Quotes About Ambiguity

When confronted with unexpected and ambiguous circumstances, you can either see opportunity or obstacles. I believe that opportunity is present even in chaotic situations.

The real universe of ordinary language is that of the struggle for existence. It is indeed an ambiguous, vague, obscure universe, and is certainly in need of clarification. Moreover, such clarification may well fulfill a therapeutic function, and if philosophy would become therapeutic, it would really come into its own.

A smile is the chosen vehicle for all ambiguities.

A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.

Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.

Como siempre, confunde duda con profundidad, vacilación con análisis.

AM I know my days are numbered, but not every day is a real number.

It was a kind of Cadmean victory.

He left not knowing where he was going, he got there not knowing where he was, and he came back not knowing where he had been. But history books will point out Columbus as the person who made the Americas available for exploitation. I guess I can make the same kind of ridiculous claim.

Sometimes things acquire a tenderness, a monstrous tenderness we don't expect from them.

Dos campos a aldeia parece um amontoado de casas entre as colinas, cuja planta só pode ser reconhecida através das cores. Tudo parece próximo, e quando nos aproximamos não chegamos lá. Eu nunca entendi essas distâncias. Eu sempre estava atrás dos caminhos, tudo corria à minha frente. Eu só tinha a poeira na face. E em lugar nenhum havia um fim.

E assim como eles, também os semimortos de fome não são de facto nem masculinos nem femininos, mas objectivamente neutros como objectos, talvez comuns-de-dois.

If that guy don't look like the loneliest thing ever. And it ain't because he's turned his back on the world. With him, everybody's happy to see him coming, but no one's sorry to see him go. And anybody who catches sight of him is bound to step aside on account of the intense scent he's got about him.

Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.

A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts tat frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

He never lives in a single reality, but in a shifting shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities.

Edward Seymour says, 'You should have been a bishop, Cromwell.' 'Edward,' he says, 'I should have been Pope.

Damn it all, Cromwell, why are you such a . . . person? It isn't as if you could afford to be.

He doesn't believe the dead need our prayers, nor can they use them. But anyone who knows the Bible as he does, knows that our God is a capricious God, and there's no harm in hedging your bets.

I was bound to step out of line, if only because I did not know where the line was: if only because I did not know anything.

It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

This is the best he can hope for, unless. There is always unless.

Every time you go to see Hamlet you don't expect it to have a happy ending...you're still enthralled. (Interview BBC Radio 4 Today 17 October 2012.)