is quite uncertain what the problems really are. — John Von Neumann
Confusion is the best form of communication. It's left to be unexplained. — Twiggy
There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words. — Thomas Reid
I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers. — James Ellroy
The human language, as precise as it is with its thousands of words, can still be so wonderfully vague. — Garth Stein
Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity. — Sigmund Freud
Uncertainty is where things happen. It is where the opportunities - for success, for happiness, for really living - are waiting. — Oliver Burkeman
Short Ambiguity Quotes
A blur of great magic is still just a blur. — Ken Weber
On the road from the City of Skepticism, I had to pass through the Valley of Ambiguity. — Adam Smith
The use of the polygraph has done little more than create confusion, ambiguity and mistakes. — Aldrich Ames
Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality. — Theodor Adorno
I've always thought that a woman owes it to herself to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity. — Helena Rubinstein
I think great art is always ambiguous and can't be pinned down. — Stephen Rea
The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia. — Kenzaburo Oe
That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing. — Joan Didion
Take advantage of the ambiguity in the world. Look at something and think what else it might be. — Roger Von Oech
I'm a participant in the doctrine of constructive ambiguity. — Vernon A. Walters
Ambiguity Image Quotes
Working In Ambiguity Quotes
Things either become unclear in a story or they're just ambiguous with no real point. So defined gray area with clarity that also works in the narrative, that's tricky. — Annette Bening
Skywhale is ambiguous. I think she is beautiful, but a lot of people think she is grotesque. You are drawn in and repelled at the same time, and it has to have that dynamic. My work has a certain element of abject mutation, uncertainty and darkness. Even she is dark - I mean she has ten breasts. — Patricia Piccinini
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
Had the Bible been in clear straightforward language, had the ambiguities and contradictions been edited out, and had the language been constantly modernised to accord with contemporary taste it would almost certainly have been, or become, a work of lesser influence. — John Kenneth Galbraith
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 Safak
Moral Ambiguity Quotes
Understand the causes of terror? Yes, we should try, but let there be no moral ambiguity about this: nothing could ever justify the events of September 11 and it is to turn justice on its head to pretend it could — Tony Blair
All men are naturally included to obscure the morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity. — Reinhold Niebuhr
To believe that will has power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality (which is always potentiality to do and not to do) — this is the perpetual illusion of morality. — Giorgio Agamben
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
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
Whether it's movies or television that I've directed, or characters that I've played, I'm just always fascinated by the moral ambiguity inherent in life. — Tony Goldwyn
We all hate moral ambiguity in some sense, and yet it is also absolutely necessary. In writing a story, it is the place where I begin. — Amy Tan
Nobody is ever just a straight up protagonist or antagonist - everybody's morally ambiguous. — Cheyenne Jackson
You know, people who almost - yeah, there's a slight reluctance there - but there's also an ambiguity. What are their morals? What is their code of living. What are they really doing here. And it is just interesting because it is never black or white. — Matt Robinson
We must be clear. White supremacy is repulsive. This bigotry is counter to all America stands for. There can be no moral ambiguity. — Paul Ryan
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
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
I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain ending - an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism at bay. — William Kentridge
How ever sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, religion or all four. — Gloria Steinem
Whenever I allow anything but tenderness and compassion to dictate my response to life--be it self-righteous anger, moralizing, defensiveness, the pressing need to change others...I am alienated from my true self. My identity as Abba's child [a child of God] becomes ambiguous, tentative and confused — Brennan Manning
The character of human life, like the character of the human condition, like the character of all life, is "ambiguity": the inseparable mixture of good and evil, the true and false, the creative and destructive forces-both individual and social. — Paul Tillich
People usually complain that music is so ambiguous, and what they are supposed to think when they hear it is so unclear, while words are understood by everyone. But for me it is exactly the opposite...what the music I love expresses to me are thoughts not to indefinite for words, but rather too definite. — Felix Mendelssohn
My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity. — Kenzaburo Oe
Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. — Donna J. Haraway
The ideal trademark is one that is pushed to its utmost limits in terms of abstraction and ambiguity, yet is still readable. Trademarks are usually metaphors of one kind or another. And are, in a certain sense, thinking made visible. — Saul Bass
Everyone knows that a gorilla can’t fly an airplane. Whether or not the psychiatrist really did get involved – and if he did, whether he was aware of the gorilla masks – remains ambiguous to Dr. Craig Luther. But for the purposes of a strategic deception campaign, the point is clear: no one wants to be mistaken for a fool. — Annie Jacobsen
The meaning of this observation is unclear, but it raises the unfortunate possibility of ambiguous triplets; that is, triplets which may code more than one amino acid. However one would certainly expect such triplets to be in a minority. — Francis Crick
Death does determine life. Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous. However, to be sincere I must add that for me death is important only if it is not justified and rationalized by reason. For me death is the maximum of epicness and death. — Pier Paolo Pasolini
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
I think that at the end of the day I'm drawn to a certain level of ambiguous storytelling that requires hard thought and work in the same way that the New York Times crossword puzzle does: Sometimes you just want to put it down or throw it out the window, but there's a real rewarding sense if you feel like you've cracked it. — Damon Lindelof
One can imagine having a procedural rule that anything ambiguous should be treated as the Taj Mahal unless we see that it is labelled "fog". The motorist replies: "What sort of rule is this? Surely the best guarantee I can have that the fog is fog is if I fail to see the sign saying 'fog' because of the fog." — Michael Frayn
Every human being relies on and is bounded by his knowledge and experience to live. This is what we call “reality”. However, knowledge and experience are ambiguous, thus reality can become illusion. Is it not possible to think that, all human beings are living in their assumptions? — Masashi Kishimoto
We're teaching a generation of students who've been schooled to produce quick, right answers on demand. They are not comfortable with ambiguity. The implications of that in the long term are discomforting. — Carol Ann Tomlinson
If it doesn’t have ambiguity, don’t bother to take it. I love that, that aspect of photography - the mendacity of photography. It’s got to have some kind of peculiarity in it, or it’s not interesting to me. — Sally Mann
The goal is to live a full, productive life even with all that ambiguity. No matter what happens, whether the cancer never flares up again or whether you die, the important thing is that the days that you have had you will have lived. — Gilda Radner
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
I love the necessary ambiguity of short stories - there simply isn't time to render every detail, so much of the story that orbits the literal prose must happen in the reader's imagination. Who knows, maybe the dwindling attention spans means a lucrative future for short story writers. — Matthew Healy
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
The search for truth in cyberspace will take you through the wormhole, and there's nothing on the other side but pedants and nitpickers and bottomless ambiguity. If you're not careful, you'll spend all your time proving everything and understanding nothing. — Mike Rowe
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
Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous. — Pier Paolo Pasolini
Abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it --- on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger. — Julia Kristeva
In Conclusion
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