38 Quotes About Ambiguity

There are no such things as black and white. There are only shades of gray, and lots of them. Life is full of ambiguity, and we all struggle with it. While it can lead to frustration, it also offers the opportunity to discover the many different ways we can interpret the situations we encounter every day Read more

Whether it’s a movie, a book, a newspaper article, or a conversation with a friend, there is so much out there to be interpreted and interpreted again. So read on for some of the best ambiguous quotes to help you understand what it means to not know where you stand.

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I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity. Gilda Radner
The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the...
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The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt. Joyce Carol Oates
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I will complain, yet praise; I will bewail, approve: And all my sowre-sweet dayes I will lament, and love. George Herbert
Looking but not seeing is the hearing but not understanding...
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Looking but not seeing is the hearing but not understanding of the eye. Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don’t much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has ceased with me. But I would not remove myself to Israel if it meant the continuing expropriation of another people, and if anti- Jewish fascism comes again to the Christian world–or more probably comes at us via the Muslim world– I already consider it an obligation to resist it wherever I live. I would detest myself if I fled from it in any direction. Leo Strauss was right. The Jews will not be 'saved' or 'redeemed.' (Cheer up: neither will anyone else.) They/we will always be in exile whether they are in the greater Jerusalem area or not, and this in some ways is as it should be. They are, or we are, as a friend of Victor Klemperer's once put it to him in a very dark time, condemned and privileged to be 'a seismic people.' A critical register of the general health of civilization is the status of 'the Jewish question.' No insurance policy has ever been devised that can or will cover this risk. Christopher Hitchens
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I believe that when you step into uncharted territory, you are also stepping into total abandonment, potential humiliation, and a space where nothing is guaranteed; there’s no case study or roadmap. I have so much respect for anybody who will step away from what they can do in order to find what they must do. That’s a hallmark characteristic of entrepreneurs and artists. And it’s scary and exciting as all hell. . Elle Luna
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The mental mist of ambiguity and the fog of ambivalence hamper human existence. Kilroy J. Oldster
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Running through the maze of life, you come across profound ambiguities and complexities. Yet the essence of living a meaningful life remains simple- following your heart and pursuing your life purpose. Roopleen
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Daydream, which is to thought as the nebula is to the star, borders on sleep, and is concerned with it as its frontier. An atmosphere inhabited by living transparencies: there's a beginning of the unknown. But beyond it the Possible opens out, immense. Other beings, other facts, are there. No supernaturalism, only the occult continuation of infinite nature. Sleep is in contact with the Possible, which we also call the improbable. The world of the night is a world. Night, as night, is a universe. The dark things of the unknown world become neighbors of man, whether by true communication or by a visionary enlargement of the distances of the abyss . and the sleeper, not quite seeing, not quite unconscious, glimpses the strange animalities, weird vegetations, terrible or radiant pallors, ghosts, masks, figures, hydras, confusions, moonless moonlights, obscure unmakings of miracle, growths and vanishings within a murky depth, shapes floating in shadow, the whole mystery which we call Dreaming, and which is nothing other than the approach of an invisible reality. The dream is the aquarium of Night. Victor Hugo
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Dread was always with her, an alarm system in her head, alertto her next disaster. Despite being resigned to a life of misfortune, she becameresourceful. She grudgingly noticed that things always worked out, evenwhen she claimed defeat. An inconvenient truth, yet it was right there, in her face, betraying her self-punishments and assumptions. She kept overcoming things, dammit, aggravating herself. She still felt so much joy, despite her efforts to be miserable. Her life was full of miracles and spectacles that she was afraidto rely on so she didn’t know how to enjoy, how to be thankful, without guilt. She didn’t want to win and she didn’t want to lose. Ambiguity intrigued her and she found passion in the gapsbetween hope and despair. G.G. Renee Hill
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Apriority creates ambiguities among ideas. Toba Beta
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The sign stopped me-- or rather, this text stopped me. Words are my profession; I seized these and demanded that they explain themselves, that they cease to be ambiguous. Daniel Quinn
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The lights became stars, which became streaks in the grayspace, and then networks of fading shimmers Ashim Shanker
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It took him almost a half hour to write a message of only five lines. It took yet another fifteen minutes to delete whatever might be construed as ambiguity, desperation, or references to a history that he no longer had access to. Finally, he took a deep breath and hit ‘send’. Joakim Zander
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…I’ve come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don’t, and can’t, understand. What’s mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn’t fit into a story, what doesn’t have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature. Sorrow inseparable from joy. . Donna Tartt
