Imre Lakatos Quotes

Vagueness is at times an indication of nearness to a perfect truth.

People like to say, 'What do you mean exactly?' I would answer, 'I mean, but not exactly.'

Ambiguity is something that I really respond to. I like the complexity of it.

Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it.

Everything in life is gray, you know.

There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about.

In labouring to be concise, I become obscure.

Every clarification breeds new questions.

We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.

Be obscure clearly.

I labor to be brief, and manage to be obscure.

Any order that can be misunderstood, will be misunderstood

There are gray areas in everything.

I love telling stories, but I also am more aware now of how complex reality is and how difficult it is to really explain what happened or how I felt. Maybe that sometimes makes me a little bit vague, because I don't want to really put my finger on anything or set it in stone.

Everybody wants to have an empirical analysis of a relationship ending, but sometimes there's not that much clarity, and that's OK.

It's a murky world out there, and it's hard to figure things out sometimes.

It is... easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague.

We never know what we are talking about.

We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!

People like definite decisions, / Tidy answers, all the little ravelings / Snipped off, the lint removed, they / Hop happily among their roughs / Calling what they can't clutch insanity / Or saintliness.

After all we speak of people 'taking refuge' in vagueness -the more precise you are, in general the more likely you are to be wrong, whereas you stand a good chance of not being wrong if you make it vague enough.

Clarity is not a characteristic of the human spirit.

Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.

The more I see, the less I know.