Quotes & Sayings About Ambiguity

A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image. — John Berger

While we mortals fumble through ambiguity, he never loses his harmony #MyExperiencewith498A — Ravi Ranjan

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. — Ralph Ellison

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

Ambiguity begets participation. — Daniel J. Levitin

I've never killed men with so little regard. And it frightens me how easy I find it in war. There is no ambiguity here, no violation of moral creed. These people are warColors. They kill me or I kill them. It's simpler than the Passage. — Pierce Brown

Even if every colonialist is not mediocre, every colonizer must, in a certain measure, accept the mediocrity of colonial life and the men who thrive on it. It is also clear that every colonizer must adapt himself to his true situation and the human relationships resulting from it. By having chosen to ratify the colonial system, the colonialist has not really overcome the actual difficulties. The colonial situation thrusts economic, political, and affective facts upon every colonizer against which he may rebel, but which he can never abandon. These facts form the very essence of the colonial system, and soon the colonialist realizes his own ambiguity. — Albert Memmi

The great thing about 'Allen Gregory' is that we try to make it really questionable that the things he says have happened, have really happened. We like that ambiguity. — Jonah Hill

In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess. — Tim Peters

Psychological or spiritual development always requires a greater capacity for anxiety and ambiguity. — C. G. Jung

But was it worth anything?
That's the hopelessness of it. The openness of it. The part of it I can never understand.
I am afraid of ambiguity and certainity and permanence and impermanence.
And so is everybody else. — Katherine Ewell

Ambiguity is something that I really respond to. I like the complexity of it. — Robert Redford

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead? — John Updike

Among all the complaints you hear these days about the crimes of the media, it seems to me the critics miss the big one. It is that especially TV, but also we of the print press, tend to reduce mess and complexity and ambiguity to a simple story line that doesn't reflect reality so much as it distorts it ... What bothers me about the journalistic tendency to reduce unmanageable reality to self-contained, movielike little dramas is not just that we falsify when we do this. It is also that we really miss the good story. — Meg Greenfield

No need to choose; become choiceless. And whatsoever happens happens; whatsoever happens is good. Let things happen rather than trying to do, and you will be surprised that all ambiguity disappears. It is a by-product of the chooser's mind, the choosing mind, that creates ambiguity. Otherwise there is no dilemma. Negative and positive are perfectly balancing in life. — Rajneesh

The key to such power is ambiguity. In a society where the roles everyone plays are obvious, the refusal to conform to any standard will excite interest. Be both masculine and feminine, impudent and charming, subtle and outrageous. Let other people worry about being socially acceptable; those types are a dime a dozen, and you are after a power greater than they can imagine. — Robert Greene

The ability to try to understand existence, the ability to try to recognize the wonder and responsibility of one's own existence, the ability to know even fractionally the almost annihilating beauty, ambiguity, darkness, and horror which swarm every instant of every consciousness, the ability to try to accept it, or the ability to try to defend one's self, or the ability to dare to try to assist others; all such as these, of which most human beings are cheated of their potentials, are, in most of those who even begin to discern or wish for them, the gifts or thefts of economic privilege, and are available to members of these leanest classes only by the rare and irrelevant miracle of born and surviving 'talent. — James Agee

Thus from beneath the black veil there rolled a cloud into the sunshine, an ambiguity of sin or sorrow, which enveloped the poor minister, so that love or sympathy could never reach him. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

The North American situation, while different from the Brazilian one, reflects a similar complexity and ambiguity in the relationship between race and ethnicity. Whereas Brazilians have a great number of terms used to designate people of varying pigmentation, the 'one-drop principle' prevalent in the USA entails that people are either black or white, and that 'a single drop of black blood' (sic) contaminates an otherwise pale person and makes him or her black. Conversely, ethnic identity in the USA is, as mentioned above, not necessarily correlated with 'race'. At the same time, African- American identities are associated — Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Reality television paints a simple black-and-white world of good characters and bad characters; people we want to root for and people we want to see ruined. There is none of the gray ambiguity that colors real life. I no longer watch a lot of reality television, but sometimes I can't look away from 'Honey Boo Boo.' I just can't. — Molly O'Keefe

