Embracing Ambiguity Quotes

We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty.

I am not an expert. That is someone else's job. If I were expert, the approach would be all wrong. It would be from the inside. I am a blunderer. I usually don't know what I am going into at the start. I go into the fog and trust something will be there.

We must know, if only in order to learn not to know. The supreme lesson of human consciousness is to learn how not to know. That is, how not to interfere.

That's the only way that I can figure out how to live, is to say, "Well, I don't know what this adds up to, but I can do the best I can."

I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much undetermined and unpredictable, to a pretense of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.

In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book -- leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity.

Richard Branson once said: 'Tony's very good at selling bands and he's very good at making television programmes. But he'll never be great at either, until he decides which one he wants to do.' I entirely accept that. That doesn't matter to me very much. I like the irony of the two lives.

Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.

I think to be honest, that being is inside. I meet that being in so many people that I meet everywhere in the world and when I do meet that being, in other people, what I want to ask is "How do we keep opening ourselves so that we can become as vulnerable and as willing to live in the deepest complexity and ambiguity and truth that we can?

To allow mystery, which is to say to yourself, 'There could be more...things we don't understand,' is not to damn knowledge....It is to permit yourself an extraordinary, freedom: someone else does not have to be wrong in order that you might be right...This tolerance for mystery invigorates the imagination; and it is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.

For most of my life I had operated under a simple schematic of winning and losing, but cancer was teaching me a tolerance for ambiguities.

I think uncertainty is good for things. Certainty breeds complacency and complacency means that you just sit somewhere in your nice little comfortable suburban house in Michigan, looking at CNN and saying, "Oh, those poor immigrant children that are all coming across the border. But we really can't have them here - that isn't what God wants. Let's send them all back to the drug cartels." There's a complacency to it.

We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress, we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt.

There's no real reason for me to be so obsessed with trying to understand the true nature of things. You can live a perfectly happy life being utterly confused and not knowing.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

I find the world just too complex to embrace a single ideological point of view.

We're all complex creatures, and we shouldn't have to pick one thing to be passionate about. Life isn't black and white, so we shouldn't live that way.

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.

You don'’t always have to have the answer to everything.

Embrace the wisdom of uncertainty.

All uncertainty is fruitfull ... so long as it is accompanied by the wish to understand

Hybridity keeps me from being rigid about most things. It has taught me to appreciate the contradictions in the world and in my life. I scavenge from the best.

The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure.

Sometimes it's better to stop trying to make sense of things. Life isn't clear cut, there are always gray areas.

It’s better not to know so much about what things mean or how they might be interpreted or you’ll be too afraid to let things keep happening.