Quotes & Sayings About Ambiguous

Being in touch with reality but focusing on the more positive angles is being a realistic optimist. Realistic optimists merely filter out unnecessary negative information. They learn to tune out negative words and occurrences and develop a habit of interpreting ambiguous situations in a more positive manner. — Iben Dissing Sandahl

A hero is someone who, for the general good, takes the initiative to solve an ambiguous problem. — James Marcus Bach

One can imagine having a procedural rule that anything ambiguous should be treated as the Taj Mahal unless we see that it is labelled "fog" ... The motorist replies: "What sort of rule is this? Surely the best guarantee I can have that the fog is fog is if I fail to see the sign saying 'fog' because of the fog. — Michael Frayn

Everything is ambiguous. It's exciting, in a way, if you can tolerate ambiguity. I can't, but I'm taking a course where it's taught, in the hope of acquiring the skill. It's called Modern Living, and you get no credit. — Sheila Ballantyne

How does a woman gain such wisdom in only twenty-nine years?" Gordon asked, escorting her across the lawns toward the mansion.
"The same way a man does."
"Which is?"
Lady Keely cast him an ambiguous smile. "Either you are born with wisdom, my lord, or you make do
without it ... — Patricia Grasso

The Democratic leadership has expressed great concern for the incarceration rate in the commonwealth in the last few years. Now they want to fill the prisons up with people who would violate the merit law, a law that's been proven to be ambiguous at best and impossible to understand at worst. — Bill Vaughan

... He was a bad courtier and painted an ambiguous picture entitled La Menzogna or Falsehood, to show what he felt about the need for dissimulation to achieve success; a man holds up a mask to indicate to his companion that he must adopt it if he wants to make progress at court... ... The clear message was that Rosa was not prepared to demean himself in that way. — Jonathan Scott

My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined. — Odilon Redon

You will not kill my girlfriend today, International Terrorists of Ambiguous Nationality! — John Green

Zen is to religion what a Japanese "rock garden" is to a garden. Zen knows no god, no afterlife, no good and no evil, as the rock-garden knows no flowers, herbs or shrubs. It has no doctrine or holy writ: its teaching is transmitted mainly in the form of parables as ambiguous as the pebbles in the rock-garden which symbolise now a mountain, now a fleeting tiger. When a disciple asks "What is Zen?", the master's traditional answer is "Three pounds of flax" or "A decaying noodle" or "A toilet stick" or a whack on the pupil's head. — Arthur Koestler

It's simple. If you go to see 'Saturday Night Fever' expecting it to be good, it's a corker. However, if you go expecting it to be a crock of shit, it's that, too. Thus 'Saturday Night Fever' can exist in two mutually opposing states at the very same time, yet only by the weight of our expectations. From this principle we can deduce that any opposing states can be governed by human expectation - even, as in the case of retro-deficit-engineering, the present use of a future technology."
"I think I understand that. Does it work with any John Travolta movie?"
"Only the artistically ambiguous ones such as 'Pulp Fiction' or 'Face/Off.' 'Battlefield Earth' doesn't work, because it's a stinker no matter how much you think you're going to like it, and 'Get Shorty' doesn't work either, because you'd be hard-pressed not to enjoy it, irrespective of any preconceived notions. — Jasper Fforde

Testing is the process of comparing the invisible to the ambiguous, so as to avoid the unthinkable happening to the anonymous. — James Marcus Bach

It's relatively easy to create an ambiguous character. Any conglomeration of likable and unlikeable traits, chosen at random, will result in an ambiguous character. Getting an audience to deeply identify with a character, on the other hand, is one of the hardest things in the world to do. — Matt Bird

Feeble and timid minds ... consider the use of dilatory and ambiguous measures as the most admirable efforts of consummate prudence. — Edward Gibbon

In general we are reminded that the word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight. Unheimlich is customarily used, we are told, as the contrary only of the first signification of heimlich, and not of the second. [...] On the other hand, we notice that Schelling says something which throws quite a new light on the concept of the Unheimlich, for which we were certainly not prepared. According to him, everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light. — Sigmund Freud

While appropriation art is critical to art, it's an ambiguous art form in the world of the Supreme Court. — Lawrence Lessig

Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — Friedrich Nietzsche

What people call unemotional just doesnt have a single overriding emotion to it. The things that I like best are the ones that ambiguous on the emotional level. — Brian Eno