In art we do not make things any simpler by making simpler things. Reduction does not yield certainty, but something like its opposite, which is ambiguity and multi-valence. — Kirk Varnedoe

To embrace luck, you have to enhance your tolerance for ambiguity. — Twyla Tharp

The new Constitution will promote the "general" welfare, not welfare varying by condition or by place of residence. It will secure our liberties - against whom? There's an ambiguity here; liberty could be secured against foreign enemies and domestic subversives, or against the new government itself. The latter interpretation is soothing to American ears; but in this context, it seems far-fetched. The clause appears in a list of things government is to do, not things it is not to do; a list of powers, not of prohibitions. The new government, it would appear, is not the enemy of liberty but its chief agent and protector. The purpose then, in its most plausible reading, is to create a strong, active, national government, one whose benefits will flow directly to the people who create it. — Garrett Epps

Reagan's genius as a communicator lies in his use of ambiguity ... Ambiguity is the mother of Teflon. — Robin Lakoff

During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity. — John Le Carre

A need for precision and perfection has always been an enemy of art, which is about coloring outside the lines. It is also an enemy of the reality that following Jesus is a journey, not an arrival. — Steve Stockman

Fail your way forward. Recognize that Ready, fire, aim is superior to ready, aim, aim, aim. Straightforward trial and error produces better results than endless vacillating. If you're afraid to make decisions and act on them in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty, get a job. Failure's lessons are essential to success. — Steve Pavlina

'Into The Wild' had a great sense of wild, unpredictable freedom that I loved, and 'Unforgiven' is just a great western with characters that walked the line between right/wrong with an ambiguity that felt very true to frontier life. — Brendan Fletcher

In this world that God (or Mother Nature) created, it is always hazard and novelty-hazard and novelty-which assert themselves, thereby rendering notions of fixity absurd. Incongruously enough, however, when we allow ourselves to fully accept uncertainty, to embrace and cultivate it even, then we actually can begin to feel within ourselves the presence of an Absolute. The person who cannot welcome ambiguity cannot welcome God. — Tom Robbins

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

And must I not conceal myself like one who has swallowed gold- lest my soul should be ripped up? — Friedrich Nietzsche

We take unholy risks to prove we are what we cannot be. For instance, I am not even crazy. — Amiri Baraka

Ambiguity is the devil's volleyball. — Emo Philips

And I vaguely remember Lara smiling at me from the doorway, the glittering ambiguity of a girl's smile, which seems to promise an answer to the question but never gives it. — John Green

Yeah, we should all line up along the Bosphorus Bridge and puff as hard as we can to shove this city in the direction of the West. If that doesn't work, we'll try the other way, see if we can veer to the East. It's no good to be in between. International politics does not appreciate ambiguity. — Elif Shafak

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

At very best there are two problems with ideology. The first is that it does not represent or conform to or even address reality. It is a straight-edge ruler of a fractal universe. And the second is that it inspires in its believers the notion that the fault here lies with miscreant fact, which should therefore be conformed to the requirements of theory by all means necessary. To the ideologue this would amount to putting the world right, ridding it of ambiguity and of those tedious and endless moral and ethical questions that dog us through life, and that those around us so rarely answer to our satisfaction. — Marilynne Robinson

Reagan's failure to become a truly great movie star has been ascribed to project menace, sexuality, or even moral ambiguity. — Scott Farris

That's what I love about being mayor. Even if the problem is getting the cat out of the tree - from that to the biggest problem, you're in charge. No ambiguity. Leaders lead. — Shirley Franklin

The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry. — William Empson

It's the side-by-side culture of the Talmud I like so much. 'On the one hand' and 'on the other hand' is frustrating for people seeking absolute faith, but for me it gives religion an ambidextrous quality that suits my temperament. — Jonathan Rosen

In wrestling, nothing exists unless it exists totally, there is no symbol, no allusion, everything is given exhaustively; leaving nothing in shadow, the gesture severs every parasitical meaning and ceremonially presents the public with a pure and full signification, three dimensional, like Nature. Such emphasis is nothing but the popular and ancestral image of the perfect intelligibility of reality. What is enacted by wrestling, then, is an ideal intelligence of things, a euphoria of humanity, raised for a while out of the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and installed in a panoramic vision of a univocal Nature, in which signs finally correspond to causes without obstacle, without evasion, and without contradiction. — Roland Barthes

