Guity Quotes

1. "The aspirations of democracy are based on the notion of an informed citizenry, capable of making wise decisions. The choices we are asked to make become increasingly complex. They require the longer-term thinking and greater tolerance for ambiguity that science fosters. The new economy is predicated on a continuous pipeline of scientific and technological innovation. It can not exist without workers and consumers who are mathematically and scientifically literate."
Author: Ann Druyan

2. "Art actually happens somewhere in the space between clarity and ambiguity, concept and intuition, thought and feeling."
Author: Bert Dodson

3. "The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some predetermined, clearly delineated plan for the future. The next step discloses itself only out of a discernment of God acting in the desert of the present moment. The reality of naked trust is the life of the pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God has signaled the movement and offered it his presence and his promise."
Author: Brennan Manning

4. "It stung this new rejection, but it was also a relief to put an end to the ambiguity and incertitude. I had been deceiving myself the day I decided I could master the art of detachment, or maybe the mistake was to allow things to go on in that vein for as long as they had."
Author: Catherine Sanderson

5. "I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that 'issue' I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

6. "He has explained why it is that ambiguity touches his heart more nearly than the death and marriage style of finish that i prefer."
Author: Diane Setterfield

7. "Just as God's love entered the world, thereby submitting to the misunderstanding and ambiguity that characterize everything worldly, so also Christian love does not exist anywhere but in the worldly, in an infinite variety of concrete worldly action, and subject to misunderstanding and condemnation. Every attempt to portray a Christianity of 'pure' love purged of worldly 'impurities' is a false purism and perfectionism that scorns God's becoming human and falls prey to the fate of all ideologies. God was not too pure to enter the world."
Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

8. "People ask me if I left the lyrics open to ambiguity. Of course I did. I wanted to make a whole series of complex statements. The lyrics had to do with the state of society at the time."
Author: Don McLean

9. "Muddiness is not merely a disturber of prose, it is also a destroyer of life, of hope: death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveler expecting to be met at a railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram. Think of the tragedies that are rooted in ambiguity, and be clear! When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair."
Author: E.B. White

10. "The whole of the Targum deserves study as shewing how textual ambiguity or corruption may combine with doctrinal prepossession to modify tradition;Chapter II, Section 2, Paragraph 1171"
Author: Edwin A. Abbott

11. "Yeah, we should all line up along the Bosphorus Bridge and puff as hard as we can to shove this city in the direction of the West. If that doesn't work, we'll try the other way, see if we can veer to the East. It's no good to be in between. International politics does not appreciate ambiguity."
Author: Elif Shafak

12. "The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it."
Author: Frank Herbert

13. "Dread was always with her, an alarm system in her head, alertto her next disaster.Despite being resigned to a life of misfortune, she becameresourceful.She grudgingly noticed that things always worked out, evenwhen she claimed defeat.An inconvenient truth, yet it was right there, in her face,betraying her self-punishments and assumptions.She kept overcoming things, dammit, aggravating herself.She still felt so much joy, despite her efforts to be miserable.Her life was full of miracles and spectacles that she was afraidto rely on so she didn't know how to enjoy, how to be thankful,without guilt.She didn't want to win and she didn't want to lose.Ambiguity intrigued her and she found passion in the gapsbetween hope and despair."
Author: G.G. Renee Hill

14. "Ambiguity is necessary in some of my stories, not in all. In those, it certainly contributes to the richness of the story. I doubt that thematic closure is never attainable."
Author: Gene Wolfe

15. "The more I protested about this ambiguity, the more Joanna pointed out to me that it was both a terrible and wonderful part of life: terrible because you can't count on anything for sure—like certain good health and no possibility of cancer; wonderful because no human being knows when another is going to die—no doctor can absolutely predict the outcome of a disease. The only thing that is certain is change. Joanna calls all of this 'delicious ambiguity.' 'Couldn't there be comfort and freedom in no one knowing the outcome of anything and all things being possible?' she asked. Was I convinced? Not completely. I still wanted to believe in magic thinking. But I was intrigued."
Author: Gilda Radner

