Quotations about:
    ambiguity


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Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

Mary Oliver (1935-2019) American poet
“Evidence,” sec. 1, Evidence (2009)
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Added on 11-Feb-20 | Last updated 11-Feb-20
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Warped with satisfactions and terrors, woofed with too many ambiguities and too few certainties, life can be lived best not when we have the answers — because we will never have those — but when we know enough to live it right out to the edges, edges sometimes marked by other people, sometimes showing only our own footprints.

Rosalie Maggio (1944-2021) American writer
The New Beacon Book of Quotations by Women, Introduction (1996)
 
Added on 16-Feb-18 | Last updated 16-Feb-18
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Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life!

George Meredith (1828-1909) English novelist and poet
Modern Love, Sonnet 50 (1862)
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Added on 17-Nov-17 | Last updated 17-Nov-17
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If I take refuge in ambiguity, I assure you that it’s quite conscious.

Kingman Brewster, Jr. (1919-1988) American educator, diplomat
Speech, as quoted in The New York Tribune (14 Oct 1963)

On appointment as President of Yale University.
 
Added on 1-Nov-16 | Last updated 1-Nov-16
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Most of the bad guys in the real world don’t know that they are bad guys. You don’t get a flashing warning sign that you’re about to damn yourself. It sneaks up on you when you aren’t looking.

Jim Butcher (b. 1971) American author
Proven Guilty, ch. 41 (2006)
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Added on 13-Jan-15 | Last updated 13-Jan-15
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Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized a man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant in this field as in all others. His culture is based on “I am not too sure.”

H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken’s Notebooks, #418 (1956)
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Added on 28-Oct-08 | Last updated 23-Feb-22
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Too much positive is either scared or stupid or both. Reality is uncertain.

Robert B. Parker (1932-2010) American writer
Early Autumn (1981)
 
Added on 1-Feb-04 | Last updated 29-Mar-17
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Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

Samuel Butler (1835-1902) English novelist, satirist, scholar
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, ch. 1 “Life,” ix (1912)

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Added on 1-Feb-04 | Last updated 5-Sep-19
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