Quotes About Ambiguity

From now on the tasks of literature and philosophy can no longer be separated. When one is concerned with giving voice to the experience of the world and showing how consciousness escapes into the world, one can no longer credit oneself with attaining a perfect transparence of expression. Philosophical expression assumes the same ambiguities as literary expression, if the world is such that it cannot be expressed except in "stories" and, as it were, pointed at.

Nothingness is like the point of the stroboscopic spiral, which is who knows where, which is 'nobody.

No one is fully saved, and no one is fully lost.

All writers who are unprejudiced and open to the future know what they do not want better than what they do want.

The sensible world is full of gaps, ellipses, allusions.

Love cannot be given a name by the lover who lives it...If we are situated, then we are surrounded and cannot be transparent to ourselves, and thus our contact with ourselves must only be accomplished in ambiguity.

Ambiguity is not a lack of univocity. Ambiguity is 'good'...In truth, we have experience of knowledge and knowledge of experience. These two faces of ambiguity are abstractions. The absolute is that which is between the two: the transformation of one into the other. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

In this transgression, one does not know who is engulfing and who is engulfed.

Obscurity spreads to the perceived world in its entirety,

The positive and the negative are the two 'sides' of a Being; in the vertical world, every being has this structure (To this structure is bound the ambiguity of the consciousness...of imperception in perception...). Against the doctrine of contradiction, absolute negation, the either or--Transcendence is identity within difference.

Ambiguity cannot be resolved, but it can be understood as ultimate.

Institution of a work, like the institution of a love, intends a sense as open sense, which develops by means of proliferation, by curves, decentering and recenterimg, zigzag, ambiguous passage, with a sort of identity between the whole and the parts, the beginning and end. A sort of existential eternity by means of self-interpretation.

Meaning is like spots of light surrounded by rugged clouds of night, glowing islands.

The universe is defined not by what one sees, what one says, but precisely by what one does not see, precisely what one does not say: by the difference between the one and the other.

Anglo-American analytic philosophy is a deliberate retreat into a universe of thought where contingency, ambiguity, and the concrete have no place.

What allows us to center our existence is also what prevents us from centering it completely, and the anonymity of our body is invariably both freedom and servitude. Thus, to summarize, the ambiguity of being in the world is expressed by the ambiguity of our body, and this latter is understood through the ambiguity of time.

Melanie Klein had distinguished the concept of ambivalence from that of ambiguity. Ambivalence is where the subject makes two alternative images for the same being; alternatives that are not seen as representing the same object. Ambiguity is an adult concept. The subject perceives two images, but he knows that they apply to the same object.

We must recognize the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon.

Ambiguity is essential to human existence, and everything we live or think always has several senses.

Things are only half - opened before us, unveiled and hidden.

It's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.

Poles had a dark joke in 1944, about a bird which falls out of the sky into a cowpat, to be rescued by a cat; its moral, they said, was that "Not everyone who gets you out of the shit is necessarily your friend.

May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best -- out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters.

His life was always like this moment -- almost brilliant, almost clever, almost and always not quite.