A search for justification and the impossibility of justification are recurrent motifs in the philosophy of Sartre. His philosophy is one of the incarnations of problematism and of the ambiguity of contemporary thought (for Man does seem, to the contemporary mind, to be ambiguous). — Jean-Paul Sartre

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

Priming works best when you are on autopilot, when you aren't trying to consciously introspect before choosing how to behave. When you are unsure how best to proceed, suggestions bubble up from the deep that are highly tainted by subconscious primes. In addition, your brain hates ambiguity and is willing to take shortcuts to remove it from any situation. If there is nothing else to go on, you will use what is available. When pattern recognition fails, you create patterns of your own. In the aforementioned experiments, there was nothing else for the brain to base its unconscious attitudes on, so it focused on the business items or the clean smells and ran with the ideas. The only problem was the conscious minds of the subjects didn't notice. — David McRaney

One of the things Wall Street does not like is ambiguity. Now that the agreement is there, it begins to make the future look a little less cloudy, and that's positively received by Wall Street. — Philip M. Condit

As we progress along the intercultural journey, we become self-reflective about habits of heart and mind and the ways these are expressed in daily life. We develop strategies for encountering change, unfamiliarity and ambiguity in creative ways. We begin to realize that what is taken, as "common sense" is really "cultural sense". Our life becomes richer and deeper for having encountered differences. — H. Ned Seelye

The more clearly we are able to express ourselves, the less room there is for ambiguity. The more elaborate and the more precise our vocabulary, the greater the scope for thought and expression. Language is about subtlety and nuance. It is power and it is potent. We can woo with words and we can wound. Despots fear the words of the articulate opponent. Successful revolutions are achieved with words as much as with weapons. — John Humphrys

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. — Camille Paglia

Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity. — Graham Nelson

In a world of well-defined problems, directors are required to exercise influence over volatility, manage uncertainty, simplify complexity, and resolve ambiguity in the 21st-century digital environment. — Pearl Zhu

The enemy of accountability is ambiguity — Patrick Lencioni

The depiction of women by women (sometimes themselves) as a political statement grows potentially more powerful as it approaches actual exploitation but then, within an ace of it, collapses into ambiguity and confusion. The more attractive the women, the higher the risk, since the more closely they approach conventional stereotypes in the first place. — J. Ann Tickner

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

music licensing is an arcane thicket of ambiguity, overlapping jurisdictions, and litigation. This — Rob Reid

My dad's gay experiences really had a very positive influence on me and my straight relationships - how to better accept all the weirdness and ambiguity and ups and downs and paradoxes. I knew from the beginning I was writing about love. — Mike Mills

Resentment had erased all ambiguity in our encounters with people like him; we had been polarized into "us" and "them. — Azar Nafisi

Ambiguity depletes as your budget rises. — Tony Gilroy

He prizes ambiguity; he loves to keep you guessing. — Lionel Shriver

[To the masculine lover] Without a deep sense of purpose to direct your daily life, you will be directed by externals-financial need, your children's needs, your lover's needs-and you will begin to blame them for your lack of fulfillment. You will feel trapped in obligations, and your resentments will show. You will hold back in your relationships with your lover and family, not really wanting to be there, unsure what else to do, mired in ambiguity, guilt, and anger. Your actions will lack integrity and follow-through. Your feminine lover won't be able to trust you in everyday life or open to you sexually. [Pg 121] — David Deida

There's the ambiguity of human relationships, for instance. A relationship between two people, just like a sequence of words, is ambiguous if it is open to different interpretations. And if two people do have differing views about their relationship - I don't just mean about its state, I mean about its very nature - then that difference can affect the entire course of their lives. — Elliot Perlman

Ambiguity distracts the conscious mind. — Franz Anton Mesmer II

One of the jobs of a writer is to add nuance and ambiguity to that straight line that people often draw to very specific kinds of heroism. Most of us don't get to be Snooki. For most of us heroism has to be in our everyday lives. — John Green

