Vagueness Quotes - page 2
The human imagination has seldom had before it an object so sublimely ordered as the medieval cosmos. If it has an aesthetic fault, it is perhaps, for us who have known romanticism, a shade too ordered. For all its vast spaces it might in the end afflict us with a kind of claustrophobia. Is there nowhere any vagueness? No undiscovered by-ways? No twilight? Can we never really get out of doors?
C. S. Lewis
I found that many Americans did not even know that a country named Iran existed, let alone what it was like. Even among the diplomatic corps and among well-educated people, there was a vagueness about who the Iranians were or what the culture was, a tendency to confuse Iran with Iraq or to mistakenly assume that Iran is an Arab country simply because it is an Islamic nation. This fuzziness about the world outside is unique to America; among the intelligensia of European countries, for example, there is generally a higher level of awareness and information regarding cultures other than their own.
Ashraf Pahlavi
Fatalism, whose solving word in all crises of behavior is ''All striving is vain,'' will never reign supreme, for the impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race. Moral creeds which speak to that impulse will be widely successful in spite of inconsistency, vagueness, and shadowy determination of expectancy. Man needs a rule for his will, and will invent one if one be not given him.
William James
When people talk, they lay lines on each other, do a lot of role playing, sidestep, shilly-shally and engage in all manner of vagueness and innuendo. We do this and expect others to do it, yet at the same time we profess to long for the plain truth, for people to say what they mean, simple as that. Such hypocrisy is a human universal.
Steven Pinker
To me the entire uselessness of such rules^as practical guides lies in the inherent vagueness of the word "reasonable," the absolute impossibility of finding a definite standard, to be expressed in language, for the fairness and the reason of mankind, even of Judges. The reason and fairness of one man is manifestly no rule for the reason and fairness of another, and it is an awkward, but as far as I see, an inevitable consequence of the rule, that in every case where the decision of a Judge is overruled, who does or does not stop a case on the ground that there is, or is not, reasonable evidence for reasonable |men, those who overrule him say, by implication, that in the case before them, the Judge who is overruled is out of the pale of reasonable men.
John Coleridge, 1st Baron Coleridge
To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.
George Orwell
My struggle has been to return painting to the tangible object, which is like returning the personality to touching and feeling the world around it, to offset the tendency to vagueness and abstraction. To remind people of practical activity, to suggest the sense and not to escape from the senses.
Claes Oldenburg
What do we know about the world unseen? What reasonings, what curiosity, what misgivings there have been concerning that impenetrable mystery! Out of this mystery and vagueness and vastness comes the human form of the Divine Redeemer. He assures us that there is an unmixed and endless life, and that all we have to do to secure it is, to trust ourselves to Him who came to declare it and to confer it.
William Adams
There was no doubt or vagueness in Lenin's mind. His were the penetrating eyes which detected the moods of the masses; the clear head which could apply and adapt well-thought-out principles to changing situations; the inflexible will which held on to the course he had mapped out, regardless of immediate consequences... It is not many years since he died, and already Lenin has become a mighty tradition, not only in his native Russia, but in the world at large. As time passes he grows greater; he has become one of the chosen company of the world's immortals. Petrograd has become Leningrad, and almost every house in Russia has a Lenin corner or a Lenin picture. But he lives, not in monuments or pictures, but in the mighty work he did, and in the hearts of hundreds of millions of workers today who find inspiration in his example and the hope of a better day.
Jawaharlal Nehru
What is a symbol? Etymologically speaking, the word σύμβολον comes from σνμβάλλω, to throw-with, to make something coincide with something else: a symbol was originally an identification mark made up of two halves of a coin or of a medal. Two halves of the same thing, either one standing for the other, both becoming, however, fully effective only when they matched to make up, again, the original whole. ... in the original concept of symbol, there is the suggestion of a final recomposition. Etymologies, however, do not necessarily tell the truth - or, at least, they tell the truth, in terms of historical, not of structural, semantics. What is frequently appreciated in many so-called symbols is exactly their vagueness, their openness, their fruitful ineffectiveness to express a 'final' meaning, so that with symbols and by symbols one indicates what is always beyond one's reach.
Umberto Eco
