Best 48 quotes in «ambiguous quotes» category

I will not attempt to describe how I got through the next few days. There are desolations of the spirit which can only be hinted at. I sat there huge-eyed in the wreck of myself.

Looking but not seeing is the hearing but not understanding of the eye.

Most thoughtful,"...[he said] politely. This cheerfulness was ambiguous, Had she determined to ignore ...[the] coup entirely--an established tactic, most irritating to the innovator but hard to sustain over long periods of time--or had she already evolved her counter-strategy?

So art becomes not communication but mystification.

What follows is ambiguous and sometimes tortuously told. Man's searchings and his strugglings are ambiguous and vowed to hidden ways. Those who live by that dark light will understand.

The more I protested about this ambiguity, the more Joanna pointed out to me that it was both a terrible and wonderful part of life: terrible because you can't count on anything for sure—like certain good health and no possibility of cancer; wonderful because no human being knows when another is going to die—no doctor can absolutely predict the outcome of a disease. The only thing that is certain is change. Joanna calls all of this 'delicious ambiguity.' 'Couldn't there be comfort and freedom in no one knowing the outcome of anything and all things being possible?' she asked. Was I convinced? Not completely. I still wanted to believe in magic thinking. But I was intrigued.

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

Every ambiguous, false, tearful, emotional exaggeration brings about that typically kitsch attitude which could be defined as "sentimentality.

All things will be ambiguous, for this is the curse of wisdom.

Ger-mans love the ambiguous word, verbal assonances as ends in themselves,vague concepts. Anglosaxons are more clear.

I don't think there is such a thing as a precise sexual orientation. I think we're all ambiguous sexually.

Happiness can be bought with a bottle of wine and has become ambiguous through overuse.

Human languages tend to be much more ambiguous than computer languages because humans are much smarter about interpreting the context.

If readers must puzzle over unfamiliar or ambiguous words, you are making them work harder than they need to.

I guess the role of art is to make something that is ambiguous and complex.

I think great art is always ambiguous and can't be pinned down.

I'm very, very attracted to morally ambiguous characters, not just pure bad guys or pure good guys.

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.

I never held Negroes to be inherently inferior. The statement in Marriage and Morals refers to environmental conditioning. I have had it withdrawn from subsequent editions because it is clearly ambiguous.

In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.

I regret having been the bearer of ambiguous tidings.

I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.

I wish everybody was just ethnically ambiguous. It would make life a lot easier.

If you've got more ambiguous characters or stock stereotypes, the plastic comes through and they don't work as well.

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

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

Like music my drawings transport us to the ambiguous world of the indeterminate.

Real politics is messy and morally ambiguous and doesn't make for a compelling thriller.

Nobody is ever just a straight up protagonist or antagonist - everybody's morally ambiguous.

Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens-usually .

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!

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.

The performances I enjoy are the ones that are hard to read or ambiguous or left-of-centre because it makes you look closer and that's what humans are like - quite mysterious creatures, hard to pinpoint.

The best characters are the ones that somehow manage to be both attractive and repulsive at the same time. If you do that, you're at the center of the universe - if you can find characters who are more ambiguous and can raise more questions than answers.

There is no such thing as one Islam. The Koran is ambiguous and Islam is not a monolithic entity.

To be a hegemon is inherently ambiguous, usually implying some mixture of dominance and legitimacy, that is, being seen as contributing global leadership in a generally benevolent manner.

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

Words are such gross machinery, so primitive and ambiguous.

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.

What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month?

You can't know if your values are being violated if you're ambiguous about what they are

As always, the soucouyant seemed more lonely than bad. Maybe that was her trick, her ability to make it so you couldn't decide if she was a monster.

Things either become unclear in a story or they're just ambiguous with no real point. So defined gray area with clarity that also works in the narrative, that's tricky.

Fancy words and ambiguous notions make you feel like your argument is valid but it exudes multiple logical fallacies, which make you continue to search for a valid point.

He sank back into his black-and-white world, his immobile world of inanimate drawings that had been granted the secret of motion, his death-world with its hidden gift of life. But that life was a deeply ambiguous life, a conjurer's trick, a crafty illusion based on an accidental property of the retina, which retained an image for a fraction of a second after the image was no longer present. On this frail fact was erected the entire structure of the cinema, that colossal confidence game. The animated cartoon was a far more honest expression of the cinematic illusion than the so-called realistic film, because the cartoon reveled in its own illusory nature, exulted in the impossible--indeed it claimed the impossible as its own, exalted it as its own highest end, found in impossibility, in the negation of the actual, its profoundest reason for being. The animated cartoon was nothing but the poetry of the impossible--therein lay its exhilaration and its secret melancholy. For this willful violation of the actual, while it was an intoxicating release from the constriction of things, was at the same time nothing but a delusion, an attempt to outwit mortality. As such it was doomed to failure. And yet it was desperately important to smash through the constriction of the actual, to unhinge the universe and let the impossible stream in, because otherwise--well, otherwise the world was nothing but an editorial cartoon.

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.

It is still cheating, even if nobody comes.

Work is a way of shutting out ambiguous sentiment.