Quotes & Sayings About Vagueness

And for many of the other questions, the answers I received were cloaked in the sort of highly polished public relations vagueness that makes responses so measured and couched in nuance that they are essentially meaningless. — Ammon Shea

Ask a man which way he is going to vote, and he will probably tell you. Ask him, however, why, and vagueness is all. — Bernard Levin

Front, projected a glow upon the dusky vagueness of the Common, and as I passed it I heard in — Henry James

You start meditation as an average human being who is filled with vagueness and not much purpose or definition, who is controlled by their desires, your mind spins all over the place, your senses spin all over the place, out of control. — Frederick Lenz

You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin , or even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things. — Walt Whitman

Early on, when they'd just started home schooling together, he'd written a note on the margin of her page: "What's your star sign?"
She'd turned to him, "What does my star sigh?" and he'd seen how much she'd liked the idea that she owned a star, and that it sighed; he'd seen in her eyes that her mind was rushing through the possible words that it could sigh.
It's true that his handwriting was bad: the "n" looked a lot like an "h."
But when he's crossed it out and written "sign," underlining the "n" three times, a vagueness had wandered onto her face, and she'd thought for a moment, then said, "Pisces," and smiled. — Jaclyn Moriarty

They ordered punch. They drank it. It was hot rum punch. The pen falters when it attempts to treat of the excellence thereof; the sober vocabulary, the sparse epithet of this narrative, are inadequate to the task; and pompous term, jewelled, exotic phrases rise to the excited fancy. It warmed the blood and cleared the head; it filled the soul with well-being; it disposed the mind at once to utter wit, and to appreciate the wit of others; it had the vagueness of music and the precision of mathematics. Only one of its qualities was comparable to anything else; it had the warmth of a good heart; but its taste, its smell, its feel, were not to be described in words. — W. Somerset Maugham

I didn't like it when other people criticized Laura - her vagueness, her simplicity, her feckleness. Criticism of Laura was reserved for me. — Margaret Atwood

And the vagueness of his alarm added to its terrors; when once you have taken the Impossible into your calculations its possibilities become practically limitless. — Saki

Once, probably, I used to think that vagueness was a loftier kind of poetry, truer to the depths of consciousness, and maybe when I started to read mathematics and science back in the mid-70s I found an unexpected lyricism in the necessarily precise language that scientists tend to use My instinct, my superstition is that the closer I see a thing and the more accurately I describe it, the better my chances of arriving at a certain sensuality of expression. — Don DeLillo

The vague is the false. — Marty Rubin

O smile, going where? O upturned look:
new, warm, receding surge of the heart
;
alas, we are that surge. Does then the
cosmic space
we dissolve in taste of us? Do the
angels
reclaim only what is theirs, their own
outstreamed existence,
or sometimes, by accident, does a bit
of us
get mixed in? Are we blended in their
features
like the slight vagueness that
complicates the looks
of pregnant women? Unnoticed by them
in their
whirling back into themselves? (How
could they notice?) — Rainer Maria Rilke

But, as we have before been led to remark, most of Mr. Darwin's statements elude, by their vagueness and incompleteness, the test of Natural History facts. — Richard Owen

What does 'United States of America' mean? That we're some states, we're united somehow, and that we're in America. America could be anywhere on the continents of North or South America, so that's not specific enough, and the part about the states doesn't narrow it down, either. Mexico has united states, too. So does Canada, except they call them provinces. It's not even a name. It's just a vague description. It's so generic, like naming a country 'Country. — Erin O'Riordan

I can't be friends with a man who blows hot and cold with the same breath. — Aesop

Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit. — John Updike

Neither the colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship, is the goal of human history. — Rabindranath Tagore

Perhaps I became so vague, so exhilarated with vagueness, precisely in order to forestall a recognition of the final term of the syllogism that begins: If one man loves another he is a homosexual; I love a man ... — Edmund White

After all we speak of people 'taking refuge' in vagueness -the more precise you are, in general the more likely you are to be wrong, whereas you stand a good chance of not being wrong if you make it vague enough. — J.L. Austin

