Ambiguity Quotes

To embrace luck, you have to enhance your tolerance for ambiguity. ~ Twyla Tharp

when you hate daylight, when you hate anything, you will develop a certain ambiguity about life and you get reckless in your habits. ~ Thom Jones

I've never killed men with so little regard. And it frightens me how easy I find it in war. There is no ambiguity here, no violation of moral creed. These people are warColors. They kill me or I kill them. It's simpler than the Passage. ~ Pierce Brown

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead? ~ John Updike

But I hope that by the decision and authority of wise princes that sometime devout and learned men from the churches of other nations and of ours may be summoned together to deliberate about all the controversies and that there be handed down to posterity one harmonious, true, and clear form of doctrine, without any ambiguity. Meanwhile, as far as possible, let us encourage the union of our churches with measured advice. ~ Philipp Melanchthon

In transitions, we must learn to be still. Being still is, in part, about learning to be comfortable with ambiguity. ~ Janet Rebhan

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

It was long past time to change the subject. "The boy playing the bagpipes is really good," Prudie said.
If only she'd said it in French! Trey made a delighted noise. "Nessa Trussler. A girl. Or something."
Prudie looked at Nessa again. There was, she could see now, a certain plump ambiguity. Maybe Trey wouldn't tell anyone what she'd said. Maybe Nessa was perfectly comfortable with who she was. Maybe she was admired throughout the school for her musical ability. Maybe pigs could jig. ~ Karen Joy Fowler

Standing outside the cultural hysteria the trend is fairly clear. It is a trend toward temporal compression and the emergence of ambiguity. ~ Terence McKenna

The enemy of accountability is ambiguity ~ Patrick Lencioni

Priming works best when you are on autopilot, when you aren't trying to consciously introspect before choosing how to behave. When you are unsure how best to proceed, suggestions bubble up from the deep that are highly tainted by subconscious primes. In addition, your brain hates ambiguity and is willing to take shortcuts to remove it from any situation. If there is nothing else to go on, you will use what is available. When pattern recognition fails, you create patterns of your own. In the aforementioned experiments, there was nothing else for the brain to base its unconscious attitudes on, so it focused on the business items or the clean smells and ran with the ideas. The only problem was the conscious minds of the subjects didn't notice. ~ David McRaney

There are two management styles at the Record and a constant struggle between the two: the advocates of ambiguity, and the supporters of the more aggressive "mushroom model" (keep them in the dark, and feed them shit). ~ Amy Rowland

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

Tom said either you learn to live with paradox and ambiguity or you'll be 6 years old for the rest of your life. ~ Anne Lamott

If you judge everything by how photographically real it looks, then you're missing out on a lot of what art is about and what communication is. There are ambiguities in life, and that should be reflected in art, cinema, and storytelling, I think. ~ Ben Wheatley

I like presenting ambiguous situations. It seems to me a great part of our inner and outer lives are ambiguous, if we're honest about it. Maybe I'm a realist, in that respect. ~ Eric Basso

Such perfect incompleteness, suggestion and ambiguity are among the most valuable devices of the skilled poet, means by which the poem opens to let us in. ~ John Ciardi

No one is any longer carried away by the desire for the good to perform great things, no one is precipitated by evil into atrocious sins, and so there is nothing for either the good or the bad to talk about, and yet for that very reason people gossip all the more, since ambiguity is tremendously stimulating and much more verbose than rejoicing over goodness or repentance over evil. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

The mental mist of ambiguity and the fog of ambivalence hamper human existence. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

There is a marvelous ambiguity to the ego: on the one hand it is an ordinary part of the world, one of many things that inhabit it. It occupies space, endures through time, has physical and psychic features, and interacts causally with other things in the world: if it falls, it falls like any other body; if it is pushed, it topples over like any other thing; if treated with chemicals, it reacts like any living organism; if light rays hit its visual organs, it reacts electronically, chemically, and psychologically. 'I' am a material, organic, and psychological thing. If we were to take the self simply as one of the things in the world, we would be treating it as what can be called the empirical ego.

