These vague quotes will inspire you. Vague, not clear in meaning or of uncertain, indefinite, or unclear character or meaning.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging vague quotes, vague sayings, and vague proverbs.
Best Vague Quotes
- “I refuse to be burdened by vague worries. If something wants to worry me, it will have to make itself clear.” ~ Robert Breault
- “The knowledge that mankind needs is not the way or principle which has an absolute existence, but the particular truths for here and now and for particular individuals. Absolute truth is imaginary, abstract, vague, without evidence, and cannot be demonstrated.” ~ Hu Shih
- “The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?” ~ Edgar Allan Poe
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“It was a perfect spring afternoon, and the air was filled with vague, roving scents, as if the earth exhaled the sweetness of hidden flowers.” ~ Ellen Glasgow
- “It is better to be wrong than to be vague.” ~ Freeman Dyson
- “But during all these years I had a vague but persistent desire to return to New Orleans. I never forgot New Orleans. And when we were in tropical places and places of those flowers and trees that grow in Louisiana, I would think of it acutely and I would feel for my home the only glimmer of desire I felt for anything outside my endless pursuit of art.” ~ Anne Rice
- “You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.” ~ Pablo Picasso
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“If you can’t be kind, at least be vague.” ~ Judith Martin
- “Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.” ~ Theodor Adorno
- “Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self – – like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion.” ~ Sylvia Plath
- “As long as you are not aware of the continual law of Die and Be Again, you are merely a vague guest on a dark Earth.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“May we not suspect that the vague but very real fears of children, which are quite independent of experience, are the inherited effects of real dangers and abject superstitions during ancient savage times?” ~ Charles Darwin
- “What one reads, or rather all that comes to us, is surely only of interest and value in proportion as we find ourselves therein, — form given to what was vague, what slumbered stirred to life.” ~ Alice James , Vague quotes about life
- “Under chattel slavery and feudalism, exploitation was concrete and personalized in the producer’s relationship with his master. The slave and peasant knew exactly who was screwing them. The modern worker, on the other hand, feels a pounding sensation, but has only a vague idea where it is coming from.” ~ Kevin Carson , Vague quotes relationship
- “Problems are often stated in vague terms… because it is quite uncertain what the problems really are.” ~ John von Neumann
- “But, the true reason for the success of such new expositions [translated Eastern religious texts] is to be found where they are the most accommodating, least rigid, least severe, most vague, and ready to come to easy terms with the prejudices and weaknesses of the modern world. Let everyone have the courage to look deeply into himself and to see what it is that he really wants.” ~ Julius Evola
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“The human language, as precise as it is with its thousands of words, can still be so wonderfully vague.” ~ Garth Stein
- “I never said a word against eminent men of science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a sort of new religion and an uncommonly nasty one. When people talked about the fall of man, they knew they were talking about a mystery, a thing they didn’t understand. Now they talk about the survival of the fittest: they think they do understand it, whereas they have not merely no notion, they have an elaborately false notion of what the words mean.” ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
- “O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “There’s a fine line in being too specific so you can’t be too flexible, and being too vague in being specific and people not thinking it’s meaningful.” ~ Jim Nussle
- “Death is not soft-mouthed, vague-footed, nearby. It is in the hall.” ~ Harold Brodkey
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“It’s one of the biggest problems with the system now. Vague regulations leave the system open to abuse.” ~ Chris Asplen
- “Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.” ~ Bertrand Russell
- “A vague uncritical idealism always lends itself to ridicule and too much of it might be a danger to mankind, leading it round in a futile wild-goose chase for imaginary ideals.” ~ Lin Yutang
- “Progress in science is often built on wrong theories that are later corrected. It is better to be wrong than to be vague.” ~ Freeman Dyson
- “The pious pretense that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing.” ~ Aleister Crowley
- “Vague goals produce vague results” ~ Jack Canfield
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“For parlor use, the vague generality is a life saver.” ~ George Ade
- “And this vague little smile is my all purpose expression the meaning of which I will leave to your discretion.” ~ Ani DiFranco
