Ambiguous Quotes - Page 2

• 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.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Family, Party, Book

  J.R.R. Tolkien (2012). “The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings”, p.32, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Swimming, Land, Circles

  Friedrich Nietzsche, Maudemarie Clark, Brian Leiter (1997). “Nietzsche: Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality”, p.52, Cambridge University Press

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• The emperor of the East was no longer guided by the wisdom and authority of his elder brother, whose death happened towards the end of the preceding year: and, as the distressful situation of the Goths required an instant and peremptory decision, he was deprived of the favourite resource of feeble and timid minds; who consider the use of dilatory and ambiguous measures as the most admirable efforts of consummate prudence.

  Edward Gibbon

  Brother, Years, History

  Edward Gibbon (2008). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.94, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Sometimes the government has to answer questions with ambiguous language.

  Jason Kenney

  Government, Answers, Language

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• Work is a way of shutting out ambiguous sentiment.

  Wendy Wasserstein

  Work, Way, Sentiments

  Wendy Wasserstein (1991). “Bachelor Girls”, Vintage

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• Human languages tend to be much more ambiguous than computer languages because humans are much smarter about interpreting the context.

  Larry Wall

  Language, Computer, Humans

  Source: bigthink.com

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• The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power.

  Umberto Eco

  Gains, Significance, Elusive

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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

  Brennan Manning

  Children, Confused, Compassion

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• I'm usually sort of ambiguous in terms of whether I'm playing a good person or a bad person. I can walk that line of funny but also dark, and I'm happy doing that.

  Amy Hill

  Dark, Lines, Good Person

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Happiness can be bought with a bottle of wine and has become ambiguous through overuse.

  Tim Ferriss

  Wine, Bottles Of Wine, Bottles

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• A sneeze travels at a peak velocity of two hundred miles per hour. A burp, more slowly; a fart, slower yet. But a kiss thrown by fingers- its departure is sudden, its arrival ambiguous, and there is no source that can state with authority what speeds are reached in its flight.

  Tom Robbins

  Kissing, Two, Departure

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues”, p.148, Bantam

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• How ever sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, religion or all four.

  Gloria Steinem

  Sex, Race, Liberty

  Gloria Steinem (1986). “Outrageous acts and everyday rebellions”, New Amer Library

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• People usually complain that music is so ambiguous, and what they are supposed to think when they hear it is so unclear, while words are understood by everyone. But for me it is exactly the opposite...what the music I love expresses to me are thoughts not to indefinite for words, but rather too definite.

  Felix Mendelssohn

  Thinking, Opposites, People

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• [T]here is a methodological bias in favor of taking natural discourse literally, other things being equal. For example, unless there are clear reasons for construing discourse as ambiguous, elliptical, or involving special idioms, we should not so construe it.

  Tyler Burge

  Philosophical, Special, Favors

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• It's relatively easy to create an ambiguous character. Any conglomeration of likable and unlikeable traits, chosen at random, will result in an ambiguous character. Getting an audience to deeply identify with a character, on the other hand, is one of the hardest things in the world to do.

  Matt Bird

  Character, Hands, World

  "Losing My Religion, Part 2: Misconceptions About Character". www.secretsofstory.com. November 21, 2012.

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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

  Alan Greenspan

  Success, Business, Decision

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• Every human being relies on and is bounded by his knowledge and experience to live. This is what we call “reality”. However, knowledge and experience are ambiguous, thus reality can become illusion. Is it not possible to think that, all human beings are living in their assumptions?

  Masashi Kishimoto

  Reality, Thinking, Assumption

  "Naruto: Shippūden". TV Series, 2007 - 2017.

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• You will not kill my girlfriend today, International Terrorists of Ambiguous Nationality!

  John Green

  Girlfriend, Today, Terrorist

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• She used to pride herself on her refusal to see two sides of an argument, but increasingly she accepts that issues are more ambiguous and complicated than she once thought.

  David Nicholls

  Pride, Two Sides, Issues

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• History is the only science enjoying the ambiguous fortune of being required to be at the same time an art.

  Johann Gustav Droysen

  Art, History, Fortune

  Johann Gustav Droysen (1893). “Outline of the Principles of History”

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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.

  Elliot Perlman

  Mean, Views, Two

  "Seven Types of Ambiguity". Book by Elliot Perlman, 2003.

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• Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species - back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire - has been ethically ambiguous.

  Carl Sagan

  Atheist, Fire, Religion

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.476, Ballantine Books

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• Alcohol is a pervasive fact of life, but an extraordinary fact-pleasurable and destructive, anathematized and adulated, and deeply ambiguous ... the genie in the bottle.

  Griffith Edwards

  Alcohol, Bottles, Facts

  Griffith Edwards (2013). “Alcohol: The World's Favorite Drug”, p.1, Macmillan

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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.

  G. H. Hardy

  Beautiful, Moving, Mean

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• My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.

  Odilon Redon

  Drawing, Inspire, Doe

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