On the other hand, this very same self can also be played off against the world: it is the center of disclosure to whom the world and everything in it manifest themselves. It is the agent of truth, the one responsible for judgments and verifications, the perceptual and cognitive 'owner' of the world. When considered in this manner, it is no longer simply a part of the world; it is what is called the transcendental ego.

The empirical and transcendental egos are not two entities; they are one and the same being, but considered in two ways. ~ Robert Sokolowski

Every word, every gesture is now loaded with ambiguity, nothing can be taken at face value. We speak to each other from a safe distance, pretending all the years we soaped each other's backs and pissed in front of each other never happened. We don't use any of the baby talk, code words, or short hand gestures that had been our language of intimacy, the proof that we belonged to each other. ~ Amy Tan

We live in times that are in many ways ambiguous. Maybe that's why kids want precision in what they read - they don't like that moral ambiguity. ~ Lois Lowry

The South African artist William Kentridge speaks to this type of certainty: 'To say that one needs art, or politics, that incorporate ambiguity and contradiction is not to say that one then stops recognizing and condemning things as evil. However, it might stop one being so utterly convinced of the certainty of one's own solutions. There needs to be a strong understanding of fallibility and how the very act of certainty or authoritativeness can bring disasters.'
The outcome of the current crisis is already determined. ~ Nick Flynn

Spectrums (...) One of the reasons Im so fond of spectrums is because I believe, with fearce tenacity, that *nothing* in this world is black and white.
Spectrums embrace gray spaces, ambiguity, and fluidity. Since these are all concepts which are integral to the human experience, I find spectrums particularly helpfull in understanding and describing identity.
(...) as we learn about various identities, it's important we recognize they are not "all or nothing" concepts. Many identities can exist in various degrees and come in a range of possibilities. Remembering this is incredibly crucial as we progress. ~ Ashley Mardell

So great are the psychological restistances to war in modern nations, that every war must appear to be a war of defence against a menacing, murderous aggressor. There must be no ambiguity about whom the public is to hate. Guilt and guilelessness must be assessed geographically and all the guilt must be on the other side of the frontier. ~ Harold Lasswell

Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality. ~ Theodor W. Adorno

There are some who question the relevance of space activities in a developing nation. To us, there is no ambiguity of purpose. We do not have the fantasy of competing with the economically advanced nations in the exploration of the moon or the planets or manned space-flight. But we are convinced that if we are to play a meaningful role nationally, and in the community of nations, we must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to the real problems of man and society. ~ Vikram Sarabhai

One of the jobs of a writer is to add nuance and ambiguity to that straight line that people often draw to very specific kinds of heroism. Most of us don't get to be Snooki. For most of us heroism has to be in our everyday lives. ~ John Green

If it doesn't have ambiguity, don't bother to take it. I love that, that aspect of photography - the mendacity of photography - it's got to have some kind of peculiarity in it or it's not interesting to me. ~ Sally Mann

To put it simply, we need to keep the arts in education because they instill in students the habits of mind that last a lifetime: critical analysis skills, the ability to deal with ambiguity and to solve problems, perseverance and a drive for excellence. Moreover, the creative skills children develop through the arts carry them toward new ideas, new experiences, and new challenges, not to mention personal satisfaction. This is the intrinsic value of the arts, and it cannot be overestimated. ~ Rod Paige

Ambiguity is not, today, a lack of data, but a deluge of data. ~ Paul Gibbons

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

It wasn't the intention to do something important, or to even relate about social issues. The ground is so fertile in the justice world, dealing with the death penalty and the Innocence Project, for characters that have a moral ambiguity, which we were both attracted to. It's the idea that everybody has their reasons. Whatever their actions are, whether you agree with them or not, you can understand why they're feeling that way, in terms of racism or even the death penalty. ~ Richard LaGravenese

Early in my career, a critic said that I needed to "explain" the irony in my work, suggesting that I needed to add text next to the images to help people understand what I was trying to say. At first I was dismayed that I wasn't making work with a clear enough message. That's when I realized that that was the exact opposite of what I wanted to do - that I wasn't responsible for a misinterpretation of my work, that there should be some ambiguity to it. They either got it, or they didn't. ~ Cindy Sherman

Oftentimes I deliberately put ambiguity into my books so that ... the reader is left with an echo of: 'How much of this was from me?' ~ Mohsin Hamid