16. "To believe that will has power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality (which is always potentiality to do and not to do) — this is the perpetual illusion of morality."
Author: Giorgio Agamben

17. "Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity."
Author: Graham Nelson

18. "Thought like that showed me the needless ambiguity of words like space-time. The average person heard a word like that and figured he'd never understand it. But it was so simple. Every place you ever saw was linked to a specific time ... the school you visited twenty years after you graduated, the football field you played on, the track you ran -- none of them was the same. If they were, you would collide with the generations that had run on them before and after you. The lover you kissed was not the same person he or she was sixty seconds before. In that minute, a million skin cells had died and been replaced by new ones. The smallest slices of space-time separated thought from action Life from death."
Author: Greg Iles

19. "But the recurrent ambiguity of the American tale of the supernatural reveals both a fascination with the possibility of numinous experience and a perplexity about whether there was, in fact, anything numinous to be experienced. Writers often delighted in leading readers into, but not out of, the haunted dusk of the borderland."
Author: Howard Kerr

20. "I began dividing life in absolutes... Things and people were either perfectly bad, or perfectly good, and when life didn't obey this black-and-white rule, when things or people were complex or contradictory, I pretended otherwise. I turned every defeat into a disaster, every success into an epic triumph, and separated all people into heroes or villains. Unable to bear ambiguity, I built a barricade of delusions against it."
Author: J.R. Moehringer

21. "Seasoning one's claims with self-irony and modesty, cultivating a tolerance for moral ambiguity, periodically practicing normative reticence, building up a resistance to the pleasure of purity, minding your own business, doing what you can to forget to wreak vengeance, defending negative freedom even if there is no such thing, and playing around are the best you can do. But that's quite a lot."
Author: Jane Bennett

22. "Perhaps we can conceive of the ironist as the fetishist's apprentice, reaching out for all readers, ensnaring them in a tangle of ambiguity, uncertainty and indecision from which there is no escape. Irony, quite possibly, makes fetishists of us all."
Author: Janet Beizer

23. "Ambiguity is very interesting in writing; it's not very interesting in science."
Author: Janna Levin

24. "This false distance is present everywhere: in spy films, in Godard, in modern advertising, which uses it continually as a cultural allusion. It is not really clear in the end whether this 'cool' smile is the smile of humour or that of commercial complicity. This is also the case with pop, and its smile ultimately encapsulates all its ambiguity: it is not the smile of critical distance, but the smile of collusion"
Author: Jean Baudrillard

25. "I suppose I am talking about just that: the ambiguity of belonging to a generation distrustful of political highs, the historical irrelevancy of growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man's own blood. If man was bound to err, then any social organization was bound to be in error. It was a premise which still seems to me accurate enough, but one which robbed us early of a certain capacity for surprise."
Author: Joan Didion

26. "Naturally, the reader has access only to the events I show and the way I show them, but as has been said, there's generally a good deal of ambiguity in that presentation."
Author: John M. Ford

27. "I like middles. . . It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules."
Author: John Updike

28. "I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous."
Author: Keith Richards

29. "He prizes ambiguity; he loves to keep you guessing."
Author: Lionel Shriver

30. "We live in times that are in many ways ambiguous. Maybe that's why kids want precision in what they read - they don't like that moral ambiguity."
Author: Lois Lowry

31. "It is no more natural and no less conventional to shout in anger or to kiss in love than to call a table 'a table'. Feelings and passional conduct are invented like words. Even those which like paternity seem to be part and parcel of the human make-up are in reality institutions. It is impossible to superimpose on man a lower layer of behavior which one chooses to call 'natural' followed by a manufactured cultural or spiritual world. Everything is both manufactured and natural in man as it were in the sense that there is not a word, not a form of behavior which does not owe something to purely biological being and which at the same time does not elude the simplicity of animal life and cause forms of vital behavior to deviate from their pre-ordained direction through a sort of leakage and through a genius for ambiguity which might serve to define man."
Author: Maurice Merleau Ponty

32. "Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs - these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration."
Author: Max Weber