- “A symbol from the first, of mastery, experiments such as Hippocrates made and substituted for vague speculation stayed the ravages of plague.” ~ Marianne Moore
- “Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty love.” ~ George Eliot , Vague quotes about love
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“Anybody who thinks there is any vague chance of adult exchange with a child is up the spout; and would be much less disappointed if they recognized the chasm unbridgeably dividing them.” ~ Caitlin Thomas
- “Life is also a mixture of unsolved problems, ambiguous victories and vague defeats-with very few moments of clear peace.” ~ Hugh Prather
- “Charity, till then, had been conscious only of a vague self-disgust and a frightening physical distress; now, of a sudden, there came to her the grave surprise of motherhood.” ~ Edith Wharton
- “We have found other terms far less vague than the old ones to designate the same complaints. It’s a great advance linguistically.” ~ Jean Anouilh
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“Religion struck me so vague a thing at best, that I could perceive no advantage of any one system over any other.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “I’m a vague, conjunctured personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.” ~ Woodrow Wilson
- “Valuation is vague and arbitrary, when there is no assurance that it will be generally acquiesced in by others.” ~ Jean-Baptiste Say
- “The people have only a very vague direct power. They have the power of voting against the administration, again after its decisions have been taken; but they have no way of getting into the question of policy-making, decision-making, except insofar as the vague forces and pressures of public debate and public opinion have their impact on the President. The President still has to decide. He can’t go to the people and ask them to decide for him; he has to make the decision. In that sense he was condemned to be a dictator.” ~ Walter Millis
- “Vague and mysterious forms of speech, and abuse of language, have so long passed for mysteries of science; and hard or misapplied words with little or no meaning have, by prescription, such a right to be mistaken for deep learning and height of speculation, that it will not be easy to persuade either those who speak or those who hear them, that they are but the covers of ignorance and hindrance of true knowledge.” ~ John Locke
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“The current state of knowledge remains vague when history is not considered, just as history remains vague without substantive knowledge about the current state.” ~ Ludwik Fleck
- “It’s very tempting when you really want to be with someone to settle for much, much less – even a vague pathetic facsimile of less – than you would have ever imagined. Remember always what you set out to get, and please don’t settle for less. These guys exist because there are a lot of women out there who allow them to.” ~ Greg Behrendt
- “Whether game theory leads to clear-cut solutions, to vague solutions, or to impasses, it does achieve one thing. In bringing techniques of logical and mathematical analysis gives men an opportunity to bring conflicts up from the level of fights, where the intellect is beclouded by passions, to the level of games, where the intellect has a chance to operate.” ~ Anatol Rapoport
- “One of the most extraordinary things about industrial society of the present day is its idiot lack of memory. Tabloids and movies take the place of mental processes and revolts, crimes, despairs pass off in a dribble of vague words and rubber stamp phrases without leaving a scratch on the mind of the driven instalment-paying, subway-packing mass.” ~ John Dos Passos
- “As for the square at Meknes, where I used to go every day, it’s even simpler: I do not see it at all anymore. All that remains is the vague feeling that it was charming, and these five words that are indivisibly bound together: a charming square at Meknes. … I don’t see anything anymore: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.” ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
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“Cinema d’auteur, cinema about people, about emotions. About la difficulté d’être, the difficulty of being, existential problems. That’s what the nouvelle vague is. The early ’60s was all about that.” ~ Charlotte Rampling
- “To reach beyond what you are you must ignore the rules and fashions of the day. Or perhaps better yet cast them way out in your peripheral vision where you can still see them but only as a vague reference point. This doesn’t mean that all the rules are gone. It might mean that you adopt a far tighter code of conduct to ensure the necessary level of intensity and adventure.” ~ Peter Croft
- “Become conscious of what you think during the day. A negative thought will enter you. At first it will be vague, innocuous, but then it will root in your consciousness and soon it will be impossible to eradicate.” ~ Frederick Lenz
- “Unless an action is rightly thought out and its steps rightly planned, every stage of its performance will probably remain vague and therefore unsatisfactory for the doer and all those concerned.” ~ Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
