Vagueness Quotes - Page 2

• Perhaps I became so vague, so exhilarated with vagueness, precisely in order to forestall a recognition of the final term of the syllogism that begins: If one man loves another he is a homosexual; I love a man.

  Edmund White

  Men, Order, Finals

  Edmund White (2016). “A Boy's Own Story: Picador Classic”, p.84, Pan Macmillan

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• You start meditation as an average human being who is filled with vagueness and not much purpose or definition, who is controlled by their desires, your mind spins all over the place, your senses spin all over the place, out of control.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Average, Meditation

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• A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.

  Sebastian Faulks

  Mad, Imagine, Bits

  Sebastian Faulks (2007). “Engleby: A Novel”, Doubleday Books

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• In abandoning the vagueness of the sketch the artist shows more of his personality by revealing the range but also the limitations of his talent.

  Eugene Delacroix

  Artist, Personality, Talent

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• It is in the early morning hour that the unseen is seen, and that the far-off beauty and glory, vanquishing all their vagueness, move down upon us till they stand clear as crystal close over against the soul.

  Sarah Smiley

  Morning, Moving, Soul

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• Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness.

  Sinclair Lewis

  Fog, Gossip, Cynical

  Sinclair Lewis (1995). “Main Street: The Story of Carol Kennicott”, p.387, Penguin

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• Kantians are saddled with absolutist views, Aristotelians are accused of vagueness, and there is almost no horror to which Consequentialists are innocent of, according to some critics. While all these families of views have been victimized in these ways, Consequentialists have gotten the worst of it. I think this may have something to do with the fact that Kant and Aristotle are acknowledged to be great philosophers, and we tend to read the greats sympathetically, while Consequentialism is a family of views not rooted in the work of a single great man to whom this kind of deference is owed.

  Dale Jamieson

  Men, Thinking, Views

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• And the vagueness of his alarm added to its terrors; when once you have taken the Impossible into your calculations its possibilities become practically limitless.

  Hector Hugh Munro

  Taken, Alarms, Impossible

  Saki, Hector Hugh Munro (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of Saki (Illustrated)”, p.476, Delphi Classics

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• When people talk, they lay lines on each other, do a lot of role playing, sidestep, shilly-shally and engage in all manner of vagueness and innuendo. We do this and expect others to do it, yet at the same time we profess to long for the plain truth, for people to say what they mean, simple as that. Such hypocrisy is a human universal.

  Steven Pinker

  Mean, Simple, Long

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• Courtship consists in a number of quiet attentions, not so pointed as to alarm, nor so vague as not to be understood.

  Laurence Sterne

  Marriage, Numbers, Alarms

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• When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

  John Updike

  Easter, New York, Writing

  John Updike (2013). “Picked-Up Pieces: Essays”, p.472, Random House

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• What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

  Bertrand Russell

  Believe, Science, Opposites

  "Sceptical Essays". Book by Bertrand Russell, Ch. 12: Free Thought and Official Propaganda, 1928.

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• The pious pretense that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing.

  Aleister Crowley

  Evil, Doe, Enormous

  "The Confessions of Aleister Crowley". Book by Aleister Crowley. Chapter 33, 1969.

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• Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people - what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes.

  Virginia Woolf

  Eye, Glasses, Mirrors

  Virginia Woolf (2017). “A arte da brevidade: Contos”, p.7, Autêntica

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• We think of it as a sort of traffic accident of the heart. It is an emotion that scares us more than cruelty, more than violence, more than hatred. We allow ourselves to be foiled by the vagueness of the word. After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier?

  Diane Ackerman

  Heart, Thinking, Knives

  Diane Ackerman (2011). “A Natural History of Love: Author of the National Bestseller A Natural History of the Senses”, p.20, Vintage

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• Fatalism, whose solving word in all crises of behavior is All striving is vain, will never reign supreme, for the impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race. Moral creeds which speak to that impulse will be widely successful in spite of inconsistency, vagueness, and shadowy determination of expectancy. Man needs a rule for his will, and will invent one if one be not given him.

  William James

  Life, Determination, Successful

  William James (2015). “Essays in Popular Philosophy: Top Essays”, p.58, 谷月社

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• Well - Patriotism has its laws. And it also is a perfectly definite one, there are not vaguenesses about it. It commands that the brother over the border shall be sharply watched and brought to book every time he does us a hurt or offends us with an insult.

  Mark Twain

  Hurt, Brother, Book

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.44, Courier Corporation

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• I can't write from the subconscious actually, because a lot of the time when I co-write with other people, I'm writing for them as opposed to for myself. When it comes to lyrics, I tend to want to give them their voice, since it's most likely going to be on their record, or somebody else's record. And I find for more commerial-style music, people want simplicity, less vagueness, and less space to fill between the lines, so to speak. So I can't be quite as ethereal and mystical.

  Gary Louris

  Writing, Voice, Space

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• An artist has to go to every extreme, to stretch his sensibility through excess and suffering in order to feel and to communicate more. I have always been fascinated by blood. Pain can be vitalizing; it gives intensity in the place of vagueness and emptiness. If we don't suffer, how do we know that we live?

  Sebastian Horsley

  Pain, Artist, Blood

  "Horsley's cross is a painful one to bare" by Jack Foley, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.

  Eudora Welty

  Writing, Clouds, Purpose

  Eudora Welty (2011). “On Writing”, p.50, Modern Library

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• I seldom think about my limitations, and they never make me sad. Perhaps there is just a touch of yearning at times; but it is vague, like a breeze among flowers.

  Helen Keller

  Sad, Flower, Ex Boyfriend

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• In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible... Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness... Political language [is] designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.

  George Orwell

  Lying, Writing, Political Language

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• Just, harmonious, temperate as is the spirit of liberty, there is in the name and mere notion of it a vagueness so opposite to the definite clearness of the moral law.

  Augustus William Hare

  Freedom, Names, Law

  Augustus William Hare (1827). “Guesses at Truth”, p.38

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• The mission of the law is not to oppress persons and plunder them of their property, even though the law may be acting in a philanthropic spirit. Its purpose is to protect persons and property.... If you exceed this proper limit -- if you attempt to make the law religious, fraternal, equalizing, philanthropic, industrial, or artistic -- you will then be lost in uncharted territory, in vagueness and uncertainty, in a forced utopia or, even worse, in a multitude of utopias, each striving to seize the law and impose it on you.

  Frederic Bastiat

  Religious, Law, Acting

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• The policies that Hillary [Clinton] advocates are going to be more of the same, whether you're looking at her cozy relationships with the banks, her refusal to support Glass-Steagall, her vagueness about what actually she's going to do about the control of the big banks.

  Jill Stein

  Glasses, Support, Cozy

  Source: www.glamour.com

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