A masterpiece of vagueness. — Kenneth Oppel

The more I read, the less I admire modern theology. the more I study the productions of the new schools of theological teachers, the more I marvel that men and women can be satisfied with such writings. There is a vagueness, a mistiness, a shallowness, an indistinctness, a superficiality, an aimlessness, a hollowness about the literature of the 'broader and kinder systems', as they are called, which to my mind stamps their origin on their face. They are of the earth, earthy. — J.C. Ryle

Haydon was more than his model, he was his inspiration, the torch-bearer of a certain kind of English calling which - for the very reason that it was vague and understated and elusive - had made sense of Guillam's life till now. — John Le Carre

She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose. — Virginia Woolf

Maybe vagueness has been good for me. The word means two different things in Tokyo and Osaka, you know. In Tokyo it means stupidity, but in Osaka they talk about vagueness in a painting and in a game of Go. — Yasunari Kawabata

[F]or a social theorist ignorance is more excusable than vagueness. Other investigators can easily show I am wrong if I am sufficiently precise. They will have much more difficulty showing by investigation what, precisely, I mean if I am vague. I hope not to be forced to weasel out with 'But I didn't really mean that.' Social theorists should prefer to be wrong rather than misunderstood. Being misunderstood shows sloppy theoretical work. — Arthur L. Stinchcombe

It is easy enough to write and talk about God while remaining comfortable within the contemporary intellectual climate. Even people who would call themselves unbelievers often use the word gesturally, as a ready-made synonym for mystery. But if nature abhors a vacuum, Christ abhors a vagueness. If God is love, Christ is love for this one person, this one place, this one time-bound and time-ravaged self. — Christian Wiman

Awhile, adv.
I love the vagueness of words that involve time. 'It took him awhile to come back'
it could be a matter of minutes or hours, days or years.
It is easy for me to say it took me awhile to know. That is about as accurate as I can get. There were sneak previews of knowing, for sure. Instance that made me feel, oh, this could be right, But the moment I shifted from a hope that needed to be proven to a certainty that would be continually challenged? There's no pinpointing that.
Perhaps it never happened. Perhaps it happened while I was asleep. Most likely, there's no signal event. There's just the steady accumulation of 'awhile'. — David Levithan

A story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes. — George Orwell

Vagueness spurred him into knight errantry. — E. M. Forster

Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness. — Sinclair Lewis

An automobile piston should be round; but this phrase means nothing unless there is a way to measure the roundness of a particular piston. — David Salsburg

In a play, certainly, the subject is of more importance than in any other work of art. Infelicity, triviality, vagueness of subject, may be outweighed in a poem, a novel, or a picture, by charm of manner, by ingenuity of execution; but in a drama the subject is of the essence of the work-it is the work. If it is feeble, the work can have no force; if it is shapeless, the work must be amorphous. — Henry James

The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race. — William James

Just, harmonious, temperate as is the spirit of liberty, there is in the name and mere notion of it a vagueness so opposite to the definite clearness of the moral law ... — Augustus William Hare

We live in a day of abounding vagueness and indistinctness on doctrinal subjects in religion. Now, if ever, it is the duty of all advocates of clear, well-defined, sharply-cut theology, to supply proof that their views are thoroughly borne out by Scripture. — J.C. Ryle

I can't write from the subconscious actually, because a lot of the time when I co-write with other people, I'm writing for them as opposed to for myself. When it comes to lyrics, I tend to want to give them their voice, since it's most likely going to be on their record, or somebody else's record. And I find for more commerial-style music, people want simplicity, less vagueness, and less space to fill between the lines, so to speak. So I can't be quite as ethereal and mystical. — Gary Louris

Life shouldn't be measured in hours for the vagueness in which they exist, but moments; moments are memorable and we could easily say that a short life filled with a stock of extraordinary memories is worth a thousand times what a long, boring and loveless one is. — Emiliano Campuzano