Among the words that can be all things to all men, the word "race" has a fair claim to being the most common, most ambiguous and most explosive. No one today would deny that it is one of the great catchwords about which ink and blood are spilled in reckless quantities. Yet no agreement seems to exist about what race means. — Jacques Barzun

I only like luxury fashion. You have to decide where you stand. I like well-made, authentic clothes, well-crafted tailoring. I also like the dream and fantasy of luxury, the exception and rarity of it. I have no interest at all in fast retail. It is ambiguous. — Hedi Slimane

And to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to mind with ambiguous alterations
sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing room door. — J. Sheridan Le Fanu

All this convinced him that he had come to one of those revolting havens where pathetic depravity makes its abode, born of tawdry education and the terrible populousness of the capital. One of those havens where man blasphemously crushes and derides all the pure and holy that adorns life, where woman, the beauty of the world, the crown of creation, turns into some strange, ambiguous being, where, along with purity of soul, she loses everything feminine and repulsively adopts all the mannerisms and insolence of a man, and ceases to be that weak, that beautiful being so different from us. — Nikolai Gogol

Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property. It was a morally ambiguous drive; the need for space, for land, was a real human need. But in conditions of scarcity, in a barbarous epoch of history ruled by competition, this human need was transformed into — Howard Zinn

Any American who has spent time in Iraq or Afghanistan will tell you: the closer you get, the less certain you are of anything. If you are in Iraq, if you are in Afghanistan, everything is ambiguous. Everything is murky and gray and uncertain and possibly lethal. — Dexter Filkins

In order to survive, we cling to all we know and understand. And label it reality. But knowledge and understanding are ambiguous. That reality could be an illusion. All humans live with the wrong assumptions. Isn't that another way of looking at it? That sharingan how much can you really se? — Masashi Kishimoto

There are moments when one feels a desperate gratitude for museums, whatever their own ambiguous histories. Their objects from lost cities lead us back to who we are. — Amy Davidson

The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life. — Nancy Kress

Titus, operating under the terms of the more modest package that he had negotiated with Gwen, which included room, board, and at the end of his own Candy Land path, the ambiguous pink-frosting-roofed gingerbread house of a family to love him and fuck him up, instantly got out of the car, observed the agreed-upon conventions of civilized intercourse among strangers, and got back into the car. The boy was still visiting their planet from his own faraway home world, but Archy figured that with time, he would adjust to the local gravity and microbes. Keeping close to the baby most of the time, as if Clark were the object he had crossed the stellar void to study. — Michael Chabon

I regret having been the bearer of ambiguous tidings. — David Brin

The concept of God is so 'ambiguous' ...
God came, waited, looked around and went back..confused! — Abha Maryada Banerjee

All men are naturally included to obscure the morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity. — Reinhold Niebuhr

Oral myths are closer to the genetic conclusions than the often ambiguous scientific evidence of archaeology. — Bryan Sykes

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

Song

This is the love I bring,
Absolute and nothing:
A tree but with no roots,
A cloud heavy with fruit,
A wide stone stair
That leads nowhere
But to empty sky,
Ambiguous majesty.

This is the love I bear:
It is light as air,
Yet weighs like an earth;
It is water flowing,
Yet adamant as fire.
It is coming from going.
It is dying and growing.

A love so rare and hard
It cuts a diamond word
Upon the windowpane,
"Never, never again,
Never upon my breast,"
Having no time to bring,
Having no place to rest,
Absolute and nothing. — May Sarton

Life is unresolved, confusing, bewildering, puzzling, ambiguous. You don't really know what's going to happen. The future is uncertain for everybody. — Woody Allen

Instrumental music is nonverbal and thus radically ambiguous. It doesn't lend itself to what might be called content-oriented analysis, though plenty of intellectuals have tried to analyze it in precisely that way. — Terry Teachout

You're going to drive me crazy, aren't you," Hank said.
"Crazy is an ambiguous term with no clinical meaning, and it's insulting to mental health patients. Can you be more specific? — Eli Easton

Indira Gandhi had been this very powerful, dominating, ambiguous mother figure. Ambiguous because she was tyrannical, she had imposed ... she had suspended Indian democracy for a few years but she also was the woman who had defeated Pakistan in war at a time when most male politicians in India had secretly feared fighting that war, so that here in India even today Indira Gandhi is called by Indian nationalists the only man ever to have governed India. — Aravind Adiga

I want the music to be ambiguous. Its tone gives you a context in which to start visualizing what you're feeling with the music. — Glenn Branca

At the end of the day, the end of the movie is sort of ambiguous - it's whatever you want it to be. — Jonathan Groff

