120 Quotes About Ambiguity

It is still cheating, even if nobody comes.

Looking but not seeing is the hearing but not understanding of the eye.

At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation. But their attempt to lie to us is in vain. Cowardice does not pay. Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they would like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer.

One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face. Of course this is a love story.

The will to insist upon a definite, unimpeachable reading of an incident - which might well have been read in other, more generous ways - was a mark of a bewildering denial: a denial of the imagination that, liberated to do its proper work, can lead us in alternative directions.

In the end, it’s not the obviousness or the complexity of the matters that’s deluding mankind. It’s man himself.

The rage for 'identity' too often bespeaks a preference for simplicity rather than for complexity.

History often teaches us to embrace ambiguity, to understand there aren’t simple answers to complex questions, and Americans tend to like simple answers to complex questions. So the challenge is to use history to help the public feel comfortable with nuance and complexity.

If you accept life in all its fullness and ambiguity, it's not complicated; it's only complicated, if you don't accept it.