It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness — Adrienne Rich
Somewhere between love and hate lies confusion, misunderstanding and desperate hope. — Shannon Alder
The tension between "yes" and "no," between "I can" and "I cannot," makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self. — Anatole Broyard
Screw ambiguity. Perversion and corruption masquerade as ambiguity. I don`t trust ambiguity. John Wayne — John Wayne
I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous. — Keith Richards
It seems we are capable of immense love and loyalty, and as capable of deceit and atrocity. It's probably this shocking ambivalence that makes us unique. — John Scott
There's always a tension in me between my urge to destroy and my will to live... Every morning I wake up with a new wrath, a new suspiciousness, a new desire to live. — Ingmar Bergman
We fluctuate long between love and hatred before we can arrive at tranquillity. — Heloise
Minds that are ill at ease are agitated by both hope and fear. — Ovid
Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better. — Sydney J. Harris
Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity. — Sigmund Freud
Learning to live with ambiguity is learning to live with how life really is, full of complexities and strange surprises. — James Hollis
The human heart is a strange vessel. Love and hatred can exist side by side. — Scott Westerfeld
Indifference creates an artificial peace. — Mason Cooley
Short Ambivalence Quotes
Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own. — Erica Jong
Ambivalence is like carbon monoxide - undetectable yet deadly. — Cherie Carter-Scott
Since time out of mind, a considered act of heroism has been the cure for stultifying ambivalence. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes
While discretion points out the impropriety of my conduct, inclination urges me on to ruin. — Susanna Rowson
I am ambivalent about London because I am so ambivalent about England in general. — Jane Jacobs
For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for. — Andrea Dworkin
The base of artistic pursuit is ambivalence and complexity. And that's what I try to do. — Fernando Perez
When asked at age 7 whether he had ambivalent feelings about girls. No, I hate 'em! — Colin Johnson
Real love isn't ever ambivalent. — Tony Kushner
I don't know that I've ever been completely comfortable with anything. — Shannon Elizabeth
This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness. — Dalai Lama
We're captive on the carousel of time, we can't return we can only look behind. — Joni Mitchell
I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend. — Thomas Jefferson
Ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to hate, and hate leads to violence. This is the equation. — Averroes
Less is more. Simplicity is awesome. That's all you need in life. Its just my personal philosophy. — G-Eazy
Everything is Energy and that is all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you can not help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics. — Unknown Author
Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh, and the greatness which does not bow before children. — Kahlil Gibran
My philosophy is: if you don't bear a cross, you can't wear a crown so you gotta go through some form of humiliation to reach tribulation. — Peter Tosh
Inspirational Quotes
Religion is for people who fear hell, spirituality is for people who have been there. — David Bowie
One day you will ask me which is more important? My life or yours? I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life. — Kahlil Gibran
Life is short. Kiss slowly, laugh insanely, love truly and forgive quickly — Paulo Coelho
The POSITIVE THINKER sees the INVISIBLE, feels the INTANGIBLE, and achieves the IMPOSSIBLE. — Winston Churchill
I had to make my own living and my own opportunity. But I made it! Don't sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them. — Madam C. J. Walker
Every day may not be good... but there's something good in every day — Alice Morse Earle
Ambivalent Feelings Quotes
It is only when parental feelings are ineffective or too ambivalent or when the mother's emotions are temporarily engaged elsewhere that children feel lost. — Anna Freud
I focus on the task and try and do it as best we can. And we're constantly evolving it, because it's my way of trying to make sense of all these ambivalent feelings I have. — Jon Stewart
We need to be ambivalent - in the essay, and in life too. Ambivalence - having mixed feelings, entertaining contradiction, living with fluctuation - is a widened embrace. It's about the coexistence of things, and in that light, we have no choice in the matter. — Charles D'Ambrosio
Some people have human muses - mine is a city. I feel a startling ambivalence towards London, but for better or worse my work has come utterly to depend upon it. — Will Self
The biggest problem that women have is being ambivalent about their own power, ... We should be comfortable with the idea of wielding power. We shouldn't feel that it detracts from our femininity. — Elizabeth Wurtzel
Life is full of tough decisions, and nothing makes them easy. But the worst ones are really your personal koans, and tormenting ambivalence is just the sense of satori rising. Try, trust, try, and trust again, and eventually you'll feel your mind change its focus to a new level of understanding. — Martha Beck
I'm very ambivalent in my feelings about marriage. I think it promises a lot to people... sort of like saying, once you get married you are on the highway to heaven, and quite often it isn't that. I think marriage has always been based on a combination of religious and legal reasons. — Mick Jagger
I'd rather make an interesting film that gets people talking, that maybe some people hate, than make the kind of 'entertaining' film that everyone feels ambivalent about. — Emily Browning
I've had some ambivalent feelings about being an actor. I don't know that I've ever been totally and completely comfortable with it. — Don Johnson