It's a language I've come to hate, because it admits no mystery and no ambiguity into its smug vocabulary, which arrogantly suggests that everything can be known. ~ Siri Hustvedt

[To the masculine lover] Without a deep sense of purpose to direct your daily life, you will be directed by externals-financial need, your children's needs, your lover's needs-and you will begin to blame them for your lack of fulfillment. You will feel trapped in obligations, and your resentments will show. You will hold back in your relationships with your lover and family, not really wanting to be there, unsure what else to do, mired in ambiguity, guilt, and anger. Your actions will lack integrity and follow-through. Your feminine lover won't be able to trust you in everyday life or open to you sexually. [Pg 121] ~ David Deida

A blur of great magic is still just a blur. ~ Ken Weber

Stories start in all sorts of places. Where they begin often tells the reader of what to expect as they progress. Castles often lead to dragons, country estates to deeds of deepest love (or of hate), and ambiguously presented settings usually lead to equally as ambiguous characters and plot, leaving a reader with an ambiguous feeling of disappointment. That's one of the worst kinds. ~ Rebecca McKinsey

Vagina Warriors are done being victims. They know no one is coming to rescue them. They would not want to be rescued. They have experienced their rage, depression, desire for revenge, and they have transformed them through grieving and service. They have confronted the depth of their darkness. They live in their bodies. They are community makers. They bring everyone in. They have a keen ability to live with ambiguity. They can hold two opposite thoughts at the same time. ~ Eve Ensler

My heart tells me to stop right here, to offer quiet benediction and call it the end. But the truth won't allow it. Because there is no end, happy or otherwise. Nothing is fixed, nothing solved. the facts, such as they are, finally spin off into the void of things missing, the inconclusiveness of us. Who are we? Where do we go? The ambiguity may be dissatisfying, even irritating, but this is a love story. There is no tidiness. Blame it on the human heart. One way or another, it seems, we all perform vanishing tricks, effacing history, locking up our lives and slipping day by day into the graying shadows. Our whereabouts are uncertain. All secrets lead to the dark, and beyond teh dark there is only maybe. ~ Tim O'Brien

Men of today seem to feel more acutely than ever the paradox of their condition. They know themselves to be the supreme end to which all action should be subordinated, but the exigencies of action force them to treat one another as instruments or obstacles, as means. The more widespread their mastery of the world, the more they find themselves crushed by uncontrollable forces. Though they are masters of the atomic bomb, yet it is created only to destroy them. Each one has the incomparable taste in his mouth of his own life, and yet each feels himself more insignificant than an insect within the immense collectivity whose limits are one with the earth's. Perhaps in no other age have they manifested their grandeur more brilliantly, and in no other age has this grandeur been so horribly flouted. In spite of so many stubborn lies, at every moment, at every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each man and all men. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

The Japanese, if I understand them, are masters of the unsaid and the unstated, of subtlety and ambiguity, all of which constitute powerful stimulants to the imagination. ~ Semir Zeki

I think there is a commitment on the part of the White House to racial justice in this country, and no ambiguity. ~ Richard Lugar

To remember that and the white look of the lavatory made him feel cold and then hot. There were two cocks that you turned and water came out: cold and hot. He felt cold and then a little hot: and he could see the names printed on the cocks. That was a very queer thing. ~ James Joyce

One of hallmarks of a creative person is the ability to tolerate ambiguity, dissonance, inconsistency, things out of place. But one of the rules of a well-run corporation is that surprise is to be minimized. Yet if this rule were applied to the creative process, nothing worth reading would get written, nothing worth seeing would get painted, nothing worth living with and using would ever get designed. ~ Ralph Caplan

Oh, please," said Hessler. "It's your standard false duality designed to draw gullible believers into a world of monochromatic enemies and strip away any moral ambiguity - usually utilized by the ruling government to bolster whatever policies it wishes to implement. ~ Patrick Weekes

Irene sighed. "...But I do believe the Library wants an answer to what`s happened. Why else would they call you in?"
" An answer, certainly," Vale agreed. " But the truth? That might be a very dangerous commodity. ~ Genevieve Cogman