Over against all this cloudy vagueness stands the clear scriptural doctrine that God can be known in personal experience. A loving Personality dominates the Bible, walking among the trees of the garden and breathing fragrance over every scene. Always a living Person is present, speaking, pleading, loving, working, and manifesting Himself whenever and wherever His people have the receptivity necessary to receive the manifestation. — A.W. Tozer

When the truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head. Then, like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness. You keep studying the dim shape of it, as if the original form will magically emerge. This blank spot in my past, then, spoke most loudly to me by being blank. It was a hole in my life that I both feared and kept coming back to because I couldn't quite fill it in. — Mary Karr

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

I don't invent you
at sadly cooled-off places from which
you've gone away; even your not being there
is warm with you and more real and more
than a privation. Longing leads out too often
into vagueness. Why should I cast myself, when,
for all I know, your influence falls on me,
gently, like moonlight on a window seat. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Spiritual activity, education, civilization, culture, the idea are all vague, indefinite concepts, under the banner of which it is quite convenient to use words that have a still less clear meaning and therefore can easily be plugged into any theory. — Leo Tolstoy

We think of it as a sort of traffic accident of the heart. It is an emotion that scares us more than cruelty, more than violence, more than hatred. We allow ourselves to be foiled by the vagueness of the word. After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier? — Diane Ackerman

Such mental haziness is in order, given the delightful vagueness of the terrain. — William T. Vollmann

Our political vagueness divides men, it does not fuse them. — G.K. Chesterton

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness. — Stendhal

For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules
it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus preceding to exact rules. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people - what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. — Virginia Woolf

The writer who has a definite meaning to express will not take refuge in such vagueness. — William Strunk Jr.

This was a fight the likes of which only existed in fiction, a war that was black and white and had no vagueness in where the line was drawn. — Evan Currie

I am only conscious of any satisfaction in Scientific Reading or thinking when it rounds off into a poetical generality and vagueness. — Wilfred Owen

To live in the world of creation - to get into it and stay in it - to frequent it and haunt it - to think intently and fruitfully - to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation - this is the only thing - and I neglect it, far and away too much; from indolence, from vagueness, from inattention, and from a strange nervous fear of letting myself go. If I can vanquish that nervousness, the world is mine. — Henry James

The danger, when not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human thought. The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the dullness of exhausted emotion. — Joseph Conrad

The prophecies are not literal, Mistress," OreSeur said. "They're metaphors - expressions of hope. Or, at least, that is how I have always seen them. Perhaps your Terris prophecies are the same? Expressions of a belief that if the people were in danger, their gods would send a Hero to protect them? In this case, the vagueness would be intentional - and rational. The prophecies were never meant to mean something specific, but more to speak of a general feeling. A general hope. — Brandon Sanderson

Siebel, The Magazine has a man in a suit on the cover. He's not smiling, or frowning. He wears a beard that isn't a beard; it's a quotation from a film nobody can put their finger on. 'Customer satisfaction,' says the brochure. 'Seamless integration.' 'Comprehensive upgrade.' Of what? I want to scream. 'Solutions provider.' Siebel has solutions for questions that have not yet been asked, will never be asked.
A Sino-American businessman holds a tiny screen in his hand: 'You're always connected and always available. Some call it a revolution; others call it evolution.' Language is de-fanged, homogenised. Yellow E-tab faces leer at you. Ecstasy without frenzy. Satisfaction, whether you want it or not. — Iain Sinclair

You only demand clarity because you're too comfortable within your vagueness — Albert Camus

Anyhow, it is a definite colour: I am glad I have red hair. There is it is in the mirror, it makes itself seen, it shines. I am still lucky if my forehead was surmounted by one of those neutral heads of hair which are neither chestnut not blond, my face would be lost in vagueness, it would make me dizzy. — Jean-Paul Sartre

And he showed, using methods which would today be considered exemplary applications of systematic textual analysis but which one of his contemporary critics derided as the bean-counting mentality of "a born Chancellor of the Exchequer," that this vagueness in Homer's color descriptions was the rule, not the exception. — Guy Deutscher

