Quotes About Equivocal

I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details. The equivocal clarity of dawn penetrated along the earthen patio.

If words happen to be still dubious, we may establish their meaning from the context; with which it may be of singular use to compare a word, or a sentence, whenever they are ambiguous, equivocal, or intricate.

this question depends upon the definition of the word, Nature, than which there is none more ambiguous and equivocal.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

The so-called physical universe—"the world so described"—turns out to be constituted by mathematical structures which we ourselves have imposed; in a word, it proves to be "man-made." Yet this way of putting it is also misleading; for inasmuch as physical knowledge is partly objective, "the world so described" must be "partly objective" as well. One is left with a curiously equivocal conception, which may enlighten the wise but is bound to deceive the unwary

couldn't say what precisely

Religion is dogmatic. Politic is ideological. Reason must be logical, but literature has a privilege of being equivocal.

he had discovered for himself the uselessness of having opinions and in consequence made a habit of usually saying the opposite of what he thought in a joking way. He was an ironist, hence he appeared often to violate good sense: hence too his equivocal air, the apparent frivolity with which he addressed himself to large subjects. This sort of serious clowning leaves footmarks in conversation of a peculiar kind. His little sayings stayed like the pawmarks of a cat in a pat of butter.

The full truth is that trade does create some (hopefully better-paying) jobs, but it also destroys other (lower-paying) jobs. But that's a complex, even equivocal, message.

It has been my fate in a long life of production to be credited chiefly with the equivocal virtue of industry, a quality so excellent in morals, so little satisfactory in art.

Life is not like the game of chess. There are not only black and white pieces. There are gray figures, solitary knights, and equivocal characters who never get caught.

Doctrines, though useful, are the product of analytical dissection; they recast the original, equivocal, historical material into abstract, less fully realized categories of meaning. In short, doctrines are not as richly meaningful as that which they are doctrines about.

my nature forces me to drift, to remain forever in the equivocal

double et louche (a provocative phrase which could mean "double and squinting" or "equivocal" or "shady" in the sense of disreputable).

And Sheila was indeed noncommittal. She

When all institutions have become equivocal or even disreputable, and when open prayers are heard even in churches not for the persecuted but for the persecutors, at this point moral responsibility passes into the hands of individuals, or, more accurately, into the hands of any still unbroken individuals.

A position I couldn't help but notice was ambiguous at best.

In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.

This visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein, as in a portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal shapes.

I felt once more the strange equivocal power of the city—its flat alluvial landscape and exhausted airs… Alexandria; which is neither Greek, Syrian nor Egyptian, but a hybrid: a joint.

In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.

So is this good or bad or what?" "It's 'or what