For humans, tools point to the necessity of moral inquiry. Because nature makes only ambiguous prescriptions for us, we are compelled to ask, what is good? If you give a young boy a hammer for the first time and watch his face, you will see an awareness of this burden dawning on him (as he turns to the cat, for example). — Matthew B. Crawford

The clown figure has had so many meanings in different times and cultures. The jolly, well-loved joker familiar to most people is actually but one aspect of this protean creature. Madmen, hunchbacks, amputees, and other abnormals were once considered natural clowns; they were elected to fulfill a comic role which could allow others to see them as ludicrous rather than as terrible reminders of the forces of disorder in the world. But sometimes a cheerless jester was required to draw attention to this same disorder, as in the case of King Lear's morbid and honest fool, who of course was eventually hanged, and so much for his clownish wisdom. Clowns have often had ambiguous and sometimes contradictory roles to play. ("The Last Feast Of The Harlequin") — Thomas Ligotti

I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous. — Keith Richards

All our qualities, whether good or bad, are unstable and ambiguous, and almost all are at the mery of chance. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Since I don't feel like I belong solely to any one of them I find that it makes me even more interested and open to other cultures as well. It's also fun looking ethnically ambiguous because no one can quite put a finger on what I am and it's very entertaining to me! — Kina Grannis

I fear that which I cannot control, and this existential anxiety is most intense when I reflect on my ambiguous relation to the mysterious presence of God, which I am unable to manipulate, and on my futile attempts to secure a place for my "self" in the world. Theological anthropology articulates the gospel of grace manifested in the history of Jesus Christ, by whose Spirit I am set free from the binding pain of my attempts to control my own destiny and in whose Spirit I rest peacefully in the dynamic presence of divine love. But it is not simply about me and God. — F. LeRon Shults

The search for the symbolic value of phonemes, each taken as a whole, runs the risk of giving rise to ambiguous and trivial interpretations because phonemes are complex entities, bundles of different distinctive features. — Roman Jakobson

Like most people, I feel ambiguous guilt for my inferiors, ambiguous envy for my superiors, and mandatory low-spirits about the system itself. — Martin Amis

Recognizing that the boundaries of the market are ambiguous and cannot be determined in an objective way lets us realize that economics is not a science like physics or chemistry, but a political exercise... If the boundaries of what you are studying cannot be scientifically determined, what you are doing is not a science. — Ha-Joon Chang

If untruths become part of our language - untruths that in context are intended to be interpreted as polite expressions or figure of speech - then each person is left to decide for themselves the meaning of any sentence. And when language and meaning become subjective, society breaks down. The rule of law becomes a grey area. Commands become suggestions. And how do you keep anyone, including yourself, accountable for actions based on ambiguous language? — Alex Latimer

Post-Modern space is historically specific, rooted in conventions, unlimited or ambiguous in zoning and irrational or transformational in its relation of parts to whole ... ... . ... skew or distorted spaces, created by sharp angles which exaggerate perspective ... . ... always keep a mental coordinate system no matter how free- form and baroque they become. The reference plane is always an implied frontality, and the route through the building or the curvilinear elements then relate to this conceptual cage — Charles Jencks

Even a cow creates ambiguous signifiers. The moo of mystery. — Mason Cooley

The best mathematics is serious as well as beautiful - 'important' if you like, but the word is very ambiguous, and 'serious' expresses what I mean much better — G.H. Hardy

However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must
start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that
right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four. However
far it may expand, the progression inevitably rests on unequal power
and airtight roles within the family. — Gloria Steinem

Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species - back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire - has been ethically ambiguous. — Carl Sagan

But if a role model in her seventies isn't layered with contradictions - as we all come to be - then what good is she? Why bother to cut the silhouette of another's existence and place it against our own if it isn't as incongruous, ambiguous, inconsistent, and paradoxical as our own lives are? — Molly Peacock

Games tell stories best when they're elliptical and ambiguous and there's a sense of roaming and freedom. — Tom Bissell

For a long time, I was in love with her in that diffuse, ambiguous, and obsessive way that can never be explained to strangers. — Pete Hamill

Hope is ambiguous, but fear is precious. — Leo Rosten

This question depends upon the definition of the word, Nature, than which there is none more ambiguous and equivocal. — David Hume

I think every good song tells a story, as ambiguous and vague as it may be. And if you know what a song is talking about, it can only help your performance. — David Cook