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. — George Orwell

Yellow is vagueness and luminousness, both. — Alexander Theroux

For the rest, she grew used to the life that she was leading - used to the enormous sleepless nights, the cold, the dirt, the boredom, and the horrible communism of the Square. After a day or two she had ceased to feel even a flicker of surprise at her situation. She had come, like everyone about her, to accept this monstrous existence almost as though it were normal. The dazed, witless feeling that she had known on the way to the hopfields had come back upon her more strongly than before. It is the common effect of sleeplessness and still more of exposure. To live continuously in the open air, never going under a roof for more than an hour or two, blurs your perceptions like a strong light glaring in your eyes or a noise drumming in your ears. You act and plan and suffer, and yet all the while it is as though everything were a little out of focus, a little unreal. The world, inner and outer, grows dimmer till it reaches almost the vagueness of a dream. — George Orwell

A poem is never a put-up job ... It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a loneliness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness. — Robert Frost

The extreme nature of dominant-end views is often concealed by the vagueness and ambiguity of the end proposed. — John Rawls

People who have nothing much in mind for next week speak instead about the next century or millennium. — George F. Will

Science fiction rarely is about scientists doing real science, in its slowness, its vagueness, the sort of tedious quality of getting out there and digging amongst rocks and then trying to convince people that what you're seeing justifies the conclusions you're making. — Kim Stanley Robinson

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

Thinking, even when thinking is difficult, versus nonthinking Awareness, even when awareness is challenging, versus unawareness Clarity, whether or not it comes easily, versus obscurity or vagueness Respect for reality, whether pleasant or painful, versus avoidance of reality Respect for truth versus rejection of truth Independence versus dependence Active orientation versus passive orientation Willingness to take appropriate risks, even in the face of fear, versus unwillingness Honesty with self versus dishonesty Living in and being responsible to the present versus retreating into fantasy Self-confrontation versus self-avoidance Willingness to see and correct mistakes versus perseverance in error Reason versus irrationalism — Nathaniel Branden

Human relations are built on feeling, not on reason or knowledge. And feeling is not an exact science; like all spiritual qualities, it has the vagueness of greatness about it. — Amelia Barr

Vagueness is at times an indication of nearness to a perfect truth. — Charles Ives

None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error. — Bertrand Russell

Sometimes I do actually forget that the person to whom I owe that love is a real person, complete in himself, not someone who should make do with some rather diffuse emotion which gradually resigns itself to its own fatal vagueness, as if that were a fate against which there were no possible appeal ... — Jose Saramago

Political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. — George Orwell

A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people — Edgar Degas

Conventions of generality and mathematical elegance may be just as much barriers to the attainment and diffusion of knowledge as may contentment with particularity and literary vagueness ... It may well be that the slovenly and literary borderland between economics and sociology will be the most fruitful building ground during the years to come and that mathematical economics will remain too flawless in its perfection to be very fruitful. — Kenneth E. Boulding

Young Adam was always an obedient child. Something in him shrank from violence, from contention, from the silent shrieking tensions that can rip at a house. He contributed to the quiet he wished for by offering no violence, no contention, and to do this he had to retire into secretness, since there is some violence in everyone. He covered his life with a veil of vagueness, while behind his quiet eyes a rich full life went on. This did not protect him from assault but it allowed him an immunity. — John Steinbeck

Several of the inventions and discoveries which have made the modern world possible (the electric telegraph, the breech-loading gun, india-rubber, coal gas, wood-pulp paper) first appeared in Dickens's lifetime, but he scarcely notes them in his books. Nothing is queerer than the vagueness with which he speaks of Doyce's "invention" in Little Dorrit. It is represented as something extremely ingenious and revolutionary, "of great importance to his country and his fellow-creatures," and it is also an important minor link in the book; yet we are never told what the "invention" is! — George Orwell

