Quotes About Uncertainty

I'm afraid to live any place but in expectation. I'm no life-risk.

It looks like freedom but it feels like death, it's something in between I guess. It's closing time.

I don't ask for information that I probably wouldn't be able to process even if it were granted to me. --Aug 2016 interview, when asked what might be in store for us after the big sunset

I'm blackening pages, but I don't know if it's writing.

What a pity it is that war, with its terrible suffering and devastation, should often be more vivid than peace. In war, your comrades mean everything to you, life is unsure and thus precious, and you know that the sword is raised above you. Now it is peace. Your friends still mean everything, life is still precious, and look--why didn't you notice it?--there's the sword, still raised above you.

We might say the universe is so constituted as to maximize play. The best games are not those in which all goes smoothly and steadily toward a certain conclusion, but those in which the outcome is always in doubt. Similarly, the geometry of life is designed to keep us at the point of maximum tension between certainty and uncertainty, order and chaos. Every important call is a close one. We survive and evolve by the skin of our teeth. We really wouldn't want it any other way.

Of mystery there is no end. Of clarity, there is precious little.

probability is the very guide of life

I think it's my adventure, my trip, my journey, and I guess my attitude is, let the chips fall where they may.

Don't be a guy who feels bad," said Tetsuo. "Nobody ever knows what to do. Our life-task is to decide what to do.

Unforeseen surprises are the rule in science, not the exception. Remember: Stuff happens.

If a system is chaotic (most are), then it implies that however good the resolving power may be, the time over which the system is predictable is limited. Perfect predictability is not achievable, simply because we are limited in our resolving power.

Between successive measurements along the z axis, we turn through 90 degrees, make an intermediate measurement, and turn it back to its original direction. Will a subsequent measurement along the z axis confirm the original measurement? The answer is no. The

I have no idea where I am going. . . . But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.

Lei non crede in niente - disse il professore. - Oh sì, in qualche cosa. Forse in troppe, per i tempi che corrono.

Time, as we all know, passes. Whether it returns in quite the same way is doubtful.

God gave us the power to imagine the future but gave us no power to control it.

You know that feeling. When you like a boy but then he starts to like you and you stop liking him.

Time is like this boat that you are on. You can't see who is steering it, but it is taking you to weird unknown and sometimes awful or terrifying places.

Those who are comfortably established in life tend to have no need to ask what it means. They are the insiders, and for them, how things are is how they should be. The status quo is so much a given that it goes not just unquestioned but unseen, and the blind eye is always turned. It is those whose place is uncertain, and who are thus uneasy in their existence, who need to ask why. And who often come up with radically new answers.

So when dogmatic atheists assume that science has all the answers, or imagine that it soon will, they are no more immune than the most literal religious fundamentalist to the deceptive enchantment of certainty.

Al-Tabari understood that human truth is always flawed—that realities are multiple and that everyone has some degree of bias. The closest one might come to objectivity would be in the aggregate, which is why he so often concludes a disputed episode with that time-honored phrase "Only God knows for sure.

Especially the doubt, which is in many ways essential to real faith.

It was as though nobody had considered the possibility that he might die, not even Muhammad himself.