Harry Graf Kessler Quotes

We want to live in the black and white, but we don't. The world is gray. And, I'm always fascinated by people who are clearly, 'This is black and this is white, and that's the way life is.' Life always has something to say about that.

Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.

Most consequential choices involve shades of gray, and some fog is often useful in getting things done.

This life of ours, this is a wonderful life. If you can get through life like this and get away with it, hey that's great. But it's very predictable. There's so many ways you can screw it up.

To me, most of life kind of lives in the grey and I don't just mean morally. I just mean kind of everything. If things were black and white it would be a lot clearer as to what to do all the time.

Everyone always wants to find the answer, to feel that things are resolved. But in dreams, maybe there isn't an answer so much.

Non-technical questions sometimes don't have an answer at all.

The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you're opposed to it. But when you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.

Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.

Due to mistakenly believing that outer problems are their own problems, most people seek ultimate refuge in the wrong objects. As a result, their suffering and problems never end.

I'm just deeply disappointed that once again we may have to settle for the lesser of two evils.

In all political regulations, good cannot be complete, it can only be predominant.

Irishmen don't know what they want, and won't be satisfied until they get it.

Sportswriting is fascinating - descriptions of the opponents and the details of an event in which someone is going to win and someone is going to lose. Life is much longer and more complicated, and the outcomes are less clear-cut.

Life isn't always black and white. You're not always sure you're right. At least I'm not.

War's not black and white; it's gray. If you don't fight in the gray area, you're going to lose.

We grow up to respect the gray. Black or white, one or the other, is childish. It represents the worldview of someone who does not know the world.

Life is not black and white; there is some gray nuance to it.

Most of us don't confront pure anything. What our life does involve is a whole lot of 60/40 and 70/30.

If you go about trying to please everyone, there's going to be endless struggles.

Our options oftentimes on foreign policy are not a choice between a good one and a bad one. It's a choice between two less-than-ideal options. And you're trying to figure out which is the least harmful of the two. And I think that's something we should be encouraged by, not something that we should be critical of.

The most interesting thing about being alive is that there is no black and white; there are many shades of gray.

The character of human life, like the character of the human condition, like the character of all life, is "ambiguity": the inseparable mixture of good and evil, the true and false, the creative and destructive forces-both individual and social.

What a fearfully distracting, perplexing and heart-searching business it is to live.

There is black. There is white. Gray is a cowardly excuse to mix our wants with our needs.