Quotes for All
A chess problem is genuine mathematics, but it is in some way trivial mathematics. However, ingenious and intricate, however original and surprising the moves, there is something essential lacking. Chess problems are unimportant. The best mathematics is serious as well as beautiful-important if you like, but the word is very ambiguous, and serious expresses what … Read more
There was one woman who had a giant sign and on it, it just said, ‘America Is Better Than Abortion.’ I think she meant that America was too good a place for the horror of abortion. But instead, it sounded like she had weighed both – the American spirit and getting an abortion and decided … Read more
Ger-mans love the ambiguous word, verbal assonances as ends in themselves,vague concepts. Anglosaxons are more clear. Erich Fromm
Finally one arrives at this: the state of sleep has an ambiguous function; in sleep, the lack of contact with the culture brings out the worst and also the best in us. Erich Fromm
The performances I enjoy are the ones that are hard to read or ambiguous or left-of-centre because it makes you look closer and that’s what humans are like – quite mysterious creatures, hard to pinpoint. Emily Blunt
The development of the plot of the novel leads to a single point, and it’s my opinion that the ending that the novel has, which is a somewhat ambiguous ending, is the only logical ending given the structure of the book as a whole. Emily Barton
There’s the ambiguity of human relationships, for instance. A relationship between two people, just like a sequence of words, is ambiguous if it is open to different interpretations. And if two people do have differing views about their relationship – I don’t just mean about its state, I mean about its very nature – then … Read more
The emperor of the East was no longer guided by the wisdom and authority of his elder brother, whose death happened towards the end of the preceding year: and, as the distressful situation of the Goths required an instant and peremptory decision, he was deprived of the favourite resource of feeble and timid minds; who … Read more
Feeble and timid minds . . . consider the use of dilatory and ambiguous measures as the most admirable efforts of consummate prudence. Edward Gibbon
Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that … Read more