All mathematicians live in two different worlds. They live in a crystalline world of perfect platonic forms. An ice palace. But they also live in the common world where things are transient, ambiguous, subject to vicissitudes. Mathematicians go backward and forward from one world to another. They're adults in the crystalline world, infants in the real one. — Sylvain Cappell

We are to hold accountable those on the inside, and speak to those on the outside with persuasion and mission.
We tend to do the exact reverse. We rail against the culture outside, and speak in muted and ambiguous terms about what is common among us. We lambaste political and cultural heresies on the outside, but sit silently in the face of doctrinal heresies in the inside. That's because we are seeing the wrong kingdom first. — Russell D. Moore

I think that, at the end of the day, I'm drawn to a certain level of ambiguous storytelling that requires hard thought and work in the same way that the 'New York Times' crossword puzzle does: Sometimes you just want to put it down or throw it out the window, but there's a real rewarding sense if you feel like you've cracked it. — Damon Lindelof

A sneeze travels at a peak velocity of two hundred miles per hour. A burp, more slowly; a fart, slower yet. But a kiss thrown by fingers- its departure is sudden, its arrival ambiguous, and there is no source that can state with authority what speeds are reached in its flight. — Tom Robbins

In a very complex way, things have improved in the dramatic field. Before you had the good and the bad and you couldn't mingle them. Now it's more ambiguous. — Isabelle Huppert

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

The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power. — Umberto Eco

The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia. — Kenzaburo Oe

When my sons arrived in the family, their legal status was not ambiguous at all. They were our kids. But their wants and affections were still atrophied by a year in the orphanage. They didn't know that flies on their faces were bad. They didn't know that a strange man feeding them their first scary gulps of solid food wasn't a torturer. Life in the cribs alone must have seemed to them like freedom. That's what I was missing about the biblical doctrine of adoption. Sure it's glorious in the long run. But it sure seems like hell in the short run ... — Russell D. Moore

Even those novelists most commonly deemed "philosophical" have sometimes answered with an emphatic no. Iris Murdoch, the longtime Oxford philosopher and author of some two dozen novels treating highbrow themes like consciousness and morality, argued that philosophy and literature were contrary pursuits. Philosophy calls on the analytical mind to solve conceptual problems in an "austere, unselfish, candid" prose, she said in a BBC interview broadcast in 1978, while literature looks to the imagination to show us something "mysterious, ambiguous, particular" about the world. Any appearance of philosophical ideas in her own novels was an inconsequential reflection of what she happened to know. "If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships," she said. "And in a way, as a novelist, I would rather know about sailing ships than about philosophy. — Iris Murdoch

He threw up the conkers into the air in his great happiness. In the tree above him they disturbed a roosting crow, which erupted from the branches with an explosive bang of its wings, then rose up above him towards the sky, its harsh, ambiguous call coming back in long, grating waves towards the earth, to be heard by those still living. — Sebastian Faulks

A religiously ambiguous Thomas Jefferson is not useful to the Christian right. — Matt McCook

Even the great Van Helsing is not immune from these confusing and cloying vampiric attractions, 'the fascination of the wanton Un-dead' (p. 393). But destroy the vampires though he and the other men indeed do in the end, it is Mina who remains the most important enabling factor for the defeat of Dracula, with the aid, of course, of what she calls 'the wonderful power of money!' (p. 378). And the reason for this is her ambiguous sexuality. In her is to be found something — Bram Stoker

It is precisely because the world appears to us to be multiple, ambiguous, and paradoxical, that we must strive to speak and write clearly. — Mark Dintenfass

It's clear that we imitate the behaviors of others, whether consciously or not. We are especially keen to see what they're doing when the situation is unfamiliar or ambiguous. And change situations are, by definition, unfamiliar! So if you want to change things, you have to pay close attention to social signals, because they can either guarantee a change effort or doom it. — Chip Heath

Obfuscation is the deliberate addition of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection. — Finn Brunton

Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion. The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everybody. Not a few men who cherish lofty and noble ideals hide them under a bushel for fear of being called different. — Martin Luther King Jr.

