Ambivalence Quotes

Author says he suffered from both "a craving to be famous" and "a horror of being known to like being known.

What am I doing? Tearing myself. My usual occupation at most times.

Charles Dickens

Don Bradman will bat no more against England, and two contrary feelings dispute within us: relief, that our bowlers will no longer be oppressed by this phenomenon; regret, that a miracle has been removed from among us. So must ancient Italy have felt when she heard of the death of Hannibal.

R.C. Robertson-Glasgow

He had to pause for his usual misgivings.

The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism—an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.

A pensive personality and ambivalent attitude towards power and money can cause other people to take a high production or creative person for granted.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.

F. Scott Fitzgerald