Quotes About Uncertainty

From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away. For the time being, our cities still shine through the night, and the fires still spread.

I was terrified. Especially because of the kids. It's such a big responsibility to take other people's children out in public these days. Who can tell what terrible thing will happen?

Now is the age of anxiety.

Knowledge may have its purposes, but guessing is always more fun than knowing.

Horror lets us know that how we expected the world to act has been indefinitely cancelled.

Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.

There is only one thing about which I am certain, and that is that there is very little about which one can be certain.

Now days are dragon-ridden.

Socrates. The wise are doubtful, and I should not be singular if, like them, I also doubted.

Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.

I sometimes think since I've retired, sitting in the shade here and feeling the winds shift, I must have been filled with a child dread you could catch somebody's dying if you got too close. And you can't be too sure.

The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.

The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.

no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.

Now, more than ever, we distinctly hear The dreadful shuffle of a murderous year And all our senses roaring as the Black Dog leaps upon the individual back.

The sense of danger must not disappear: The way is certainly both short and steep, However gradual it looks from here; Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

Baseball is the most perfect of games, solid, true, pure and precious as diamonds. If only life were so simple. Within the baselines anything can happen. Tides can reverse; oceans can open. That's why they say, "the game is never over until the last man is out." Colors can change, lives can alter, anything is possible in this gentle, flawless, loving game.

Growing up is a ritual, more deadly than religion, more complicated than baseball, for there seem to be no rules. Everything is experienced for the first time.

Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost. Rigour should be a signal to the historian that the maps have been made, and the real explorers have gone elsewhere.

you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write

I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write — W.S. Merwin, from "Berryman," Flower & Hand: Poems, 1977-1983 (Copper Canyon Press; English Language edition October 1, 1996)

I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write

I am an abyss that I am trying to cross.

Chance is another name that we give to our mistakes. And all of the best things in my films are mistakes.