It is easy to forget that the most important aspect of comedy, after all, its great saving grace, is its ambiguity. You can simultaneously laugh at a situation, and take it seriously. ~ Stephen Fry

The Russian proposal over Iran's uranium enrichment program is considerable, but it has some problems and ambiguities to be clarified in future talks. ~ Ali Larijani

Life is easier in black and white. It's the ambiguity of a world defined in grays that has stripped me of my confidence and left me powerless. ~ Amy Plum

Political activists rarely like fiction of any kind. Literature is about ambiguity, mixed emotions, and guilty pleasures. Politics is about ideals and action. ~ Christopher Bram

In any case, once you're dealing on a nonverbal level, ambiguity is unavoidable. But it's the ambiguity of all art, of a fine piece of music or a painting - you don't need written instructions by the composer or painter accompanying such works to 'explain' them. "Explaining" them contributes nothing but a superficial 'cultural' value which has no value except for critics and teachers who have to earn a living. ~ Stanley Kubrick

It seems to me that this dialectic, this ambiguity, this contradiction of the clichés of our mental life and the images of lived life is really the subject of all my films. ~ Agnes Varda

In the ambiguity and shifting playing field of adult life, I often wish I could just fill in a dot and have someone say "Yes" and hand me a chicken leg, or "No" and slap me with an old fish. ~ Rob Delaney

Mann is widely recognized as a master of irony and ambiguity, yet it's remarkable how quickly people foreclose options he carefully leaves open. Lots of readers - including eminent critics - jump to conclusions: that Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy is a central background text, that Aschenbach is an inferior writer, that he's never been attracted by pubescent male beauty before, that he dies of cholera. ~ Philip Kitcher

Business today is about making decisions amid ambiguity. ~ Geraldine Laybourne

The loudness of tone in Jane Eyre is undoubtedly effective in communicating tension and frustration, but the style does of course have its related limitations. It precludes the use of the small suggestive detail or the quiet but telling observation that Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot are so good at. In such a fortissimo performance
as this, the pianissimo gets drowned out, or noted only as an incongruity (which helps to account for the book's moments of unintended comic bathos). Again, it makes the whole question of modulation of tone a difficult one,6 and it is also hard to manage irony elegantly, as the Brocklehurst and Ingram portraits show.
There is unconscious ambiguity but little deliberate irony in Jane Eyre. Hence the remarkable unity of critical interpretation of the book - the reader knows all too well what he is meant to think about the heroine and the subsidiary characters. The novel does not merely request our judicious sympathy for the heroine, it demands
that we see with her eyes, think in her terms, and hate her enemies, not just intermittently (as in David Copperfield) but in toto. It was, incidentally, because James Joyce recognised the similar tendency of Stephen Hero that he reshaped his autobiographical material as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, retaining the 'first-person effect' but building in stylistic and structural
irony that would guard against the appearance of wholesale authorial endorsement of Stephen. ~ Ian Gregor

The obvious matters are more imperceptible today. ~ Pawan Mishra

You will find ambiguity a great ally on your road to power. Give a sign of Slytherin on one day, and contradict it with a sign of Gryffindor the next; and the Slytherins will be enabled to believe what they wish, while the Gryffindors argue themselves into supporting you as well. So long as there is uncertainty, people can believe whatever seems to be to their own advantage. And so long as you appear strong, so long as you appear to be winning, their instincts will tell them that their advantage lies with you. Walk always in the shadow, and light and darkness both will follow. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

The acceptance of ambiguity implies more than the commonplace understanding that some good things and some bad things happen to us. It means that we know that good and evil are inextricably intermixed in human affairs; that they contain, and sometimes embrace, their opposites; that success may involve failure of a different kind, and failure may be a kind of triumph. ~ Sydney J. Harris

Writing is so much more problematic than drawing, full of moral pitfalls, ambiguity, public responsibility. If you record a day of your life, does the decision to do so change the shape of the day? One of Doris Lessing's days in The Golden Notebook is fifty-four pages long. It's complete; the rest are summaries - the "impression" of a day foisted artfully upon the reader by providing a few details. Fiction is made this way - as lineal perspective gives the illusion of three dimensions in drawing. But does the selection of a day - that you begin by knowing you must remember and observe - really affect it? Do you change the balance, distort the truth? The period itself, its choice and selection, does that not in itself constitute a kind of misconstruction, and the rest follow subconsciously? ~ Kate Millett

