Nuance Quotes

“Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.”
― Bernard Berenson

“When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life, and it is only fair that one has to pay dearly for having assaulted men and things in this manner with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of tastes, the taste for the unconditional, should be cruelly fooled and abused until a man learns to put a little art into his feelings and rather to risk trying even what is artificial — as the real artists of life do.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“When one loses the capacity for nuance, one becomes an extremist, a dangerous individual capable of committing war crimes.”
― Isaiah Senones

“The Scientist’s clear mind sees a foggy world, full of complexity and nuance and messiness, the Zealot’s foggy mind shows them a clear, simple world, full of crisp lines and black-and-white distinctions.”
― Tim Urban, What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies

“Most of my opinions are not as informed and well rounded as I would like. I have to be humble enough to accept that I don’t know enough. If my goal is to understand something true, then being challenged is a good thing. We need to be challenged occasionally and to get out of the echo chamber that is your own philosophical group or your own confirmation biased mind. The alternative is to only be able to hear one narrative and for those who oppose that narrative to be silenced, or to have uncivil debate by two polar opposite opinions. Truth is usually found to be hidden in a field of nuance and, as Albert Maysles said, “Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance.”
― Eric Overby, Legacy

“History often teaches us to embrace ambiguity, to understand there aren’t simple answers to complex questions, and Americans tend to like simple answers to complex questions. So the challenge is to use history to help the public feel comfortable with nuance and complexity.”
― Lonnie G. Bunch III

“In order to think through things clearly, we need other opinions and viewpoints in order to navigate into the nuance. We need civil debate to present opposing viewpoints and point out our blind spots. We need the ability to speak freely and civilly to one another.”
― Eric Overby, Legacy

“It will find its way into the final volumes, I expect,' said Mr. [Fred] Sweetman when we discussed it. 'The poets will see to that. They have a way of adding nuance to the meaning of things.”
― Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words

“I'm dead if I'm not wired
Crucified if not proclaimed
Cut off if not in contact
Devoid of soul if not ashamed
Terminal if not content
Last in line if not number one
Sorrowful if not elated
All is lost if all's not won
Eternal tipping of the scales
They fail to balance out
Doomed to drown in rushing floods
Or perish in a drought”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“There is a trailer that I pass on the drive to my parents’ house in Robards,
and obstructing the dance of the overgrown weeds
is a Trump sign.
Last summer, another sign went up next to it.
The sign, handily made of cardboard and black marker, said,
“EXTRA FRUITS AND VEGGIES FROM GARDEN,
STOP BY AND GET YOU SOME.”
― Belle Townsend

“If all of your ideas are correct, will there be room to add new information? Can you pour any more liquid into a full cup?”
― Eric Overby

“I never really understood why people look to comedians for moral certitude or judge them other than on the humor of their jokes, they are not prophets, despite what some might claim.”
― C.A.A. Savastano

“Practice of nuance means asking painful, difficult questions—questions that might reveal something new or bring a position into different relief or otherwise illuminate our perspectives.”
― Sarah Stewart Holland, I Think You're Wrong (But I'm Listening): A Guide to Grace-Filled Political Conversations

“When everyone says the same thing about some complex topic, what should come to your mind is, 'wait a minute, nothing can be that simple, something's wrong.' That's the immediate light that should go off in your brain when you ever hear unanimity on some complex topic." (The Ezra Klein Show 2021/04/23)”
― Noam Chomsky

“We tend to chew life into pieces to make it easier for us to swallow, but the challenge is to know that life is a jawbreaker and to be fair to the things we experience, you have to gulp. Especially people.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“She is eager to rewrite the pages. They are too grandiose, too preachy. She has come to appreciate short sentences.”
― Lara Ehrlich, Animal Wife

“I think we must leave very soon, or else stay the winter.”
The window was open; the breeze passed over us. It was a trick of his, to set a sentence out like a plate on a table and see what you would put on it.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“‪Cooking is so infinitely nuanced that to write completely about how to cook any dish would require a manuscript longer than a David Foster Wallace novel and include twice as many footnotes within twice as many endnotes. And then no one would be able to follow it, let alone cook from it.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Egg: A Culinary Exploration of the World's Most Versatile Ingredient

“I’m growing to believe that I shouldn’t have an opinion on some things or at least shouldn’t have an opinion that people listen to. When asked about some of the current hot issues of the day, I have grown OK with saying, “It’s complicated, I haven’t really looked into it enough.” I don’t have to, and will never, know about everything. In order to really understand most things, it takes a lot of research.”
― Eric Overby

“The behavior of any human being is, of course, a very complex phenomenon, and the historian who attempts to "explain" it is indulging in a certain arrogance.”
― Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

“There are emanations of god we can’t even see. What’s important is that you feel it.”

“But I want to know.”

“You think anyone knows? A mother loves the way she sees her child. A people love their myth of a homeland. You love your Miriam.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“Both God and the Devil are in the details…”
― D. Michael Quinn, Chosen Path: A Memoir

“As concepts like people-pleasing and self-care become more mainstream, complex ideas like boundaries are often diluted in ways that ultimately discourage us from building healthy relationships. We’re told that if someone doesn’t bring us “love and light at all times,” we should “cut them out.” We’re told that if someone disagrees with us, we should leave them behind to “protect our peace.” We’re told that if someone can’t meet every single one of our needs, we “deserve better.”

These one-dimensional platitudes ignore the reality that human relationships are complicated. They impede our healing by encouraging us to seek an unattainable standard, and they prevent us from looking inward to assess how we may be contributing to our own unhappiness or disempowerment.”
― Hailey Paige Magee, Stop People Pleasing: And Find Your Power

“For designers to understand their work as part of a dialogue influences the design output in much more nuanced ways, and relieves the designer from the burden of needing to control every aspect of the experience.”
― Tania Allen, Solving Critical Design Problems: Theory and Practice

“We crawl by inches. What we find today we will wipe from the blackboard tomorrow and reject it—unless it shows up again the day after tomorrow. And if we find anything which would suit us, that thing we will eye with particular distrust.”
― Bertolt Brecht, Galileo

“We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don't...the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

“An ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and as a rule witty or deceitful. I propose to use the word in an extended sense, and shall think relevant to my subject any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.”
― William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity

“One of the biggest problems with so-called "cancel culture" is not the "cancelling" itself. Instead, it the crisis of imagination that exposes our collective inability to engage the complexities of social issues with nuance.

What generally happens is that when there is any significant call for accountability and justice, it is uncritically deemed "cancel culture", pointing to the few extremes as "proof". Without question, ruthless public shaming and ostracization is never ultimately beneficial to all involved. However, that fact is too often forced through a binary lens that fails to address the individual and systemic issues at play, posit restorative/transformative consequences, and require better, more informed accountability.

This is further complicated by the tendency of those with social privilege to lean into the rhetoric of "dialogue" and some variety of "bothsidesism" that fails to address underlying systemic imbalances of power and relative impact of social issues, all while policing tone and emotion as though anger and hurt are disqualifying.

If there is a tendency for some to lean too strongly into "cancelling"- a legitimate issue that we need to address- it is largely because it is an attempt at correcting the over-emphasis on biased, normative systems that benefit the privileged and perpetuate harm.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“J'avais plusieurs visages parce que j'étais jeune et que je ne savais pas moi-même qui j'étais et qui je voulais être.”
― Milan Kundera, The Joke

“I guess when you live somewhere, you take things for granted in your own backyard and the nuances get lost in daily commutes.”
― Joseph Carro, The Little Coffee Shop of Horrors Anthology 2