Ambivalence Quotes

Caution is an important quality in a leader, but it has to be caution followed by decision. Caution followed by ambivalence can be a weakness.

Often, if there’s something that I want to do, but somehow can’t get myself to do, it’s because I don’t have clarity. This lack of clarity often arises from a feeling of ambivalence – I want to do something, but I don’t want to do it; or I want one thing, but I also want something else that conflicts with it.

I felt a lot of ambivalence about going back to graduate school for a second MFA. The impulse was really the opposite from what it had been more than a decade before: I wanted to interrupt a career.

Buddhism cannot be true to itself until Buddhists resolve their ambivalence toward nonhuman animals and extend the full protection of their compassion to the most harmless and helpless of those who live at our mercy in the visible realms.

I’m still ambivalent about Hollywood. I think that’s why I made ‘Star 80.’ To deal with the ambivalence. I really wanted to succeed Gene Kelly, and I thought it was a fair bet.

Most women would say they relate to ‘Hedda Gabler’ – there’s a part of her in them. Ibsen was writing about a deep ambivalence that many women feel about domesticity. I think about myself and friends of mine – we have some of Hedda’s qualities and traits.

Most human things are full of conflict and ambivalence, not ease and simplicity. The world has grown increasingly fundamentalist, and the parameters of discussion have become narrowed. People, when they’re fearful, are vulnerable to certainty in rhetoric.

We need to be ambivalent – in the essay, and in life too. Ambivalence – having mixed feelings, entertaining contradiction, living with fluctuation – is a widened embrace. It’s about the coexistence of things, and in that light, we have no choice in the matter.

Life is full of tough decisions, and nothing makes them easy. But the worst ones are really your personal koans, and tormenting ambivalence is just the sense of satori rising. Try, trust, try, and trust again, and eventually you’ll feel your mind change its focus to a new level of understanding.

The base of artistic pursuit is ambivalence and complexity. And that’s what I try to do.

a heart may be lifted up and cast down in the same moment, as sometimes sunshine comes while rain is falling and builds upward in the sky tall reaches of misty, unlikely beauty.

I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don’t know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus.

I’ve always been fascinated by the operation of memory – the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.

We don’t do ambivalence well in America. We do courage of our convictions. We do might makes right. Ambivalence is French. Certainty is American.

The moral ambivalence of the great mother goddesses has been conveniently forgotten by those American feminists who have resurrected them. We cannot grasp nature’s bare blade without shedding our own blood.

Abstract is not a style. I simply want to make a surface work. This is just a use of space and form: it’s an ambivalence of forms and space.

I’ve always had a lot of ambivalence about fame and celebrity.

There’s a panic, a rush, to this ‘achievement’ of fame. There’s also the ambivalence of fame: the love of it and the hatred of it. We sometimes hate the famous while, at the same time, straining to achieve fame oneself.

I was toying with the idea of ambivalence a lot. It’s something I work on, not being so invested in outcomes and being more engaged in the process of my life.

They say the definition of ambivalence is watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac.

More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable.

It seems we are capable of immense love and loyalty, and as capable of deceit and atrocity. It’s probably this shocking ambivalence that makes us unique.

I am happy to accept that badge of ambivalence if that means some progress in dismantling this false opposition: writers boldly using their privileges of free speech in the morally superior West versus pathetic wimps in repressive countries we don’t like.

Man-hating is everywhere, but everywhere it is twisted and transformed, disguised, tranquilized, and qualified. It coexists, never peacefully, with the love, desire, respect, and need women also feel for men. Always man-hating is shadowed by its milder, more diplomatic and doubtful twin, ambivalence.

Surely binationalism is not love, but there is, we might say, a necessary and impossible attachment that makes a mockery of identity, an ambivalence that emerges from the decentering of the nationalist ethos and that forms the basis of a permanent ethical demand.

Beneath the surface of our daily life, in the personal history of many of us, there runs a continuous controversy between an Ego that affirms and an Ego that denies.

Whether outside work is done by choice or not, whether women seek their identity through work, whether women are searching for pleasure or survival through work, the integration of motherhood and the world of work is a source of ambivalence, struggle, and conflict for the great majority of women.

Modern science knows much about such conflicts. We call the mental state that engenders it “ambivalence”: a collision between thought and feeling.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

My experience is that lots of people go to church, sing the songs, tell the story, etc but have profound ambivalence about God.

From the beginning, there have been some religious leaders who greeted the funding of faith-based social services by government with ambivalence.

I think that social migration to another economic class requires a kind of negotiating with yourself. And also, there’s so much ambivalence in your heart about who you are and who you’re really not.

We British play an important role in Europe, even if we have a traditional and historical ambivalence towards the continent.

I worked with fantastic actors, fantastic directors. People I would never otherwise have met. Was I limited? Yes. Did I use it as I could have? No. But I was always ambivalent about Hollywood and what I wanted. And ambivalence in our business is no good for success.

Prudence is not hesitation, procrastination, or moderation. It is not driving in the middle of the road. It is not the way of ambivalence, indecision, or safety.

Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women

Every single immigrant is part of a larger history that needs to be communicated in all its ambivalences and complexities.