- “The film is ambiguous, an ambiguity that reflects on Japan today, and a world in which nothing is clear. Once I made the film [Takeshis’], I realized it was about this feeling of vague disquiet in Japan and in the rest of the world, a feeling that is gaining on us, getting less vague.” ~ Takeshi Kitano
- “The word ‘security’ is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment. The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security.” ~ Hugo Black
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“Old noted oak! I saw thee in a mood Of vague indifference; and yet with me Thy memory, like thy fate, hath lingering stood For years, thou hermit, in the lonely sea Of grass that waves around thee!” ~ John Clare
- “I think the hardest thing to teach a student is that what he or she puts down on paper is changeable. It’s not the final thing, it’s the first thing, which may just be the suggestive, vague identification of something that you have to come back to and rewrite.” ~ M. H. Abrams
- “When you want to organize knowledge. you will be careful to base the classification upon essential qualities. You will thus derive classes in which the members have the greatest amount of resemblance to one another and the greatest amount of difference from the members of other classes. But suppose that, instead of organizing knowledge, you set out to organize ignorance and prejudice. You will then do precisely the opposite.You will keep the classification vague and flexible, so that it can be made to include just whatever individuals you choose.” ~ Barrows Dunham
- “I don’t suppose you do know precisely what you are after. I don’t think in the creative process anyone quite knows. They have a vague idea – a beckoning, an inkling of some truth – it is only in the process that it comes to any clarity.” ~ Lawren Harris
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“Sleep seems to hammer out for me the logical conclusions of my vague days, and offer them to me as dreams.” ~ D. H. Lawrence
- “My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “I shall never forget what I saw at the Museum of Modern Art: in a spotless schoolroom, fifty little girls painting away at tables covered with brushes, pots, tubes, bowls, staring into space and sticking out their tongues like the clever animals that ring a bell, tongues lolling and eyes vague. Teachers supervise these young creators of abstract art and slap their wrists if what they paint represents something and dangerously inclines toward realism. The mothers – still at the Picasso stage – are not admitted.” ~ Jean Cocteau
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“Public opinion is a mysterious and invisible power, to which everything must yield. There is nothing more fickle, more vague, or more powerful; yet capricious as it is, it is nevertheless much more often true, reasonable, and just, than we imagine.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
- “For who can wonder that man should feel a vague belief in tales of disembodied spirits wandering through those places which they once dearly affected, when he himself, scarcely less separated from his old world than they, is for ever lingering upon past emotions and bygone times, and hovering, the ghost of his former self, about the places and people that warmed his heart of old?” ~ Charles Dickens
- “Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we, Light half-believers of our casual creeds, Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will’d, Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds, Whose vague resolves never have been fulfill’d; For whom each year we see Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new; Who hesitate and falter life away, And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too?” ~ Matthew Arnold
- “Whether a law be void for its repugnancy to the Constitution, is, at all times, a question of much delicacy, which out seldom, if ever, to be decided in the affirmative, in doubtful case. … But it is not on slight implication and vague conjecture that the legislature is to be pronounced to have transcended its powers, and its acts to be considered as void. The opposition between the Constitution and the law should be such that the judge feels a clear and strong conviction of their incompatibility with each other.” ~ John Marshall
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“The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.” ~ Antonin Artaud
- “The idea of freedom is quite in accord with a general, though vague, sentiment among us; it is an idea of fair play, of giving everyone a chance; and nothing arouses more general and active indignation among our people than the belief that someone or some class is not getting a fair chance.” ~ Charles Horton Cooley , Vague quotes about freedom
- “We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say this we think of that hour as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time; it does not occur to us that it can have any connexion with the day that has already dawned and can mean that death — or its first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never leave hold of us again — may occur this very afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon whose time-table, hour by hour, has been settled in advance.” ~ Marcel Proust
