Quotes About Ambiguity

First of all, don't ever let them try to define that word "happiness" for themselves. They can't and that's precisely what we never want them to realize. Keep it a vague bright mist hovering about their heads. Locate it securely at the end of implausible rainbows. Hide it snugly in some corner of their thoughts they rarely visit.

Some part of me, I don't know which, contradicts the rest.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from doubletalk.

analogue computers are stupidly named; they should be named continuous computers." For real-world questions—especially ambiguous ones—analog computing can be faster, more accurate, and more robust, not only at computing the answers, but also at asking the questions and communicating the results.

Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating ten more.

It takes only one drink to get me drunk. The trouble is, I can't remember if it's the thirteenth or the fourteenth.

Actually, it only takes one drink to get me loaded. Trouble is, I can't remember if it's the thirteenth or fourteenth.

If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?

A successful interpretive language both tolerates ambiguity and takes advantage of it. "A language which has maximum compression would actually be completely unsuited to conveying information beyond a certain degree of complexity, because you could never find out whether a text is right or wrong," von Neumann explained

Generally when there's a lot of smoke...there's just a whole lot more smoke.

There are endless unknowns, and no forecast of a century can be either complete or utterly correct.

I looked at Curran. "You killed an animal god and then you ate him?" "Maybe," Curran said. "What do you mean maybe?

you would think I was cruel, so I hesitated." "You are cruel." "Yes, but it doesn't mean I want you to think I am.

She looked left. She looked right. She looked confused.

I don't know a room suitable to a woman I asked to marry me and who replied with 'maybe.

Knowing too much about the future made things more complicated, not less.

But I live, I live , with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always.

Was it unpleasant? I don't know, I said. Everything is so unpleasant nowadays it's hard to tell.

I had better spend the day quietly, sleep in the afternoon perhaps, and then start again hunting for Hugo. I would have much preferred to look for Anna. But I had no idea now where to start looking. Also I wanted to lay quickly to rest the terrible suspicion that where I found Hugo now I would also find Anna. This idea didn't bear thinking about and so I didn't think about it.

There was a shadowy light, not exactly twilight, but an uncertain vivid yet hazy illumination, wherein people walked like spirits, bathed in light and not revealed.

Understanding was out of the question; and indeed how passionately, just then, I did not want to be understood.

What follows is ambiguous and sometimes tortuously told. Man's searchings and his strugglings are ambiguous and vowed to hidden ways. Those who live by that dark light will understand.

Words may mislead us (...) since words are often stable while concepts alter (...)

In the torpor of the afternoon the remembered road had the slightly menacing and elusive familiarity of a place in a dream when one thinks: I have been here, yet where is it and what is going to happen?