Quotes About Uncertainty

She felt as though everything were beginning to be double in her soul, just as objects sometimes appear double to over-tired eyes. She hardly knew at times what it was she feared, and what she hoped for. Whether she feared or desired what had happened, or what was going to happen, and exactly what she longed for, she could not have said.

Moreover, during his wife's confinement, something had happened that seemed extraordinary to him. He, an unbeliever, had fallen into praying, and at the moment he prayed, he believed. But that moment had passed, and he could not make his state of mind at that moment fit into the rest of his life.

Oh, it's wonderful to be your age,' continued Anna. 'I know and remember that blue haze, like you see on the mountains in Switzerland. The haze covering everything at that blessed point when your childhood is coming to an end, and the path leading from that huge, carefree, happy circle becomes narrower and narrower, and it is both jolly and terrifying entering that enfilade, even though it is bright and beautiful...Who has not been through that?

But does it make any difference now?" he thought. "And what will be there, and what has been done here? Why was I so sorry to part with life? There was something in this life I didn't and still don't understand...

He spoke with such self-confidence that his hearers could not be sure whether what he said was very witty or very stupid.

It was one of those things that one knows but cannot even tell oneself - so dreadful and shameful it would be to be mistaken.

There is nothing certain, nothing at all except the unimportance of everything I understand, and the greatness of something incomprehensible but all-important.

But I am alive still. Now what's to be done? what's to be done?

What right had I to imagine that she would wish to unite her life with mine? Who and What am I? A man of no account, wanted by no one and of no use to anyone.

In order to undertake anything in family life, it is necessary that there be either complete discord between the spouses or loving harmony. But when the relations between spouses are uncertain and there is neither the one nor the other, nothing can be undertaken.

While I doubted, I had hope; but now there is no hope left and all the same I doubt everything.

The question how to live had hardly begun to grow a little clearer to him, when a new, insoluble question presented itself—death.

He spoke with such complete self-confidence that no one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid. He

When I doubted, there was hope; but now there is no hope and even so I doubt everything.

You can't understand it; for you men, who are free and make your own choice, it's always clear whom you love. But a girl's in a position of suspense, with all a woman's or maiden's modesty, a girl who sees you men from afar, who takes everything on trust,— a girl may have, and often has, such a feeling that she cannot tell what to say.

And at that moment Pierre felt that Hélène not only could, but must, be his wife, and that it could not be otherwise. He knew this at that moment as surely as if he had been standing at the altar with her. How and when this would be he did not know, he did not even know if it would be a good thing (he even felt, he knew not why, that it would be a bad thing), but he knew it would happen.

But as a young man in love trembles and thrills, not daring to utter what he dreams of by night, and looks about fearfully, seeking help or the possibility of delay and flight, when the desired moment comes and he stands alone with her, so now Rostov, having attained what he desired more than anything in the world, did not know how to approach the sovereign and presented thousands of considerations to himself for why it was unsuitable, improper, and impossible.

What is bad? What is good? What should one love and what hate? What does one live for? And what am I? What is life, and what is death? What power governs all? There was no answer to any of these questions, except one, and that not a logical answer and not at all a reply to them. The answer was: "You'll die and all will end. You'll die and know all, or cease asking." But dying was also dreadful.

It is not given to man to know what is right and what is wrong. Men always did and always will err, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.

You live in better style than we do, but though you often earn more than you need, you are very likely to lose all you have. You know the proverb, 'Loss and gain are brothers twain.' It often happens that people who are wealthy one day are begging their bread the next.

Then these moments of perplexity began to recur oftener and oftener, and always in the same form. They were always expressed by the questions: What is it for? What does it lead to?

Three days and nights of awful suffering and death. Why, that may at once, any minute, come upon me too.

One step beyond that boundary line which resembles the line dividing the living from the dead, lies uncertainty, suffering, and death. And what is there? Who is there?—there beyond that field, that tree, that roof lit up by the sun? No one knows, but one wants to know. You fear and yet long to cross that line, and know that sooner or later it must be crossed and you will have to find out what is there, just as you will inevitably have to learn what lies the other side of death. But

I was afraid of life and strove against it, yet I still hoped for something from it.