It is the very strangeness of nature that makes science engrossing. That ought to be at the center of science teaching. There are more than seven-times-seven types of ambiguity in science, awaiting analysis. The poetry of Wallace Stevens is crystal-clear alongside the genetic code. ~ Lewis Thomas

A woman of faith is fearless. There is no ambiguity, no uncertain trump in her life. She can live a principled life because she studies the doctrine and teachings of a perfect teacher, the Master. She is a noble example to all who know her. ~ Margaret D. Nadauld

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

That was the problem ... with trusting to the written word ... We were human, mortal and fallible. We forgot, we made errors, argued ambiguities, and twisted meanings to suit our own ends.
And in doing so, mayhap we reshaped the gods themselves. ~ Jacqueline Carey

At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation. But their attempt to lie to us is in vain. Cowardice does not pay. Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they would like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

He has explained why it is that ambiguity touches his heart more nearly than the death and marriage style of finish that i prefer. ~ Diane Setterfield

I had to learn to get comfortable in a role of ambiguity where I had to seek out advisers and learn quickly. ~ Brian Chesky

All the scientist creates in a fact is the language in which he enunciates it. If he predicts a fact, he will employ this language, and for all those who can speak and understand it, his prediction is free from ambiguity. Moreover, this prediction once made, it evidently does not depend upon him whether it is fulfilled or not. ~ Henri Poincare

Parnet: I want you to talk about desire. What is desire, exactly? Let's consider the question as simply as possible. When Anti-Oedipus...

Deleuze: It's not what they thought it was, in any case, not what they thought it was, even back then. Even, I mean, the most charming people who were... It was a big ambiguity, it was a big misunderstanding, or rather a little one, a little misunderstanding. I believe that we wanted to say something very simple. In fact, we had an enormous ambition, notably when one writes a book, we thought that we would say something new, specifically that one way or another, people who wrote before us didn't understand what desire meant. That is, in undertaking our task as philosophers, we were hoping to propose a new concept of desire. But, regarding concepts, people who don't do philosophy mustn't think that they are so abstract... On the contrary, they refer to things that are extremely simple, extremely concrete, we'll see this later... There are no philosophical concepts that do not refer to non-philosophical coordinates. It's very simple, very concrete. What we wanted to express was the simplest thing in the world. We wanted to say: up until now, you speak abstractly about desire because you extract an object that's presumed to be the object of your desire. So, one could say, I desire a woman, I desire to leave on a trip, I desire this, that. And we were saying something really very simple, simple, simple: You never desire someone or so ~ Gilles Deleuze

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

Copenhagen interpretation Niels Bohr's combination of instrumentalism, anthropocentrism and studied ambiguity, used to avoid understanding quantum theory as being about reality. ~ David Deutsch

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. ~ Gilda Radner

Accepting that the world is full of uncertainty and ambiguity does not and should not stop people from being pretty sure about a lot of things. ~ Julian Baggini

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

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

Among all the complaints you hear these days about the crimes of the media, it seems to me the critics miss the big one. It is that especially TV, but also we of the print press, tend to reduce mess and complexity and ambiguity to a simple story line that doesn't reflect reality so much as it distorts it ... What bothers me about the journalistic tendency to reduce unmanageable reality to self-contained, movielike little dramas is not just that we falsify when we do this. It is also that we really miss the good story. ~ Meg Greenfield

You cannot grow in the integrative dance of action and contemplation without a strong tolerance for ambiguity, an ability to allow, forgive, and contain a certain degree of anxiety, and a willingness to not know-and not even need to know. This ever widens and deepens your perspective. This is how you allow and encounter Mystery and move into the contemplative zone. ~ Richard Rohr

For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work. ~ Don DeLillo

I have written a couple of screenplays for studios, and each time has been less gratifying than the last. In my experience, they want no real representations of homosexuality, they want no complexity, they are terrified of ambiguity and unanswered questions - they don't know what they want, except that they want to make lots of money. The only freedom I've ever had as an artist has been in the theatre ... ~ Craig Lucas