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They wanted a list of symptoms: dizziness, blurred vision, palpitations. You could not say, it is a different life trying to nudge this one aside. I am meant to be living that different life. Who would understand that, if she could make no better sense of understanding it herself? Jean Thompson
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The obvious matters are more imperceptible today. Pawan Mishra
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It’s not the obviousness or the complexity of the things that’s deftly deluding mankind. It’s man himself. Pawan Mishra
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I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him. I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsom and jetsom in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality. Unknown
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There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints. Victorious historians rule where good or evil lies. Glen Cook
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Because that’s life, you know? Good and bad. You can’t have one without the other. The bad brings out the good in us, and the good can be corrupted by the bad. It’s always a struggle–to fight for the good, so it tips the scale. - Jet Phoenix Rachael Wade
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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. Giuseppe Peano
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Stories start in all sorts of places. Where they begin often tells the reader of what to expect as they progress. Castles often lead to dragons, country estates to deeds of deepest love (or of hate), and ambiguously presented settings usually lead to equally as ambiguous characters and plot, leaving a reader with an ambiguous feeling of disappointment. That's one of the worst kinds. Rebecca McKinsey
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It was all very isolating to think about, what people use to define themselves and their actions. And at the end of the day, did it make people feel better? Maybe it did. Maybe it gave them something to grasp at in the ambiguous vein of life on Earth. Rhian J. Martin
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You can't always choose which. Sometimes you have to BE which. Jonathan R. Miller
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The many meanings of 'evolution' are frequently exploited by Darwinists to distract their critics. Eugenie Scott recommends: 'Define evolution as an issue of the history of the planet: as the way we try to understand change through time. The present is different from the past. Evolution happened, there is no debate within science as to whether it happened, and so on.. I have used this approach at the college level.' Of course, no college student–indeed, no grade-school dropout– doubts that 'the present is different from the past.' Once Scott gets them nodding in agreement, she gradually introduces them to 'The Big Idea' that all species–including monkeys and humans–are related through descent from a common ancestor.. This tactic is called 'equivocation'–changing the meaning of a term in the middle of an argument. Jonathan Wells
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CS Lewis may make difficult questions accessible. I don't think he makes answers 'easy. — Debra Winger Greg Cootsona
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The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements - as well as one's deepest failures - is a definite symptom of maturity. Paul Tillich
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In the presence of Esch, values have hidden their faces. Order, loyalty, sacrifice–he cherishes all these words, but exactly what do they represent? Sacrifice for what? Demand what sort of order? He doesn't know. If a value has lost its concrete content, what is left of it? A mere empty form; an imperative that goes unheeded and, all the more furious, demands to be heard and obeyed. The less Esch knows what he wants, the more furiously he wants it. Esch: the fanaticism of the era with no God. Because all values have hidden their faces, anything can be considered a value. Justice, order– Esch seeks them now in the trade union struggle, then in religion; today in police power, tomorrow in the mirage of America, where he dreams of emigrating. He could be a terrorist or a repentant terrorist turning in his comrades, or a party militant or a cult member a kamikaze prepared to sacrifice his life. All the passions rampaging through the bloody history of our time are taken up, unmasked, and terrifyingly displayed in Esch's modest adventure. Milan Kundera
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At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation. But their attempt to lie to us is in vain. Cowardice does not pay. Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they would like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer. Simone De Beauvoir
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Perhaps we can conceive of the ironist as the fetishist's apprentice, reaching out for all readers, ensnaring them in a tangle of ambiguity, uncertainty and indecision from which there is no escape. Irony, quite possibly, makes fetishists of us all. Janet Beizer
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As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it. Simone De Beauvoir
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We take unholy risks to prove we are what we cannot be. For instance, I am not even crazy. Amiri Baraka
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Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Rainer Maria Rilke
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Detective-story writers give this thrill by exploiting the resources of the possible; however improbable the happenings in a detective story, they can and must be explained in terms that satisfy the reason. But in a ghost story, where natural laws are dispensed with, the whole point is that the happenings cannot be so explained. A ghost story that is capable of a rational explanation is as much an anomaly as a detective story that isn’t. The one is in revolt against a materialistic conception of the universe, whereas the other depends on it. . L.P. Hartley
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Isn’t life a collection of weird quizzes with no answers to half the questions? Pawan Mishra
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Heroes don't exist. And if they did, I wouldn't be one of them. Brodi Ashton