As an exercise, can you recall the last time you saw someone whose gender was ambiguous? Was this person attractive to you? And if you knew they called themselves neither a man nor a woman, what would it make you if you're attracted to that person? And if you were to kiss? Make love? What would you be? — Kate Bornstein

He has the special quality of virginity, most and least ambiguous of states: ignorance, yet at the same time, power in potentia, and, furthermore, unknowingness, which is not the same as ignorance. — Angela Carter

This intensely lyrical vision of the pregant woman in [i]Hope I[i] is set in an ambiguous context peopled with masks, death's heads and allegorical monsters such as Sin, Disease, Poverty and Death, all threatening the incipient life. — Gilles Neret

And I'm hoping there's some larger truth about suffering here, or at least my understanding of it - although 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

It opposes the dogmatic application to all cases of what is adequate only for piecemeal aggregates. The question is whether an approach in piecemeal terms, through blind connections, is or is not adequate to interpret actual thought processes and the role of the past experience as well. Past experience has to be considered thoroughly, but it is ambiguous in itself; so long as it is taken in piecemeal, blind terms it is not the magic key to solve all problems. — Max Wertheimer

She had understood all that he had said, with no way of knowing what he meant. It was as though he himself existed here in this town in this state in translation, ambiguous, slightly wrong, too highly colored or wrongly nuanced. Within him was the original, which no one could read. — John Crowley

I left the ending ambiguous, because that is the way life is. — Bernardo Bertolucci

Death does determine life. Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous. However, to be sincere I must add that for me death is important only if it is not justified and rationalized by reason. For me death is the maximum of epicness and death. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole of language were present to me when I spoke, then I would not be able to articulate anything at all. The ego, or consciousness, can therefore only work by repressing this turbulent activity, provisionally nailing down words on to meanings. Every now and then a word from the unconscious which I do not want insinuates itself into my discourse, and this is the famous Freudian slip of the tongue or parapraxis. But for Lacan all our discourse is in a sense a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery and ambiguous as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say and never say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part-failure, mixing non-sense and non-communication into sense and dialogue. — Terry Eagleton

It's not all 'Jane Eyre' out there. In her sweet, honorable, slightly passive-aggressive way, Jane was as perfect as a protagonist can get while remaining interesting; in fact, she's one of my favorites. But most characters are more morally ambiguous. — Susan Isaacs

The American citizen lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly irridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves. — Daniel J. Boorstin

The best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us slower to act, rather than quicker. They make us more humble, cause us to empathize with people we don't know, because they help us imagine these people, and when we imagine them - if the storytelling is good enough - we imagine them as being, essentially, like us. If the story is poor, or has an agenda, if it comes out of a paucity of imagination or is rushed, we imagine those other people as essentially unlike us: unknowable, inscrutable, incontrovertible. — George Saunders

The process of philosophizing, to my mind, consists mainly in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things, that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear, definite, which by reflection and analysis we find is involved in the vague thing that we start from, and is, so to speak, the real truth of which that vague thing is a sort of shadow. — Bertrand Russell

And ... by the pricking of my thumbs, something morally ambiguous this way comes. — Simon R. Green

People often complain that music is too ambiguous, that what they should think when they hear it is so unclear, whereas everyone understands words. With me, it is exactly the opposite, and not only with regard to an entire speech but also with individual words. — Felix Mendelssohn

For instance, the cards that I wrote for the company's 'I'd Like to Declare My Confused and Ambiguous Fondness for You' line were all notorious failures, some of which were blamed as the single direct cause of several nasty divorces, and some of their purchasers had actually taken the effort to discover the identity of their anonymous author, sending me hate mail, dead fish, and poorly wrapped, oil-stained packages emitting ticking noises. — Dexter Palmer

It is properly said that the Devil can "quote Scripture to his purpose." The Bible is full of so many stories of contradictory moral purpose that every generation can find scriptural justification for nearly any action it proposes - from incest, slavery, and mass murder to the most refined love, courage, and self-sacrifice. And this moral multiple personality disorder is hardly restricted to Judaism and Christianity. You can find it deep within Islam, the Hindu tradition, indeed nearly all the world's religions. Perhaps then it is not so much scientists as people who are morally ambiguous. It — Carl Sagan

I didn't have a perfect model, but I wanted to try to blend my own personal reflections and experiences with this broader canvas to see how a lot of the narratives we have about economy and foreign policy got stuck. Because we have these categories of liberal, conservative, free marketer, open government - all these stereotypes about our politics and the categories we try to put things in are inadequate to this sort of complex, ambiguous, sometimes contradictory experience we have as ordinary people and that I have as an elected official. — Barack Obama

Black life is ambiguous, and a kaleidoscope of meanings, rich, multi-sided ... we have frozen our vision in figures that caricature, at best the complexity of our lives and leave the real artistic chore of interpretation unfinished. — Charles Bartlett Johnson

History is the only science enjoying the ambiguous fortune of being required to be at the same time an art. — Johann Gustav Droysen

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

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