Quotes About Uncertainty

I love telling stories, but I also am more aware now of how complex reality is and how difficult it is to really explain what happened or how I felt. Maybe that sometimes makes me a little bit vague, because I don't want to really put my finger on anything or set it in stone.

When I was 19, I celebrated my first Valentine's Day while being in a relationship. I was so excited, but didn't know what the rules were. What should I get him, or was I even supposed to get him something?

No one knows anything about economics. It's the great lie of the economists. By contrast in football people might have contrasting opinions, each of which has some validity. But the economists always speak in conditionals - what a mess.

On the road from the City of Skepticism, I had to pass through the Valley of Ambiguity.

Valor is a gift. Those having it never know for sure whether they have it till the test comes. And those having it in one test never know for sure if they will have it when the next test comes.

The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means.

When you're young, you don't really know quite what you're aiming at. You're very impulsive and acting on impulse, which is very important and valuable. But you're kind of swimming in a blind sea. When you get older, you have more of a sense of direction.

As writers, we can't predict who might come along who might find our offerings valuable.

Doubt packs more damage, kept secret.

So much of life is about standing on the curb, willing to see what rolls up.

So much of life is about standing on the curb, wiling to see what rolls up.

The daddy-at-home theory posits that concealed ovulation evolved to promote monogamy, to force the man to stay home, and thus to bolster his certainty about his paternity of his wife's children. The many-fathers theory instead posits that concealed ovulation evolved to give the women access to many sex partners and thus to leave many men uncertain as to whether they sired her children.

don't know whether Pertamina policies have changed since then.

Me kaikki elämme todellisuudessa, mutta kukaan meistä ei tiedä minkä näköinen se on.

Unless you are a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy

Maybe I'd see how you could be so certain that we had no chance...at all.

I wished I could imagine my life five years later, without me in it.

What history does prove is that how risky stocks seem, and how risky they actually are, are inversely correlated.

History has rewritten itself so many times I'm not really sure how it was to begin with -- it's a bit like trying to guess the original color of a wall when it's been repainted eight times.

Sometimes I don't know whether I'm thening or nowing.

Maybe those sorts of yes-or-no life-and-death decisions are easier to make because they are so black and white. I can cope with them because it's easier. Human emotions, well. . .they're just a fathomless collection of grays and I don't do so well on the midtones.

I don't need you to agree with me, she said quietly. I'll go away happy with a little bit of doubt. Doubt is good. It's an emotion we can build on. Perhaps if we feed it with curiosity it will blossom into something useful, like suspicion - and action.

I am by turns a petulant adolescent and a mature man, a melancholy loner and a wit telling actors their trade. I cannot decide whether I'm a philosopher or a moping teenager, a poet or a murderer, a procrastinator or a man of action. I might be truly mad or sane pretending to be mad or even mad pretending to be sane.

There is much unexplained in the world. It behoves one to be wary at all times. Just when you think you've got the hang of it, along comes string theory, collateralised debt obligations or Björk's new album, and bam! You're as confused as you were when you first started.