Ambiguity Quotes - Page 13

• 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

  Understanding, Pedants, Sides

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• The inherent preferences of organizations are clarity, certainty and perfection. The inherent nature of human relationships involves ambiguity, uncertainty, and imperfection. How one honors, balances, and integrates the needs of both is the real trick of feedback.

  Richard Pascale

  Inspirational, Educational, Real

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• Everything comes to us in fifteen-second sound bites and photo opportunities. All possibility for ambiguity - the most precious trait of any adequate analysis - is erased.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Opportunity, Sound, Analysis

  Stephen Jay Gould (1991). “Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

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• 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

  Art, Optimism, Political

  Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge (1998). “William Kentridge”, Societe Des Expositions Des Beaux

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• The most obvious and yet the oldest and most stubborn error on which the appeal of inflation rests is that of confusing ‘money’ with ‘wealth’…Real wealth, of course, consists in what is produced and consumed: the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in. It is railways and roads and motor cars; ships and planes and factories; schools and churches and theaters; pianos, paintings and books. Yet so powerful is the verbal ambiguity that confuses money with wealth, that even those who at times recognize the confusion will slide back into it in the course of their reasoning.

  Henry Hazlitt

  Powerful, Real, Book

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• Complexity begets ambiguity, which yields in all ways to prejudice and avarice. Complication does not so much defeat Men as arm them with fancy.

  R. Scott Bakker

  Men, Yield, Doe

  R. Scott Bakker (2012). “The White-Luck Warrior: Book Two”, p.138, The Overlook Press

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• Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity.

  Richard Rohr

  Religious, Belief, Made

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• Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel-the spiritual texture-of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.

  Tim O'Brien

  Spiritual, Hate, War

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.78, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• . . I have written a couple of screenplays for studios, and each time has been less gratifying than the last. In my experience, they want no real representations of homosexuality, they want no complexity, they are terrified of ambiguity and unanswered questions - they don't know what they want, except that they want to make lots of money. The only freedom I've ever had as an artist has been in the theatre.

  Craig Lucas

  Couple, Real, Artist

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• Our amended Constitution is the lodestar for our aspirations. Like every text worth reading, it is not crystalline. The phrasing is broad and the limitations of its provisions are not clearly marked. Its majestic generalities and ennobling pronouncements are both luminous and obscure. This ambiguity of course calls forth interpretation, the interaction of reader and text. The encounter with the Constitutional text has been, in many senses, my life's work.

  William J. Brennan

  Reading, Law, Encounters

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• It seems to me that the great pleasure of human life is not in having an opinion, but rather in learning all the ways you are wrong, and all the nuances you failed to account for, and all the truths that turned out to be not as simple as you once believed. And it seems to me that one of the central pleasures of attending school is that you get to read with really well-informed people who can help welcome you into a complex world stuffed with rich and maddening ambiguity.

  John Green

  School, Simple, People

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• The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

  J. G. Ballard

  Art, War, Keys

  "Age of unreason". Interview with Jeannette Baxter, www.theguardian.com. June 22, 2004.

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• It is the misanthrope who alone has clarity.By standing outside the huddles of man,he sees a lot,and what he often sees is the evidence that people are not as smart as dogs think they are.And he wants to see it time and again.In the fog of ambiguities and mysteries,he desperately searches for truths because truth usually shows humanity in a poor light

  Manu Joseph

  Dog, Smart, Men

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• Where unclarity resides, there is temptation, and there it proves only too easily the stronger. Wherever there is ambiguity, wherever there is wavering, there is disobedience down at the bottom.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Christian, Temptation, Stronger

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• Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Faith, Men, Legends

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.46, Penguin

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• Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader

  Lionel Trilling

  Notebook, Journalism, Reason

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• The difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God. . . Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there's some hand to hold: if we just do the right things, someone will appreciate us and take care of us. . . Nontheism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves.

  Pema Chodron

  Atheist, Buddhist, Believe

  Pema Chodron (2000). “When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times”, p.51, Shambhala Publications

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• 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

  Believe, Decision, Morality

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• And I vaguely remember her smiling at me from the door way the glittering ambiguity of a girls smile, which seems to promise an answer to the question, but never gives it. The question, the one we’ve all been asking since girls stopped being gross, the question that is to simple to be uncomplicated: Does she like me or does she LIKE me?

  John Green

  Girl, Simple, Doors

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• It is indeed acceptable practice to sometimes split an infinitive. If infinitive-splitting makes available just the shade of meaning you desire or if avoiding the separation creates a confusing ambiguity or patent artificiality, you are entitled to happily go ahead and split!

  Richard Lederer

  Writing, Practice, Confusing

  Richard Lederer (2012). “Lederer on Language: A Celebration of English, Good Grammar, and Wordplay”, p.58, Marion Street Press

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• What are your fees?" inquired Guyal cautiously. "I respond to three questions," stated the augur. "For twenty terces I phrase the answer in clear and actionable language; for ten I use the language of cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity; for five, I speak a parable which you must interpret as you will; and for one terce, I babble in an unknown tongue.

  Jack Vance

  Phrases, Use, Answers

  Jack Vance (2000). “Mazirian the Magician: (previously titled The Dying Earth)”, p.91, Macmillan

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• In the long term everyone traffics in foregone conclusions, and in the short term they just get drunk. This is the way it has always been. Some half-assed ambiguity masquerading as mystery is all anybody's really looking for.

  Paul Neilan

  Long, Drunk, Half

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• Was that what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities?

  Banana Yoshimoto

  Mean, Adults, Ugly

  Banana Yoshimoto, Megan Backus (1979). “Three Plays”, p.56, Grove Press

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