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

Even though I want to expand the number of ways in which skilful ironic play happens, I suspect I'm probably guilty of the same shortcoming - and I hope that, one of these days, someone will claim that my book, while it goes in a salutary expansive direction, doesn't go far enough, that there are assumptions I make that show I've missed aspects of Mann's irony and ambiguity. ~ Philip Kitcher

Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner private quality, may well be part of the writer's vision. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

But the recurrent ambiguity of the American tale of the supernatural reveals both a fascination
with the possibility of numinous experience and a perplexity about whether there was, in fact, anything numinous to be experienced. Writers often delighted in leading readers into, but not out of, the haunted dusk of the borderland. ~ Howard Kerr

Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you'll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won't get started. It requires a lovely balance. ~ Richard Hamming

I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain ending - an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism at bay. ~ William Kentridge

How it hurts to dream, to promise, to think when you have absolutely nothing in hand. When the future is looming only by its ambiguity leaving you distressed, afraid of your destiny.. Where to go and how to know.. That suspense is serving its mystery. Let it be not my misery, I already have that anxiety void of any tranquility. ~ Noha Alaa El-Din

Okay, good." He leaned down and kissed my cheek, almost as an afterthought. I had no idea what possessed him to do that - honestly I didn't think he had it in him. His bravery didn't last long, though. Once he realized what he'd done, his face became a mask of terr. "Oh shit! I'm sorry! I wasn't thinking-"

I laughed. The look in the poor guy's eyes... I couldn't help it. "Relax, Svobo. It's just a peck on the cheek. It's nothing to get worked up about."

"R-Right. Yeah."

I put my hand on the nape of his neck, pulled his head to mine, and kissed him full on the lips. A good, long kiss with no ambiguity. When we disengaged, he looked hopelessly confused.
"Now, that," I said. "That you can get worked up about. ~ Andy Weir

Studies have found that creative people have an especially high tolerance for ambiguity. I suspect this holds true for places of genius as well. Cities such as Athens and Florence and Edinburgh created atmospheres that accepted, and even celebrated, ambiguity. ~ Eric Weiner

Occasionally, the whole class struggle may be summed up in the struggle for one word against another word. Certain words struggle amongst themselves as enemies. Other words are the site of an ambiguity: the stake in a decisive but undecided battle ~ Louis Althusser

I began dividing life in absolutes ... Things and people were either perfectly bad, or perfectly good, and when life didn't obey this black-and-white rule, when things or people were complex or contradictory, I pretended otherwise. I turned every defeat into a disaster, every success into an epic triumph, and separated all people into heroes or villains. Unable to bear ambiguity, I built a barricade of delusions against it. ~ J.R. Moehringer

If it can be verified, we don't need faith ... Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

Jerry Hirshberg, in his book The Creative Priority: Putting Innovation to Work in Your Business, writes, No one in a corporation deliberately sets out to stifle creative thought. Yet, a traditional bureaucratic structure, with its need for predictability, linear logic, conformance to accepted norms, and the dictates of the most recent "long-range" vision statement, is a nearly perfect idea-killing machine. People in groups regress toward the security of the familiar and the well-regulated. Even creative people do it. It's easier. It avoids the ambiguity, the fear of unpredictability, the threat of the unfamiliar, and the messiness of intuition and human emotion. ~ John C. Maxwell

The woman hangs from the 13th floor window crying for
the lost beauty of her own life. She sees the
sun falling west over the grey plane of Chicago.
She thinks she remembers listening to her own life
break loose, as she falls from the 13th floor
window on the east side of Chicago, or as she
climbs back up to claim herself again. ~ Joy Harjo

Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. It's the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences. ~ Terence McKenna

Teams have to eliminate ambiguity and interpretation when it comes to success ~ Patrick Lencioni

These include the beliefs that the primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that in fact human judgment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts. ~ Neil Postman

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

It stung this new rejection, but it was also a relief to put an end to the ambiguity and incertitude. I had been deceiving myself the day I decided I could master the art of detachment, or maybe the mistake was to allow things to go on in that vein for as long as they had. ~ Catherine Sanderson