Quotes About Uncertainty

Somewhere along the way the hopes of something better had become the dread of something worse. News

Her sanity was perhaps an unwarranted assumption.

Now that sense of intellectual urgency has dissipated. Tolerance, relativism, the postmodern refusal to commit, the cultural triumph of uncertainty – all these rule out a repeat of the pyrotechnics in H3. Perhaps, too, there is currently so much specialization, and so many movements and fissures within higher education, that the important questions have been lost.

But you need to have lived years in nothingness to understand how a person can suddenly become frightened by a possibility.

Il eût fallu avoir peur de ce bonheur, peur de tout le malheur qu'il pouvait annoncer.

A veces, en medio del dolor, llegamos a dudar de la realidad de lo que hemos vivido.

Personne ne pouvait imaginer qu'il lui arrivait d'avoir peur de ce bonheur, peur qu'il puisse contenir la menace du malheur.

El corazón, pese a estar siempre lleno de vacilaciones y de incertidumbres, te impulsa a hacer algo, a actuar, para que nunca puedas lamentar no haberlo intentado todo

It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.

Although history may therefore seem like a series of inevitable events, the actual future is seldom foreseen.

I tend to stumble through life as if lost in a deep forest with an out-of-date map that I can't figure out how to fold. The trees all look familiar, animals are making scary sounds in the bushes and the sandwich in my bag isn't what I ordered. No doubt I'm not alone in this.

About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.

The one thing we can be confident of is that history is not over, and that wherever the most exciting new ideas of the next century come from, it will almost certainly be from someplace we don't expect.

Kingdoms rise and fall; they also strengthen and weaken; governments may make their presence known in people's lives quite sporadically, and for many people in history, it was not at all clear whose government they were actually in. Even until quite recently, many of the world's inhabitants were not quite sure of what country they were citizens, or why it should matter.

The very fact that we don't know what debt is, the very flexibility of the concept, is the basis of its power.

I was once again doing something I didn't want to do, and once again I didn't know why. I was leaving the beach to drive back "home" where it was cold and wet. While the mountainous city of Asheville was certainly a beautiful place, I felt better near the ocean. I'm not saying the ocean is better than mountains, fields, cities, rivers, or anywhere else; the ocean was simply my preference.

C'è un momento in cui si compie un piccolo passo, pensò, si devia di un millimetro dalla solita via, a quel punto si è costretti a posare anche un secondo piede e d'un tratto si finisce si un percorso sconosciuto.

Chuang Tzu had long ago written words that now expressed Jung's predicament: My dependence is like that of the snake on his skin. How can I tell why I do this, or why I do that?56

What looked safe was not safe. What looked hard and unsafe was probably safer. Anyway, safe was somewhere else in the world.

She was young and scared, and hadn't realized there was time to spare.

Louisa went about her duties at the hospital, trying not to dwell on the fact that this might be her last day alive.

All knowledge degenerates into probability.

Abstruse thought and profound researches I prohibit, and will severely punish, by the pensive melancholy which they introduce, by the endless uncertainty in which they involve you, and by the cold reception which your pretended discoveries shall meet with, when communicated. Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.

However, since we have never observed the construction of a world or observed the world constructors, we have no way of knowing what causal relations might be involved in such a project; all we can do is construct hypotheses, without any way of judging which of these are more or less likely.