Ambiguity Quotes

Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity. (Sigmund Freud)
There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words. View quote
Thomas Reid
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity (in the Harvard sense) of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead. View quote
John Updike
The extreme nature of dominant-end views is often concealed by the vagueness and ambiguity of the end proposed. View quote
John Rawls
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. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
If I take refuge in ambiguity, I assure you that it's quite conscious. View quote
Kingman Brewster, Jr.
In a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live. View quote
Robert James Waller
I think whenever people talk about the 'Anna Sui woman,' they're talking about someone that's probably kind of more downtown, and there's always like this ambiguity: Is she a good girl, or a bad girl? View quote
Anna Sui
I'm a participant in the doctrine of constructive ambiguity. View quote
Vernon A. Walters
The main business of a lawyer is to take the romance, the mystery, the irony, the ambiguity out of everything he touches. View quote
Antonin Scalia
All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard. (Edward Norton)
I believe [...] that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professionals and interested laypeople. The concepts of science, in all their richness and ambiguity, can be presented without any compromise, without any simplification counting as distortion, in language accessible to all intelligent people. [...] I hope that this book can be read with profit both in seminars for graduate students and-if the movie stinks and you forgot your sleeping pills-on the businessman's special to Tokyo. View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
Questions that pertain to the foundations of mathematics, although treated by many in recent times, still lack a satisfactory solution. Ambiguity of language is philosophy's main source of problems. That is why it is of the utmost importance to examine attentively the very words we use. View quote
Giuseppe Peano
During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity. View quote
John le Carré
The calculated ambiguity of expression is based on the confusion of experience as reflected in the architectural program. View quote
Robert Venturi
Ambiguity - the Devil's volleyball. View quote
Emo Philips
Most people aren't sure what's going to happen on a first date. Given that ambiguity, every woman must be totally aware at every moment that she is responsible for every choice she makes... protect yourselves. See trouble coming. View quote
Camille Paglia
The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing. View quote
Ralph Ellison
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. View quote
Jack Vance
The new "ambiguity" means, in a way adjudged favorable to literary, poetic, intellectually and psychologically well-devised and praiseworthily executed linguistic performance, uncertainty of meaning, or difficulty for the interpreter in identifying just what the meaning in question is: it means the old meanings of ambiguity with a difference. It means uncertainty of meaning (of a word or combination of words) purposefully incorporated in a literary composition for the attainment of the utmost possible variety of meaning-play compressible within the verbal limits of the composition. View quote
Laura Riding
But I hope that by the decision and authority of wise princes that sometime devout and learned men from the churches of other nations and of ours may be summoned together to deliberate about all the controversies and that there be handed down to posterity one harmonious, true, and clear form of doctrine, without any ambiguity. Meanwhile, as far as possible, let us encourage the union of our churches with measured advice. (Philipp Melanchthon)
The acceptance of ambiguity implies more than the commonplace understanding that some good things and some bad things happen to us. It means that we know that good and evil are inextricably intermixed in human affairs; that they contain, and sometimes embrace, their opposites; that success may involve failure of a different kind, and failure may be a kind of triumph. View quote
Sydney J. Harris
The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it. View quote
Frank Herbert
The result is - document destruction - we're really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that we're going to come to. There will be always unresolved ambiguity here. View quote
David Kay
We've never thought too deeply about the roles things like forgetting or partisanship or inefficiency or ambiguity or hypocrisy play in our political or social life. It's been impossible to get rid of them, so we took them for granted, and we kind of thought, naively, that they're always the enemy. View quote
Evgeny Morozov