Quotes About Uncertainty

Even when we want to be timid and play it safe, we should pause for a moment to imagine what we might be missing.

You never know," said Raistlin with a glance at the kitchen. "People change.

But there was never any knowing or any certitude; the time to come always had more than one possible direction. One could not even give up hope. The wind would blow, the sand would settle, and in some as yet unforeseen manner time would bring about a change which could only be terrifying, since it would not be a continuation of the present.

It's a madhouse, of course. A complete, utter madhouse. I only hope to God it remains one.

Although this was not a comforting point of view, he did not reject it, because it coincided with one of his basic beliefs: that a man must at all costs keep some part of himself outside and beyond life. If he should ever for an instant cease doubting, accept wholly the truth of what his senses conveyed to him, he would be dislodged from the solid ground to which he clung and swept along with the current, having lost all objective sense, totally involved with existence.

You know what?" he said with great earnestness. "I think we're both afraid of the same thing. And for the same reason. We've never managed, either one of us, to get all the way into life. We're hanging on to the outside for all we're worth, convinced we're going to fall off at the next bump. Isn't that true?

Since the world began has any man ever been able to know what would happen tomorrow? The world of men is today. I'm asking you to open your heart today. Tomorrow belongs to Allah ...

But there was never any knowing or any certitude; the time to come always had more than one possible direction.

He still felt coreless - he was no one, and he was standing here in the middle of no country. The place was counterfeit, a waiting room between connections, a transition from one way of being to another, which for the moment was neither way, no way.

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well.

Monsters were one thing. She was used to monsters, she could deal with monsters. A noise in the darkness, with nothing attached to it, was another.

There's so much going on here, and out there, and places we don't even know about. Everything's so scary and uncertain. We never know when fate will shake it all up. That's pretty deep. You gotta wonder how we'll ever make it through. I guess we can fall back on what's gotten us this far. A positive attitude and lots of denial?

End? You don't mean like, dead end?

so, what happened next will have to go down in my book of Bad Decisions, planted firmly in the chapter entitled, I have no idea what I was thinking

I fear that there will be no neat ending to this, in the manner of the old Greek plays. Where the Gods descend, and all is explained, and tidied away.

If reports about a candidate talk about how something "raises questions," creates "shadows," or anything similar, be aware that these are all too often weasel words used to create the impression of wrongdoing out of thin air.

Are you sure what you're doing is wrong?

The gods tempt us. They offer us riches and sweet smelling women, tres leches, each milk sweeter than the one before. But you cannot beat the gods. The grander house and the bigger deal only mean more borrowed time, more risk. When you build your life on a house of cards, you never know when the joker will turn up.

I feel like I'm running in a figure of eight, don't know if I'm coming or going, early or late.

This is the trouble with history, though. Even if you were there, which I obviously was, it's sometimes very difficult to pin down.

Why Brownlee left, and where he went, Is a mystery even now. For if a man should have been content It was him; two acres of barley, One of potatoes, four bullocks, A milker, a slated farmhouse. He was last seen going out to plough On a March morning, bright and early. By noon Brownlee was famous; They had found all abandoned, with The last rig unbroken, his pair of black Horses, like man and wife, Shifting their weight from foot to Foot, and gazing into the future.

It's like someone who prays every night saying God's a good listener. Just because you're talking to us doesn't mean we're listening. With me and God, you never really know.

Waiting, he thought, was the most miserable condition a man could find himself in. His whole life, he had been waiting for one thing or another.

If I've learned one thing, it's that the unfortunate thing about life is that everything's mixed. There's no absolute good and there's no absolute evil. There's just a lot of confusion.