No matter how physically faint, a photograph involuntarily whisper of something exquisitely carnal. The weeks, the years, whatever stretches of time separating our present from the photographs retire into the transparence of the shot and seem erased by it. We almost have to shake ourselves to overcome the feeling that we peer out at the other place, in that different age. Yet we are always aware of this illusory dislocation, for such is the ambiguity, in principle, that seduces us over and over again in the photographic experience. — Max Kozloff

Myths, whether in written or visual form, serve a vital role of asking unanswerable questions and providing unquestionable answers. Most of us, most of the time, have a low tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. We want to reduce the cognitive dissonance of not knowing by filling the gaps with answers. Traditionally, religious myths have served that role, but today - the age of science - science fiction is our mythology. — Michael Shermer

Premillennialists tended to have an even more melancholy view of nonChristians than had prevailed among their predecessors; sometimes this view was applied even to those who professed to be Christians but clearly had a different understanding of the gospel. All reality was, in essentially Manichean categories, divided into neat antitheses: good and evil, the saved and the lost, the true and the false (cf Marsden 1980:211). "In this dichotomized worldview, ambiguity was rare" (:225). Conversion was a crisis experience, a transfer from absolute darkness to absolute light. The millions on their way to perdition should therefore be snatched from the jaws of hell as soon as possible. Missionary motivation shifted gradually from emphasizing the depth of God's love to concentrating on the imminence and horror of divine judgment. — David J. Bosch

The position is clear - there is no ambiguity in Sinn Fein's position. We, along with all the other parties, have signed up to a reduced rate of corporation tax of 12.5 % by 2018. — Martin McGuinness

And I wanted to know whether it is possible to live a hopeful life in a world riddled with ambiguity, whether we can find a way to go on even when we don't get answers to questions that haunt us — John Green

You will find ambiguity a great ally on your road to power. Give a sign of Slytherin on one day, and contradict it with a sign of Gryffindor the next; and the Slytherins will be enabled to believe what they wish, while the Gryffindors argue themselves into supporting you as well. So long as there is uncertainty, people can believe whatever seems to be to their own advantage. And so long as you appear strong, so long as you appear to be winning, their instincts will tell them that their advantage lies with you. Walk always in the shadow, and light and darkness both will follow. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

[Soho] is all things to all men, catering comprehensively for those needs which money can buy. You see it as you wish. An agreeable place to dine; a cosmopolitan village tucked away behind Piccadilly with its own mysterious village life, one of the best shopping centres for food in London, the nastiest and most sordid nursery of crime in Europe. Even the travel journalists, obsessed by its ambiguities, can't make up their minds. — P.D. James

The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it. — Frank Herbert

Ambiguity is not, today, a lack of data, but a deluge of data. — Paul Gibbons

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

Dread was always with her, an alarm system in her head, alert
to her next disaster.
Despite being resigned to a life of misfortune, she became
resourceful.
She grudgingly noticed that things always worked out, even
when 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 afraid
to 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 gaps
between hope and despair. — G.G. Renee Hill

Self-organizing teams form the core of APM. They blend freedom and responsibility, flexibility and structure. In the face of inconsistency and ambiguity, the teams strive to consistently deliver on the product vision within the project constraints. Accomplishing this requires teams with a self-organizing structure and self-disciplined individual team members. Building this kind of team is the core of an agile project leader's job. — Jim Highsmith

The whole of the Targum deserves study as shewing how textual ambiguity or corruption may combine with doctrinal prepossession to modify tradition;
Chapter II, Section 2, Paragraph 1171 — Edwin A. Abbott

Read Mann's notes, which contain precise accounts of cholera and its symptoms, and observe how careful he is throughout his fiction in getting medical details straight - then you might begin to wonder whether cholera is the only candidate for the cause of Aschenbach's death. What results from this, I think, is a deeper appreciation of Mann's brilliance in keeping so many possibilities in play. The ambiguity is even more artful than people have realized. — Philip Kitcher

Great art projects a sense of inexhaustibility. In literature, particularly in poetry, this may be accomplished through ambiguity: Beneath each and every meaning that I can descry lie others, so that rereading holds out the prospect of new subtleties, inversions, secret codes and ineffabilities — William T. Vollmann

It's not the obviousness or the complexity of the things that's deftly deluding mankind. It's man himself. — Pawan Mishra

