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Ambiguous Quotes

Browse 226 quotes about Ambiguous.

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Ambiguous Quotes

“I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”

KnowsShouldWellsBookPartyHalfFamilyFantasyKnowingDrinkDeserveRingsBeerNovelistsFellowshipDeservingAmbiguousFunny FriendFrodoFellowship Of The RingFrodo BagginsLiking SomeoneLord Of The RingGreat HobbitI Liked You
Book:The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings
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“Altruism is for those who can't endure their desires. There's a world as ambiguous as a moan, a pleasure moan our earnest neighbors might think a crime. It's where we could live. I'll say I love you, Which will lead, of course, to disappointment, but those words unsaid poison every next moment. I will try to disappoint you better than anyone else has. --Mon Semblable”

ThinkingWorldTryingMomentsMightDesireCoursesNextPleasureLove YouCrimeEndureDisappointmentNeighborPoisonAltruismEarnestDisappointAmbiguousSay I Love YouUnsaid
Book:New and Selected Poems 1974-1994
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“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.”

PeopleIfsHumansMeanTwoDifferentStatesCoursesDifferencesViewsInstanceInterpretationSequenceAmbiguityHuman RelationshipsAmbiguousDifferent InterpretationsDiffering Views
Author:Elliot Perlman
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“Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen.”

PeopleEyeFacesLyingBoysFailingAirExpressionGloryFourteenAmbiguousCushionsMost RomanticAsphalt
Book:The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works
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“It is great good health to believe as the Hindus do that there are 33 million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to want to understand one s dreams. It is great good health to desire the ambiguous and paradoxical. It is sickness of the profoundest kind to believe that there is one reality. There is sickness in any piece of work or any piece of art seriously attempting to suggest that the idea that there is more than one reality is somehow redundant.”

WorldWantBelieveKindArtIdeasDreamRealityDesireMillionsPiecesSicknessGoddessAttemptingGood HealthAmbiguousParadoxicalRedundantGods And Goddesses
Author:Clive Barker
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“I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internal, and double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely mysterious even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike "identity", must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest ("gay", "black", "Muslim", whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity.”

ThinkingFeelsMindPassionBlackPiecesIdentityGayIntellectualAspectVictimPropertyComplexesExtraordinaryOneselfMysteriousComplexityInternalsAmbiguousVulgarity
Author:Philip Pullman
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“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.”

PeopleMenDifferentViewsOpinionPositionIdealsNobleTendenciesCherishStanding OutLoftyPrevailingAmbiguousFear Nothing
Book:I Have a Dream: The Quotations of Martin Luther King, Jr
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“and in that recurring dream, I found myself trapped in some sort of gigantic game of which I was unfamiliar with the rules; lost in a labyrinthine town of dark and damp, criss-crossing streets, ambiguous characters of uncertain authority having no idea of why I was there nor what I had to do, and where the first sign of the beginning of understanding was the wish to die.”

FirstsIdeasCharacterDreamDiesFoundGamesLostWishUnderstandingDarkStreetsAuthorityTownsNo IdeaTrappedUncertainCrossingsUnfamiliarAmbiguousDampRecurringWish To DieCrossing The StreetRecurring Dreams
Author:Franz Kafka
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“Whenever I allow anything but tenderness and compassion to dictate my response to life--be it self-righteous anger, moralizing, defensiveness, the pressing need to change others...I am alienated from my true self. My identity as Abba's child [a child of God] becomes ambiguous, tentative and confused”

NeedsChildrenSelfLife IsCompassionIdentityResponseConfusedRighteousTendernessTrue SelfChild Of GodNeed A ChangeAmbiguousSelf RighteousAbbaDefensivenessMoralizingRighteous Anger
Author:Brennan Manning
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“There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.”

WorldLooksChildrenTwoImportantIdeasRealSidesLinesGenerationsRocksWallAdultsBuiltMereSevenBoundariesClimbsOver ItGatesGeometryAmbiguous
Book:The Dispossessed
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“It has been said that the myth is a public dream, dreams are private myths. Unfortunately we give our mythic side scant attention these days. As a result, a great deal escapes us and we no longer understand our own actions. So it remains important and salutary to speak not only of the rational and easily understood, but also of enigmatic things: the irrational and the ambiguous. To speak both privately and publicly.”

GivingHas BeensSaidImportantDreamActionSpeakSidesResultsDealsAttentionUnderstoodRemainsMythRationalThese DaysIrrationalAmbiguousEnigmatic
Author:Mary Zimmerman
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“A chess problem is genuine mathematics, but it is in some way "trivial" mathematics. However, ingenious and intricate, however original and surprising the moves, there is something essential lacking. Chess problems are unimportant. 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.”

