Quotes About Ambiguity

For wherever mystery serves as a foundation, only ruins may be erected.

If you can't say something positive about humanity, then say something equivocal.

But though the stars were spread across a great reaching blackness, the streets below were bathed in a stale gray dimness which suggested neither night nor day nor any natural phase between them.

As a rule, anyone desirous of an audience, or even a place in society, might profit from the following motto: "If you can't say something positive about humanity, then say something equivocal.

In its quest for a sense of meaning, humanity has given countless answers to questions that were never posed to it.

Creativity isn't always an index of niceness

Alone in a world full of bewildering options, human beings will prefer the reassurance of the pack and the safety of the herd rather than choose to grapple with the ambiguities and consequences of freedom.

Isn't it grand, isn't it good, that language has only one word for everything we associate with love - from utter sanctity to the most fleshly lust? The result is perfect clarity in ambiguity, for love cannot be disembodied even in its most sanctified forms, nor is it without sanctity even at its most fleshly. Love is always simply itself, both as a subtle affirmation of life and as the highest passion; love is our sympathy with organic life.

As the case stands.

There is something in a war carried on by invasion which makes it differ in circumstances from any other mode of war, because he who conducts it cannot tell whether the ground he gains be for him, or against him, when her first obtains it.

They sent her to the fourteenth floor, which Elle knew was always the thirteenth mislabeled for the people whose idea of the borderline between reality and nonsense was flexible.

There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words.

they just didn't know

never knew who to send a letter to with the Thornton Wilder stamp.

I had no idea that I'd end up working for a woman who can't decide if I'm a career-ender or her boyfriend.

Across the hall, Paul was either fucking the girl or murdering her, I couldn't tell which. I smelled mothballs. The afghan was going to have to go.

In the gray areas of the French occupation, there is always this complication: the bad guys weren't always German. Sometimes they were French. Or British. Or American.

People laugh at turtles, but they're existentially unambiguous.

Is he dead?" "Not sure," said Serge, "but blood from the ears rarely precedes a big dance number.

Maybe she has no idea what happened to us, even if we're alive or dead. Look at your life.

I believe there's one rule in Hollywood, and that's that there are no rules.

Nobody can see into the future. Nobody knows what going to go on.

Nobody knows what the future holds.

I think a film noir demands a beginning and an end.