Quotes About Nuance

I understand why sometimes people speak in cliches because sometimes there is no other way to describe something.

What a woman says doesn't amount to shucks. It's the way she says it—that's what counts.

Between funny and witty Falls the shadow

Sometimes the embers are better than the campfire.

The truth is in the details.

I love to start characters in a place where you think you know them. We can make all kinds of assumptions about them and think they have no redeeming qualities, but like everyone, they're complex.

I think love keeps on changing every day. It's not black and white and it's definitely more than 50 shades of grey.

Not everything is black and white. Much as we would like it to be.

See, now you're saying a nice thing and yet somehow it sounds like a bad thing.' 'Not bad,' he said, 'Just...different.

There was a volume to what was not being said.

It would be great if politics were fact-based, but it is not, and it is surely not nuance-based. What works in a classroom or a think tank does not work on Capitol Hill or in the White House. Obama sometimes seems to be running the Brookings Institution, not the country.

The more you understand politics, the more you realize that you mustn't move.

words are tricky little bastards, and very rarely say what you want them to say [...]

Moral life, it can be said, is just too messy, and the situations we encounter differ from each other in subtle ways that no panoply of principles could ever manage to capture. Principles deal in samenesses, and there just aren't enough samenesses to go around. (page 2)

That means seeking out challenges (rather than eliminating or avoiding everything that "feels unsafe"), freeing yourself from cognitive distortions (rather than always trusting your initial feelings), and taking a generous view of other people, and looking for nuance (rather than assuming the worst about people within a simplistic us-versus-them morality).

As scholars challenge one another within a community that shares norms of evidence and argumentation and that holds one another accountable for good reasoning, claims get refined, theories gain nuance, and our understanding of truth advances.

Narrative teaches us the complexity of the moral life and the light-and-shade to be found in any human personality. Without this, self-righteousness can destroy the very perceptions and nuances, the tolerance and generosity of spirit on which society depends.

But I saw the pain and sadness in everything, and swirled it round my mouth like a fine wine.

nothing in Nature is black or white, few solutions are clean and clear; rather, reality, and especially our models of it, possess shades of gray throughout.

We find it hard to apply the knowledge of ourselves to our judgment of others. The fact that we are never of one kind, that we never love without reservations and never hate with all our being cannot prevent us from seeing others as wholly black or white.

Literalness, however, is not the substance from which human culture is made.

A single message, no matter how apparently unambiguous, can mean more than one thing. I'm counting on it.

Details are but trifles, but details make for perfection, and perfection is no trifle.

I formed several possible stories out of her speech, formed them at once, so it was less like I failed to understand than that I understood in chords, understood in a plurality of worlds.