Ambiguity Quotes

The goal is to live a full, productive life even with all that ambiguity. No matter what happens, whether the cancer never flares up again or whether you die, the important thing is that the days that you have had you will have lived.
Gilda Radner

Life, Live, Important

Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.
Sigmund Freud

Tolerate, Inability, Neurosis

I have always felt that a woman has the right to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity until, perhaps, she passes into the realm of over ninety. Then it is better she be candid with herself and with the world.
Carl Sandburg

Age, Woman, Treat

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

Life, Writing, Ambiguous

On the road from the City of Skepticism, I had to pass through the Valley of Ambiguity.
Adam Smith

Through, Road, City

The warning message we sent the Russians was a calculated ambiguity that would be clearly understood.
Alexander Haig

Message, Understood, Clearly

All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard.
Edward Norton

Fun, Hard, Characters

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

War, Easy, Times

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

Time, Become, Tell

If I take refuge in ambiguity, I assure you that it's quite conscious.
Kingman Brewster, Jr.

Quite, Conscious, Refuge

Take advantage of the ambiguity in the world. Look at something and think what else it might be.
Roger von Oech

Else, Might, Advantage

There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words.
Thomas Reid

Knowledge, Words, Greater

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

Great, Try, Happened

Widespread state control over art and culture has left no room for freedom of expression in the country. For more than 60 years, anyone with a dissenting opinion has been suppressed. Chinese art is merely a product: it avoids any meaningful engagement. There is no larger context. Its only purpose is to charm viewers with its ambiguity.
Ai Weiwei

Art, Freedom, Control

Perhaps where text slides toward ambiguity, film inclines to specificity. A novel contains as many versions of itself as it has readers, whereas a film's final cut vaporizes every other way it might have been made.
David Mitchell

Made, Film, Might

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

Love, Positive, Dad

Ambiguity in directors is a hard thing to deal with.
Skeet Ulrich

Hard, Deal, Directors

I think whenever people talk about the 'Anna Sui woman,' they're talking about someone that's probably kind of more downtown, and there's always like this ambiguity: Is she a good girl, or a bad girl?
Anna Sui

Good, Girl, Bad

Ambiguity depletes as your budget rises.
Tony Gilroy

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

Work, Same, Easy

The result is - document destruction - we're really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that we're going to come to. There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.
David Kay

Positive, Truth, Here

Ambiguity is necessary in some of my stories, not in all. In those, it certainly contributes to the richness of the story. I doubt that thematic closure is never attainable.
Gene Wolfe

Doubt, Story, Necessary

The Butcher Boy is a very great novel indeed and a very important Irish novel. The ambiguity of that is, he's writing a book about an appalling situation and he does it in a hilarious way.
Stephen Rea

Great, Important, Book

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

Writing, Different, Far

My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity.
Kenzaburo Oe

Country, Two, After

Naturally, the reader has access only to the events I show and the way I show them, but as has been said, there's generally a good deal of ambiguity in that presentation.
John M. Ford

Good, Said, Show

People ask me if I left the lyrics open to ambiguity. Of course I did. I wanted to make a whole series of complex statements. The lyrics had to do with the state of society at the time.
Don McLean

Time, Society, Wanted

The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.
Scott Turow

Purpose, Present, Complexity

One of my favourite films is called 'Lacombe Lucien,' directed by Louis Malle. The lead character in that film, like the lead characters in many '70s and '80s films, has a moral ambiguity to him.
Joe Cornish

Character, Him, Moral

Men tend to try to struggle to be more rational and reduce things to simplicity more and are more impatient with ambiguity than women are.
John Crowley

Women, Men, Struggle

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Mahatma Gandhi

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