It argued a special genius; he was clearly a case of that. The spark of fire, the point of light, sat somewhere in his inward vagueness as a lamp before a shrine twinkles in the dark perspective of a church; and while youth and early middle-age, while the stiff American breeze of example and opportunity were blowing upon it hard, had made the chamber of his brain a strange workshop of fortune. This establishment, mysterious and almost anonymous, the windows of which, at hours of highest pressure, never seemed, for starers and wonderers, perceptibly to glow, must in fact have been during certain years the scene of an unprecedented, a miraculous white-heat, the receipt for producing which it was practically felt that the master of the forge could not have communicated even with the best intentions. — Henry James

We cannot afford to have any large section of the business world in doubt whether they have broken the laws or not, and we cannot let the laws become a dead letter through vagueness. In this view it is clear that an administrative commission can render invaluable service. — John Bates Clark

Noise is the typographical error and the poorly designed page ... Ambiguity is noise. Redundancy is noise. Misuse of words is noise. Vagueness is noise. Jargon is noise. — William Zinsser

To her mind there was nothing of the infinite about Mrs. Penniman; Catherine saw her all at once, as it were, and was not dazzled by the apparition; whereas her father's great faculties seemed, as they stretched away, to lose themselves in a sort of luminous vagueness, which indicated, not that they stopped, but that Catherine's own mind ceased to follow them. — Henry James

To say that some kind of god might exist is to vivify its being with mystery. To define a god into existence because it meets certain criteria for godhood is to kill that god by turning it into a cheapjack idol with a publicity team of theologians behind it. This would explain why so many deities - all of them, in fact - have fallen apart or are in the process of doing so: eventually every god loses its mystery because it has become overqualified for its job. After a god's mystery is gone, arguments for its reality begin. Logic steps in to resuscitate what has been bled of its healthful vagueness. Finally, another "living god" is consigned to the mortuary of scholars. — Thomas Ligotti

But to my questions he gave replies so vague that one could not tell whether they came from the mountains or the sea. — Soseki Natsume

If you can't be kind, at least be vague. — Judith Martin

I love the vagueness of words that involve time. — David Levithan

The 'Little' or 'Barebones' Parliament, summoned by Oliver Cromwell to meet at Westminster on 4th July, 1653, after the dissolution of the remains of the Long Parliament, may have been an unpractical body, so far as the task of administration in troublous times was concerned. But it seems quite possible that the wealth of contumely and scorn which has been poured upon it was, originally, due quite as much to the fierce anger of vested interests against outspoken criticism, as to any real vagueness or want of practical wisdom in the plans of the House itself. — Edward Jenks

When I first took this job at the factory it was not my intention to work there very long, for I once possessed higher hopes for my life, although the exact nature of these hopes remained rather vague in my youthful mind. While the work was not arduous, and my fellow workers congenial enough, I did not imagine myself standing forever at my designated assembly block, fitting together pieces of metal into other pieces of metal, with a few interruptions throughout that day for breaks that were supposed to refresh our minds from the tedium of our work or for meal breaks to allow us to nourish our bodies. Somehow it never occurred to me that the nearby town where I and the others at the factory lived, travelling to and from our jobs along the same fog-strewn road, held no higher opportunities for me or anyone else, which no doubt accounts for the vagueness, the wispy insubstantiality, of my youthful hopes. — Thomas Ligotti

No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose. — Eudora Welty

In abandoning the vagueness of the sketch the artist shows more of his personality by revealing the range but also the limitations of his talent. — Eugene Delacroix

A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine. — Sebastian Faulks

Any useful logic must concern itself with Ideas with a fringe of vagueness and a Truth that is a matter of degree. — Norbert Wiener

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

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

It is in the early morning hour that the unseen is seen, and that the far-off beauty and glory, vanquishing all their vagueness, move down upon us till they stand clear as crystal close over against the soul. — Sarah Smiley

Pain can be vitalising; it gives intensity in the place of vagueness and emptiness. If we don't suffer, how do we know that we live? — Sebastian Horsley