If readers must puzzle over unfamiliar or ambiguous words…

“Names with indeterminate connotation are not to be confounded with names which have more than one connotation, that is to say, ambiguous words.”

— John Stuart Mill

One cannot explain words without making incursions into the sciences themselves, as is evident from dictionaries; and, conversely, one cannot present a science without…

— Gottfried Leibniz

“As a writer, you must truly possess a love for words." "Yes, that's right," I agreed. "I've noticed that some authors favor particular words,…

— Richelle E. Goodrich

“And about a thousand other things," he says, pausing sometimes between his words, making sure he has them right. I get the sense that…

— Lauren DeStefano

I don't have any particular desire to see words making a comeback. They are of their era, after all, and that is their identity…

— David Crystal

Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens-usually .

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Happiness can be bought with a bottle of wine and has become ambiguous through overuse.

— Anonymous

Wave particle duality is a core feature of our world. Or rather, we should say, it is a core feature of our mathematical descriptions…

— Margaret Wertheim

Words are such gross machinery, so primitive and ambiguous.

— Frank Herbert

My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.

— Odilon Redon

Photography appears to be an easy activity; in fact it is a varied and ambiguous process in which the only common denominator among its…

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

Somehow, in the novel format, I don't really like to do upfront, ideological discussion. In my heart, literature remains a poetic and ambiguous medium.…

— Xiaolu Guo

I want each poem to be ambiguous enough that its meaning can shift, depending on the reader's own frame of reference, and depending on…

— James Arthur

“In general we are reminded that the word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are…

— Sigmund Freud

Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species- back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire…

— Daniel Dennett