IfsWayWellsMeanImportantProblemBeautifulMovingScienceSeriousEssentialsOriginalsMathematicsSurpriseChessGenuineSurprisingLackingUnimportantIntricateIngeniousAmbiguous
Author:G. H. Hardy
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“Science now finds itself in paradoxical strife with society: admired but mistrusted; offering hope for the future but creating ambiguous choice; richly supported yet unable to fulfill all its promise; boasting remarkable advances but criticized for not serving more directly the goals of society.”

ScienceChoicesHopeGoalPromiseFutureCreatingCriticismRemarkableServingOfferingStrifeBoastAmbiguousParadoxicalHope For The Future
Book:How to Win the Nobel Prize
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“Eva is a story of repetition. It is a story where our protagonist faces the same situation many times over and determinedly picks himself back up again. It is a story of the will to move forward, even if only a little. It is a story of the resolve to want to be together, even though it is frightening to have contact with others and endure ambiguous loneliness. I would be most gratified if you found enjoyment in these four parts as it takes the same story and metamorphoses it into something different.”

IfsWantLittlesDifferentStoriesWould BeTogetherFacesMovingFoundSituationFourLonelinessPicksEndureContactMoving ForwardEnjoymentResolveFrighteningRepetitionAmbiguousMetamorphosisProtagonists
Author:Hideaki Anno
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“Bertrand Russell said, 'Electricity is not a thing like St. Paul's Cathedral; it is a way in which things behave.' And it's not 'they' who say, but Walter Benjamin who said, 'Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness, with the base and the banal.' In September, 1940, Benjamin died under ambiguous circumstances in the French-Spanish border town of Portbou, while attempting to flee the Nazis.”

WorldWaySaidEventsCircumstancesDiedTownsHistoricalBordersBehaveSeptemberNothingnessElectricityNaziGlancesCostumesAttemptingCathedralsAmbiguousHistorical Events
Author:Mary Jo Bang
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“As a gender variant visual artist I access 'technologies of gender' in order to amplify rather than erase the hermaphroditic traces of my body. I name myself. A gender abolitionist. A part time gender terrorist. An intentional mutation and intersex by design, (as opposed to diagnosis), in order to distinguish my journey from the thousands of intersex individuals who have had their 'ambiguous' bodies mutilated and disfigured in a misguided attempt at 'normalization'. I believe in crossing the line as many times as it takes to build a bridge we can all walk across.”

BelieveBodyArtistOrderNamesIndividualI BelieveLinesWalksTechnologyJourneyDesignI Believe InGenderAccessTerroristBridgesVisualsEraseCrossingsDiagnosisAmbiguousMisguidedVisual ArtMy JourneyPart TimeMutationAmplifyAbolitionistVisual ArtistCrossing The LineIntersex
Author:Del LaGrace Volcano
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“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.”

IfsDoeImportantReasonLife IsAddDetermineFinishedAcquireSincereJustifiedMaximumAmbiguousSuspended
Book:P.P.P., Pier Paolo Pasolini: Pier Paolo Pasolini and Death
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“The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudoevents, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century-sex and paranoia.”

WorldReasonDreamMovingGivenSexTechnologyOur LivesCenturyCommunicationBirthDrinkWeaponsAdvertisingLandscapeRealmsNightmareNuclear WeaponsTwins20th CenturyPornographyParanoiaAmbiguousSinisterCoexistSoft Drinks
Author:J. G. Ballard
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“It has been my experience that competency in mathematics, both in numerical manipulations and in understanding its conceptual foundations, enhances a person's ability to handle the more ambiguous and qualitative relationships that dominate our day-to-day financial decision-making”

PersonsHas BeensSuccessUnderstandingAbilityDecisionBusinessSelf ImprovementMathematicsFoundationFinancialHandleFinanceDecision MakingManipulationBusiness SuccessDay To DayAccountingAmbiguousCompetenciesQualitative
Author:Alan Greenspan
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“Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”

MindMadeSelfBodyUsedNaturalDifferencesCenturyLateMachinesDevelopingDistinctionArtificialOrganismsMind And BodyTwentieth CenturyLivelyAmbiguousCyborg
Author:Donna J. Haraway
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“A map in the hands of a pilot is a testimony of a man's faith in other men; it is a symbol of confidence and trust. It is not like a printed page that bears mere words, ambiguous and artful, and whose most believing reader - even whose author, perhaps - must allow in his mind a recess for doubt. A map says to you, 'Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.' It says, 'I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.”

MenMindBelieveHandsEarthLostDoubtBearsReaderPagesMereSymbolsMapsPilotsTestimonyPalmsPrintedFollow MeAmbiguousRecessDoubt Me
Book:West with the Night
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