33. "Myths, whether in written or visual form, serve a vital role of asking unanswerable questions and providing unquestionable answers. Most of us, most of the time, have a low tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. We want to reduce the cognitive dissonance of not knowing by filling the gaps with answers. Traditionally, religious myths have served that role, but today — the age of science — science fiction is our mythology."
Author: Michael Shermer

34. "The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure."
Author: Milan Kundera

35. "To accpet the world as boring or accpet oneself as boring? Which is really more agreeable? There's bound to be some amount of ambiguity and uncertainty."
Author: NisiOisiN

36. "As may be seen, there is only one sensible piece of advice to give to those who find themselves having to talk to an author about one of his books without having read it: praise it without going into detail. An author does not expect a summary or a rational analysis of his book and would even prefer you not to attempt such a thing. He expects only that, while maintaining the greatest possible degree of ambiguity, you will tell him you like what he wrote."
Author: Pierre Bayard

37. "The word "brotherhood" is, to be sure, a fine word, but we oughtn't to forget its ambiguity. The first pair of brothers in the history of the world were, according to the Bible, Cain and Abel, and the one murdered the other."
Author: Pope Benedict XVI

38. "When Jesus tells His followers not to resist evil people, He uses a word that suggests a violent resistance. In fact, New Testament scholar N. T. Wright translated the verse "Don't use violence to resist evil" to remove all ambiguity.6 Put simply, when Jesus says, "Do not resist the one who is evil," He specifically prohibits using violence to resist evil."
Author: Preston Sprinkle

39. "In the ambiguity and shifting playing field of adult life, I often wish I could just fill in a dot and have someone say "Yes" and hand me a chicken leg, or "No" and slap me with an old fish."
Author: Rob Delaney

40. "In a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live."
Author: Robert James Waller

41. "Ambiguity is something that I really respond to. I like the complexity of it."
Author: Robert Redford

42. "The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity."
Author: Scott Turow

43. "The Butcher Boy is a very great novel indeed and a very important Irish novel. The ambiguity of that is, he's writing a book about an appalling situation and he does it in a hilarious way."
Author: Stephen Rea

44. "I don't know," resignation creeping into his voice after the futile effort to hold it back, "once we all thought we were going to make grand movies. Me and Francis and Marty and Paul and Hal and Brian and the others, even George and Steven. But then George and Steven fucked it up, and it's not that they've made bad movies, you could almost wrap your mind around that. It's that they've made really good versions of bad movies, while the hermaphrodite cowboy went and made what everyone figures is a really bad version of a good movie, though what he really made is a pretty good version of a grand movie, which is the sort of ambiguity that confuses the fuck out of everyone, including me."
Author: Steve Erickson

45. "Meaning lies in the confrontation of contradiction - the coincidencia apositorum. That's what we really feel, not these rational schemes that are constantly beating us over the head with the "thou shalts" and "thou should", but rather a recovery of the real ambiguity of being and an ability to see ourselves as at once powerful and weak, noble and ignoble, future-oriented, past-facing."
Author: Terence McKenna

46. "The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; Reason is the pace; Encrease of Science, the way; and the Benefit of man-kind, the end. And on the contrary, Metaphors, and senslesse and ambiguous words, are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them, is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities; and their end, contention, and sedition, or contempt."
Author: Thomas Hobbes

47. "Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel-the spiritual texture-of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity."
Author: Tim O'Brien

48. "In this world that God (or Mother Nature) created, it is always hazard and novelty-hazard and novelty-which assert themselves, thereby rendering notions of fixity absurd. Incongruously enough, however, when we allow ourselves to fully accept uncertainty, to embrace and cultivate it even, then we actually can begin to feel within ourselves the presence of an Absolute. The person who cannot welcome ambiguity cannot welcome God."
Author: Tom Robbins

49. "God speaks, spirits speak, computer speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith."
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

50. "Great art projects a sense of inexhaustibility. In literature, particularly in poetry, this may be accomplished through ambiguity: Beneath each and every meaning that I can descry lie others, so that rereading holds out the prospect of new subtleties, inversions, secret codes and ineffabilities"
Author: William T. Vollmann

Guity Quotes Pictures