Quotes About Uncertainty

No religion is a true religion that does not make men tingle to their finger tips with a sense of infinite hazard.

I continued to doubt. But I was not afraid. I just didn't want this to end.

The particulars of new places grabbed me and held me, the sweep of new coasts, cold, lovely dawns. The world was incomprehensibly large, and there was still so much to see.... I liked surrendering to the onrush, the uncertainty, the serendipity of the road. And I generally liked being a stranger, an observer, often surprised.

Hardin lived in a world he manipulated day to day, you never knew when a piece of information might have a use. Life was a jigsaw puzzle someone had kicked apart on the day Hardin was born and he was still putting it back together a piece at a time.

He had no faith in the permanence of any of this. What he'd seen of life had shown him that the world had little of comfort or assurance. He suspected that there were no givens, no map through the maze. Here in falling dark with the world rolling simultaneously toward him and away from him everything seemed no more than random. Life blindsides you so hard you can taste the bright copper blood in your mouth then it beguiles you with a gift of profound and appalling beauty.

For the first time in his life he realized that sometimes in life you go through doors that only open one way. You can stand before them and think about whether you want to go through them or not. But when you do and the door closes behind you there is no way to go back. The door is featureless and unknobbed and smooth as a sheet of glass. You can pound on it and claw till your fingers are bleeding, scream until your throat is raw, but no one will open the door, no one will even hear you.

Hunkered there in the darkness, he felt before himself a door, madness already raising the hand to knock.

Binder was living on the edge already and knowing it, knowing that he was spending time like money he might not be able to replace.

We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.

The present tense made him nervous.

The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.

The single most important fact, perhaps, of the entire movie industry: NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.

Men never cling to their dreams with such tenacity as at the moment when they are losing faith in them, and know it, but do not dare yet to confess it to themselves.

Unhappy man he, that hath no surer portion than what this variable world will afford him. The

I do not even know what a matrix is," Heisenberg complained to Jordan. As

The atoms or the elementary particles are not real," Heisenberg said. "They form a world of potentialities and possibilities rather than one of things or facts.

Cosmologist Stephen Hawking is reported to have said, "Whenever I hear of Schrödinger's cat, I want to reach for my gun.

more terrifying now that he had been

Of all the people I have ever known you are the only one I don't know.

I don't know what the game was. I only know its name; they call it life. I'm not sure how it should be played. No one ever told me. No one ever tells anybody. I only know we must have played it wrong. We broke some rule or other along the way, and never knew it at the time. I don't know what the stakes are. I only know we've forfeited them, they're not for us. We've lost. That's all I know. We've lost, we've lost.

We all exist in a state of doubt even when we do not realize it.

Because we cannot predict the future, we diversify. —Paul Samuelson

Risk, like pornography, is difficult to define, but we think we know it when we see it.

When all is said and done, there are only two kinds of investors: those who don't know where the market is headed, and those who don't know that they don't know. Then again, there is a third kind: those who know they don't know, but whose livelihoods depend on appearing to know.