Americans have always had an ambivalent attitude toward intelligence. When they feel threatened, they want a lot of it, and when they don't, they regard the whole thing as somewhat immoral. — Vernon A. Walters
Abstract is not a style. I simply want to make a surface work. This is just a use of space and form: it's an ambivalence of forms and space. — Joan Mitchell
Horizontality is a desire to give up, to sleep. Verticality is an attempt to escape. Hanging and floating are states of ambivalence. — Louise Bourgeois
The bond between a man and his profession is similar to that which ties him to his country; it is just as complex, often ambivalent, and in general it is understood completely only when it is broken: by exile or emigration in the case of one's country, by retirement in the case of a trade or profession. — Primo Levi
The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature. — Paul De Man
I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence. — Penelope Lively
Whatever ambivalence I felt about my own career, Frankie more than made up for it with his ambition and tenacity. — Annette Funicello
Man-hating is everywhere, but everywhere it is twisted and transformed, disguised, tranquilized, and qualified. It coexists, never peacefully, with the love, desire, respect, and need women also feel for men. Always man-hating is shadowed by its milder, more diplomatic and doubtful twin, ambivalence. — Judith Levine
Fiction just has a lot more room for ambivalence and internal conflict, contradiction, and for me that sums up so much of what people felt after 9/11 - confusion even. And I think that's hard to capture in journalism. — Amy Waldman
Let us consider the polarity of love and hate.... Now, clinical observation shows not only that love is with unexpected regularityaccompanied by hate (ambivalence), and not only that in human relationships hate is frequently a forerunner of love, but also that in many circumstances hate changes into love and love into hate. — Sigmund Freud
For the only therapy is life. The patient must learn to live, to live with his split, his conflict, his ambivalence, which no therapy can take away, for if it could, it would take with it the actual spring of life. — Otto Rank
I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don't know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus. — Faye Wattleton
I always seem to be cast as slightly wan, ethereal, troubled intellectuals or physically ambivalent bad lovers. But I'm here to tell you I'm quite the opposite in real life. In fact I'm a f**king fantastic lover. — Benedict Cumberbatch
No matter where you are in your life, whatever set of people you're with, it all still breaks down like high school does. You have your social cliques, you have the people you get along with, the people you don't and the people you're ambivalent about. All of the dynamics are still here. — Colin Hanks
...all along I've had an ambivalent relationship to photography - but as to whether I thought it an art form, or a craft, or a technique, well, I've always been taken with Henry Geldzahler's answer to that question when he said, I thought it was a hobby. — David Hockney
My experience is that lots of people go to church, sing the songs, tell the story, etc but have profound ambivalence about God. — Rob Bell
We don't do ambivalence well in America. We do courage of our convictions. We do might makes right. Ambivalence is French. Certainty is American. — Anna Quindlen
More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable. — Michel De Certeau
Today, much of journalism and politics are in a kind of collusion to oversimplify and personalize issues. No room for ambivalence. Plenty of room for the personal attack. — Ellen Goodman
Beneath the surface of our daily life, in the personal history of many of us, there runs a continuous controversy between an Ego that affirms and an Ego that denies. — Beatrice Webb
And if sun comes / How shall we greet him? / Shall we not dread him, / Shall we not fear him / After so lengthy a / Session with shade? — Gwendolyn Brooks
My mother had demonstrated that the best way to defeat the numbing ambivalence of middle age is to surprise yourself - by pulling off some cartwheel of thought or action never even imagined at a younger age. — Gail Sheehy
I think ethical ambivalence is a kind of innoculation, a way of excusing yourself in advance for something you actually want to do. No offense. — Jennifer Egan
They say the definition of ambivalence is watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac. — David Mamet
Prudence is not hesitation, procrastination, or moderation. It is not driving in the middle of the road. It is not the way of ambivalence, indecision, or safety. — John Ortberg
Almost all of my early art dealt with the fallout from middle-class taboos, the messy, the ambivalent emotions couples felt, the inherent racism, the sexual tensions and the unhappiness roiling below the surface of our prim suburban lives. Meanwhile I was a suburban bad boy - cynical, sarcastic, contemptuous of all authority. — Eric Fischl
The more ambivalent you are and the more uncertain you are, then you can get something that you cannot anticipate. — Elia Kazan
When you're dealing with an ambivalent relationship, you're constantly on guard, grappling with questions of trust. — Adam Grant
Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue, but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse. — C. S. Lewis
Fashion is as profound and critical a part of the social life of man as sex, and is made up of the same ambivalent mixture of irresistible urges and inevitable taboos. — Rene Konig
[W]earisome as it may seem, women must realize that, in making a commitment to a man, they have merged in his unconscious with his mother and have therefore inherited the ambivalence of that relationship. — Camille Paglia
In Conclusion
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