Vagueness Quotes

• Human relations are built on feeling, not on reason or knowledge. And feeling is not an exact science; like all spiritual qualities, it has the vagueness of greatness about it.

  Amelia Barr

  Love, Spiritual, Greatness

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• Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

  Stendhal

  Math, Hypocrisy, Mathematics

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• Vagueness is at times an indication of nearness to a perfect truth.

  Charles Ives

  Perfect, Indication

  Charles Ives (2004). “Essays Before a Sonata”, p.35, 1st World Publishing

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• A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.

  Edgar Degas

  Art, People, Littles

  "Souvenirs sur Degas (Memories of Degas)". Book by Georges Jeanniot, 1933.

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• Ask a man which way he is going to vote, and he will probably tell you. Ask him, however, why, and vagueness is all.

  Bernard Levin

  Men, Political, Politics

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• Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.

  John Updike

  Procrastination, Comfort, Spirit

  John Updike (2009). “In the Beauty of the Lilies: A Novel”, p.39, Random House

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• I am only conscious of any satisfaction in Scientific Reading or thinking when it rounds off into a poetical generality and vagueness.

  Wilfred Owen

  Reading, Thinking, Satisfaction

  Wilfred Owen (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Wilfred Owen (Illustrated)”, p.410, Delphi Classics

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• But, as we have before been led to remark, most of Mr. Darwin's statements elude, by their vagueness and incompleteness, the test of Natural History facts.

  Richard Owen

  Elude Us, Tests, Facts

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• We cannot afford to have any large section of the business world in doubt whether they have broken the laws or not, and we cannot let the laws become a dead letter through vagueness. In this view it is clear that an administrative commission can render invaluable service.

  John Bates Clark

  Views, Law, Broken

  John Bates Clark, John Maurice Clark (1914). “The Control of Trusts”

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• You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin , or even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things.

  Walt Whitman

  Nature, Travel, Flower

  Walt Whitman (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Walt Whitman (Illustrated)”, p.1321, Delphi Classics

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• Maybe vagueness has been good for me. The word means two different things in Tokyo and Osaka, you know. In Tokyo it means stupidity, but in Osaka they talk about vagueness in a painting and in a game of Go.

  Yasunari Kawabata

  Mean, Games, Two

  Yasunari Kawabata (2015). “The Master of Go”, p.87, Random House

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• You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.

  Pablo Picasso

  Inspirational, Artist, Ideas

  Pablo Picasso (1972). “Picasso on art: a selection of views”, Viking Adult

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• If you can't be kind, at least be vague.

  Judith Martin

  Inspirational, Kindness, Advice

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• For parlor use, the vague generality is a life saver.

  George Ade

  Life, Communication, Use

  George Ade (1901). “Forty Modern Fables”, p.44, Library of Alexandria

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• None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error.

  Bertrand Russell

  Errors, Belief

  Bertrand Russell (2004). “Sceptical Essays”, p.129, Psychology Press

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• The future gets no say in who we are.

  Buddy Wakefield

  Future, Fate, Destiny

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• After all we speak of people 'taking refuge' in vagueness -the more precise you are, in general the more likely you are to be wrong, whereas you stand a good chance of not being wrong if you make it vague enough.

  J. L. Austin

  People, Chance, Speak

  15 Copy quote

• Noise is the typographical error and the poorly designed page...Ambiguity is noise. Redundancy is noise. Misuse of words is noise. Vagueness is noise. Jargon is noise.

  William Zinsser

  Errors, Marketing, Jargon

  6 Copy quote

• William James used to preach the "will-to-believe." For my part, I should wish to preach the "will-to-doubt." None of our beliefs are quite true; all at least have a penumbra of vagueness and error. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

  Bertrand Russell

  Believe, Errors, Opposites

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

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• The more I read, the less I admire modern theology. the more I study the productions of the new schools of theological teachers, the more I marvel that men and women can be satisfied with such writings. There is a vagueness, a mistiness, a shallowness, an indistinctness, a superficiality, an aimlessness, a hollowness about the literature of the 'broader and kinder systems', as they are called, which to my mind stamps their origin on their face. They are of the earth, earthy.

  J. C. Ryle

  Teacher, Writing, School

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• To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

  George Orwell

  Art, Latin, Struggle

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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