Quotes About Uncertainty

I am first affrighted and confounded with that forelorn solitude, in which I am plac'd in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expell'd all human commerce, and left utterly abandon'd and disconsolate (Hume, 1739, p. 312).

As for abstruse thought and profound researches, ·nature also says·, I prohibit them, and if you engage in them I will severely punish you by the brooding melancholy they bring, by the endless uncertainty in which they involve you, and by the cold reception your announced discoveries will meet with when you publish them. Be a philosopher, ·nature continues·, but amidst all your philosophy be still a man.

There are many things that we can understand, but in the end it is a case of 'anything is possible'.

Unfortunately, we generally find it difficult to assess very small probabilities. We typically overestimate them (thinking the events more likely than they are) and underestimate very high probabilities.

Chaos: when the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.

It makes sense to predict likely future performance from past performance. Indeed, we often don't have much else to go on. Unfortunately, however, the past can be an uncertain guide to the future.

Smyth's predictions of the date of the Second Coming, as with everyone else's predictions of this event, have proved inaccurate.

was the only incoming they'd taken in days. How do you go about telling a guy who is alive only because he didn't use the shitter at the wrong time that he ought to go back home, go to school, get married and mortgaged, have kids, and commit to the world when he knows for a fact that nothing in this world is real except chance?

There are times in our lives when we must move forward with faith, and actually take some steps into the dark, before the promised blessings come.

Sometimes it seems that a plan is a useful illusion until life figures out where you really should be headed.

Teach your tongue to say 'I don't know.

I started having doubts right on top of my certainty.

The truth is I'm in a place without a bright side or a one best thing. I'm in a place where, honest to God, you feel you can kill your friends just by asking the names of stars.

It wasn't here or there that had ever been scary. It was the middle ground, that long desolate space between, that scared the hell out of me.

It had never been that addicts don't care whether they lived or died, it was that the feeling you were chasing rested right against the brink and sometimes you just fell over.

Perhaps real "faith" involves seeing ambiguity not as an enemy, but as a vital part of the journey.

Sometimes things go wrong, no matter how careful you are.

Given his age, Jan Bublanski was afraid of many things. But perhaps he feared the absence of doubt most of all. He was a man of faith who was uncomfortable in the face of convictions too strongly held or over-simplified explanations. He was forever producing counter-arguments and contrary hypotheses. Nothing was so certain that it could not be challenged one more time.

Fue como cuando en un avión, de repente, a la azafata le empieza a temblar la mano durante el vuelo, ese momento en el que comienzas a pensar que te vas a estrellar.

We risk being confronted by an explosion of intelligence, a technological singularity, as Vernor Vinge put it. Everything that happens after that lies beyond our event horizon.

No parent should have to decide. After all, no-one could anticipate what was best for the child.

Kira was on her way, unhinged on top of everything else.

It's what I fear, which for me is as good as knowing.

Gli argini della memoria» aveva detto Joseph. Che espressione misteriosa, come se la memoria fosse un fiume. Ed era così che Tushi vedeva Joseph adesso: in riva a un fiume, con i pantaloni arrotolati sopra le caviglie e le lunghe gambe che sguazzavano nell'acqua mentre si chinava a setacciare il limo, la sabbia e il fango che erano la sua storia. Cosa avrebbe dragato prima dell'alba? Qualcosa che l'avrebbe aiutato? Tushi lo sperava, ma non ne era sicura.