Quotes About Uncertainty

chemistry experiments where you started pouring different things into a beaker knowing full well there would be an explosion, and ultimately a mess to clean up.

Ponto nox incubat atra.

The one safety for the defeated is to have no hope of safety

In human affairs there is no room for certainty

ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram, perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna: quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna est iter in silvis, ubi caelum condidit umbra Iuppiter, et rebus nox abstulit atra colorem.'' - Virgil, Aenid Liber VI, 268-272.

It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.

Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.

The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.

she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.

We're all in the dark. We try to find out, but can you imagine anything more ludicrous than one person's opinion of another person? One goes along thinking one knows; but one really doesn't know

Well, we must wait for the future to show.

I feel certain that I'm going mad again, I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices

There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to foretell the flight of a word? It is a balloon that sails over tree-tops. To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities. What is to come? I know not. But, as I put down my glass I remember; I am engaged to be married. I am to dine with my friends tonight. I am Bernard.

If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don't admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers don't do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one.

That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living.

Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.

The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.

Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning?

She did not know. She did not mind...She had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything...-and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it.

To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people's eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self.

She was off like a bird, bullet, or arrow, impelled by what desire, shot by whom, at what directed, who could say?

but after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter 'I.' One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman walking I was not quite sure. Back one was always hailed to the letter 'I.

Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour - landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair!

There was in Lily a thread of something; a flare of something; something of her own Mrs. Ramsay liked very much indeed, but no man would, she feared. [...] He was not in love of course; it was one of those unclassified affections of which there are so many.