Top 106 Ambivalent Quotes & Sayings

If you're feeling intransigently ambivalent, it might pay to formally accept what's already happening - that is, decide not to decide.

I focus on the task and try and do it as best we can. And we're constantly evolving it, because it's my way of trying to make sense of all these ambivalent feelings I have.

There is no shame is being ambivalent about almost everything in your life.

Regarding Wikileaks, I have profound ambivalent feelings about it. I am a firm believer in a strong intelligence service. There's a need for classified information.

If I've been accused a number of times of writing plays where the endings are ambivalent, indeed, that's the way I find life.

I think it's still difficult to write about motherhood and anxiety, that talking about not wanting to be a mother or feeling ambivalent about motherhood makes people uneasy. The ambivalent mother is certainly much more interesting.

Americans have always had an ambivalent attitude toward intelligence. When they feel threatened, they want a lot of it, and when they don't, they regard the whole thing as somewhat immoral.

When you're dealing with an ambivalent relationship, you're constantly on guard, grappling with questions of trust.

The biggest problem that women have is being ambivalent about their own power, ... We should be comfortable with the idea of wielding power. We shouldn't feel that it detracts from our femininity.

I think ultimately one would say that the most difficult part of the Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer is the balancing of the main character. To get him being so ambivalent in his whole conception.

I have an ambivalent feeling about the Israeli army. Growing up in Tel Aviv, being involved in the arts, the last thing artists want to do is fight.

'Macbeth,' I am ambivalent about. I don't like that play, in fact.

Humans seem to be programmed to think of ambivalent feelings at the same time. That is the driving force behind human beings: to be the warrant of all things and to control other worlds.

Although I'm certainly glad cartoons are finally getting some respect as an art, I'm fairly ambivalent to see cartooning as a legitimate academic offering. If comics need to be deconstructed and explained, something is really wrong with them.

Visiting is a pleasure; being visited is usually a mixed or ambivalent joy. ... The visitor can always go home; the visitee is already home, trapped like a rat in a drainpipe.

We all have ambivalent feelings toward work ... We try to avoid it, and yet we seem to require it for our emotional well-being.

Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.

I'm ambivalent about the Orange Prize. I was really proud to be shortlisted alongside the other writers, whom I admire. That said, I don't know if it's best way of addressing gender inequality problems.

Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue, but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse.

The American public is somewhat ambivalent about what they expect out of thenational forest.

I think that the Greeks were extremely ambivalent about the stories of Amazons: they found them both thrilling and rather daunting at the same time.

Language is always ambivalent. Its forms mutate and connect in unexpected ways. It's hard to instrumentalize language. But I think it's better to explore linguistic potentials than to keep on using language that's past its expiration date.

Contradictory strands create an essay that's richly ambivalent.

The thing to do when you're feeling ambivalent is to wait.

You hated him in the movies! Now you're ambivalent.

I am ambivalent about London because I am so ambivalent about England in general.

The more ambivalent you are and the more uncertain you are, then you can get something that you cannot anticipate.

We all parent the best we can. Being human, we're ambivalent. We want perfection for our babies, but we also need sleep.

When asked at age 7 whether he had ambivalent feelings about girls. No, I hate 'em!

When we talk about communities, we seldom discuss the margins. But for every person nestled comfortably in the bosom of a community, there is someone else on the outskirts, feeling ambivalent. Ambiguous. Excluded. Unwilling or unable to come more fully into the fold.

Plenty of people who survive tragedies end up ambivalent about danger--frightened by it, yet strangely drawn to it.

I was watching MTV and there were girls dancing in suspended cages. That would be an ambivalent situation: "I'm trapped! ...but enjoying the music".

Gollum was so interesting to me because he's morally ambivalent, and I love the notion of a quest that is to lose something. Not to gain, but to get rid of something.

I've always been profoundly ambivalent about fame. I think it just eats the reality out of you and it can be intoxicating because I like some of it.

It is only when parental feelings are ineffective or too ambivalent or when the mother's emotions are temporarily engaged elsewhere that children feel lost.

...all along I've had an ambivalent relationship to photography - but as to whether I thought it an art form, or a craft, or a technique, well, I've always been taken with Henry Geldzahler's answer to that question when he said, I thought it was a hobby.

I wasn't remotely ambivalent about marrying the person I was marrying, but I was 35. I was deep into my adulthood, and I identified as single.

Fashion is as profound and critical a part of the social life of man as sex, and is made up of the same ambivalent mixture of irresistible urges and inevitable taboos.

I always seem to be cast as slightly wan, ethereal, troubled intellectuals or physically ambivalent bad lovers. But I'm here to tell you I'm quite the opposite in real life. In fact I'm a f**king fantastic lover.

Skilled workers historically have been ambivalent toward automation, knowing that the bodies it would augment or replace were theoccasion for both their pain and their power.

He [Tony Blair] was always ambivalent about the [Rupert] Murdoch papers. But he gave other papers the chance to believe it was just about 'The Independent.' And that was wrong.

The 'Grace of Kings' isn't a narrative about a return to some golden age, to a lost status quo ante. It portrays a dynamic world in transition, where the redistribution of power is messy, morally ambivalent, and only lurches toward more justice.

When it came to religion, I felt I belonged to no one. It saddened me, it angered me, it confused me, and it made me religiously ambivalent. So I chose my calling: Cubs baseball.

There is some of the paradox of foreign policy polling. So on Iraq and Syria, the President is pretty much doing what Americans want, he's not very engaged, but they don't like the results, his polling numbers are going down. Americans may be ambivalent and disengaged with the world, they don't want a President who is ambivalent and disengaged with the world.

I'm ambivalent about tech.

Real love isn't ever ambivalent.

Throughout my life, I have grappled with my own identity, who I am. As a young child, I often felt ambivalent about myself, in fact, confused.

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.

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.

He used to sit on my lap. I was sort of ambivalent about that. He was surviving any way he could.

Pro-choice supporters are often heard using the cool language of the courts and the vocabulary of rights. Americans who are deeply ambivalent about abortion often miss the sound of caring.

As an actor, I'm ambivalent because I'm focused on the other person and what they're giving me, what I need to be giving them, and what the character is thinking.

It's time to "stop being ambivalent." ... They (groups like the Islamic State) have no ideology beyond violence and chaos and the slaughter of innocent people.

Throughout my life, I have grappled with my own identity, who I am. As a young child, I often felt ambivalent about myself; in fact, confused.

I prefer to make a film that people have a really intense reaction to than have a film that people feel ambivalent about.

The relationship between stars and their fans is always ambivalent and often highly charged with contradictory and ambivalent emotions, of which the most powerful is need.

I have somewhat ambivalent feelings about the recognition of individuals when so much of this was a team effort.

I think the thing I fear most in life is waking up one day and not feeling challenge - feeling ambivalent or glib about what I have to do that day.

I've had some ambivalent feelings about being an actor. I don't know that I've ever been totally and completely comfortable with it.

America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children.