One of hallmarks of a creative person is the ability to tolerate ambiguity, dissonance, inconsistency, things out of place. But one of the rules of a well-run corporation is that surprise is to be minimized. Yet if this rule were applied to the creative process, nothing worth reading would get written, nothing worth seeing would get painted, nothing worth living with and using would ever get designed. — Ralph Caplan

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

The next dysfunction of a team is the lack of commitment and the failure to buy in to decisions." She wrote the dysfunction above the previous one. "And the evidence of this one is ambiguity, " which she wrote next to it. Nick was reengaging now. — Jossey-Bass

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

The conference brochure asked: "How do we come to tolerate the ambiguity inherent in not-knowing or, more confusing still, sort-of-knowing?" I guess I would say it has to do, SORT-OF, with the wiring of the brain; SORT-OF with how much our caretakers were able to affirm the rights of all parts of us to exist; and SORT-OF being lucky to have someone to talk to at the right times - including someone who can think about you as a silkworm when you most need it. — Jean Petrucelli

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Being desirable means being comfortable with your own ambiguity. The most ambiguous reality is that we are flesh and spirit at the same time. Within everyone there is light and shadow, good and evil, love and hate. In order to be truthful, you must embrace your total being. A person who exhibits both positive and negative qualities, strengths and weaknesses is not flawed, but complete. — Rumi

These films however, have ambiguity built into them, because it's too easy in film to make a strident work of propaganda or advertising, which are really the same thing anyway, meaning the message is unmistakable. — Godfrey Reggio

No scientist, engineer, writer, psychologist, artist, or physician - and certainly no scholar, and therefore no serious university faculty member - pursues his or her vocation by getting right answers from a set of prescribed alternatives that trivialize complexity and ambiguity. — Leon Botstein

We all hate moral ambiguity in some sense, and yet it is also absolutely necessary. In writing a story, it is the place where I begin. — Amy Tan

If there is a single tragic flaw that mars our biggest enterprises, it is conservatism - the failure to fail, and fail big, in an era of unprecedented volatility and ambiguity. — Tom Peters

I've always thought that a woman owes it to herself to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity. — Helena Rubinstein

If I am truly honest, I have to acknowledge that the demands I am so convinced are coming from the outer world are, in fact, coming from that perpetually unfinished part of me-the pulls and tugs originating from my own ambiguity. — Joan Anderson

The real secret to freedom seems to lie in the ability to deal with ambiguity, the capacity to tolerate noise and yet hear within its wild randomizing abandon the possibilities of innovation and transformations. — William Thompson

I tell my students, if you ever become comfortable with your role as criminal defense lawyer, it's time to quit. It should be a constant source of discomfort, because you're dealing with incredible moral ambiguity, and you've been cast into a role which is not enviable. — Alan Dershowitz

Mann is widely recognized as a master of irony and ambiguity, yet it's remarkable how quickly people foreclose options he carefully leaves open. Lots of readers - including eminent critics - jump to conclusions: that Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy is a central background text, that Aschenbach is an inferior writer, that he's never been attracted by pubescent male beauty before, that he dies of cholera. — Philip Kitcher

Seasoning one's claims with self-irony and modesty, cultivating a tolerance for moral ambiguity, periodically practicing normative reticence, building up a resistance to the pleasure of purity, minding your own business, doing what you can to forget to wreak vengeance, defending negative freedom even if there is no such thing, and playing around are the best you can do. But that's quite a lot. — Jane Bennett

I would browse for half an hour or so in the secondhand bookstores in the neighborhood. Owning my own 'library' was my only materialistic ambition; in fact, trying to decide which two of these thousands of books to buy that week, I would frequently get so excited that by the time the purchase was accomplished I had to make use of the bookseller's toilet facilities. I don't believe that either microbe or laxative has ever affected me so strongly as the discovery that I was all at once the owner of a slightly soiled copy of Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity in the original English edition. — Philip Roth

I have never had a problem dealing in areas of ambiguity. I can make a decision and not have it all lined up just right. — Jerry Jones

This is positively not an album to play while you do a doctorate thesis on "Bergson, Webern and Charles the Vicious, Paradox or Ambiguity?" — Bob Brookmeyer

Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith. — Ursula K. Le Guin