Top 55 Ambiguity Quotes

Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.

Ambiguity depletes as your budget rises.

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.

The awareness of the ambiguity of one’s highest achievements (as well as one’s deepest failures) is a definite symptom of maturity.

I think Westerns are always so great for clearing out the clutter and the ambiguities, and getting right to the broad strokes of that kind of situation.

The main business of a lawyer is to take the romance, the mystery, the irony, the ambiguity out of everything he touches.

I like ambiguity because you may be the villain in someone else’s story and the hero in your own, and I think very often, African-American characters are either one thing or the other. You shouldn’t have to be perfectly good or perfectly bad. You don’t even have to be magical.

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.

I’m inspired by Prince on every level; the whole androgynous thing, the ambiguity in his gender and his foundation – it’s amazing. That’s the way I think about clothes, in relation to my personality and my life. It’s just an extension of who I am, like a song.

The spiritual ambiguity growing up made me really latch onto a faith – Protestantism – that was somewhat conventional. Everyone else was rebelling against traditions and institutions, whereas I was rebelling against the upheaval and uncertainty in my family.

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.

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.

You can have ambiguity in television that you are not allowed in film… at least in Hollywood studio films.

‘Apocalypse Now’ poses questions without any attempt to provide definitive answers, and the film’s profound ambiguities are integral to its enduring magic.

The position is clear – there is no ambiguity in Sinn Fein’s position. We, along with all the other parties, have signed up to a reduced rate of corporation tax of 12.5 % by 2018.

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.

Ambiguity is very interesting in writing; it’s not very interesting in science.

Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity.

I keep trying to write happy endings, but my books always end on more of a bittersweet note of ambiguity.

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.

In my view, statutory ambiguities are less like dandelions on an unmowed lawn than they are like manufacturing defects in a modern automobile: they happen, but they are pretty rare, given the number of parts involved.

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.

A lot of my music has ambiguity and room for people to interpret.

Ambiguity is something that I really respond to. I like the complexity of it.

What’s been lost is allowing cinema to be artful, playful, to have ambiguity, to have form, to be contemplative, to wish to be art. This slightly timeless approach to reality, like Chekhov in literature, where you look at all humanity and try to find what’s transcendent.

There is something special about the beauty in the unclear, the ambiguity, the in-between that you can’t totally recognise.

There’s a lot of ambiguity in life, and so often, our art is very neatly wrapped up at the end, when our lives never feel that way.

Don’t expect ambiguities, hesitations or palace intrigues from me.

I look for ambiguity when I’m writing because life is ambiguous.

In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word.

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

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.

We British and Americans have never been conquered and occupied by the Germans, or forced to make the choice between defiance and collaboration, or haunted by the choices, evasions and moral ambiguities that only a defeated and occupied country can feel.

As we wrestle with questions of identity, we imitate those actions we think best fill an ambiguity we have within ourselves. And that goes for everyone; no one is free from this condition.

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.

I think what human beings need is to be able to laugh at the absurd, hold on to ambiguity, and learn to love nuance, instead of making everything one or the other, and structurally, so much of the Internet and online publishing doesn’t have room for any of that.

All my novels are about the ambiguities that lie beneath the sharp edges of the law.

Ambiguity around ambiguity is forgivable in an unpublished poet and expected of an arts student on the pull: for a professional comedian demoting himself to the role of ‘thinker’, with stadiums full of young people hanging on his every word, it won’t really do.

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

I loathe categorization. I cherish my independence, and I treasure chivalry. I live just fine with ambiguity, and I welcome a good quarrel about all things designed or grown – except for when men misnomer ‘confident’ with ‘poised’ and ‘passionate’ with ‘feisty.’ I work hard.

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.

It’s really easy to make a movie that five people understand. It’s really hard to make something that a lot of people understand and yet is not obvious, still has subtlety and ambiguity, and leaves you with something to do as a viewer.

The Internet is a giant ‘lab experiment’ for corporate America, and those companies that recognise this and play well within the rules of ambiguity and fluidity will survive and win.

If I take refuge in ambiguity, I assure you that it’s quite conscious.

It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.

Ambiguity is our permanent state, isn’t it? We don’t like it being so. Most of us crave order and routine, and yet yawning before us is our future, as frightening as it is thrilling.

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.

I’m a participant in the doctrine of constructive ambiguity.

Anecdotes are factoids of questionable provenance, burnished to a high gloss, often set in gilded venues and populated with familiar names as background atmosphere, purged of ambiguity in the interest of keeping the narrative flowing smoothly.

To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism.

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.

I’m not an author, but as a songwriter, I’m afforded this kind of luxurious ambiguity in songs of being able to confess the secrets of my relationships with people and face basically no consequences, or ask for no approval or permission.

It was about a football program that brought in massive amounts of money. They’re going to try to cover something up, because it’s about money at the end of the day. That’s clear. There’s no ambiguity to that. Paterno is much more complicated and contradictory, and that’s why he’s interesting to me.

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.