Quotes About Uncertainty

We all think we know what happens after death. But maybe it's going to be not only weird but also dorky and comic and inconsistent.

"Death's a capricious thing, innit?" "Yes. Yes, she is."

Option 1: Attempt to back out. Probable result: Death after painful torture. Option 2: Do the job and hope. Probable result: Death but probably no torture (good)

Whether outright government-sanctioned persecution was inevitable, nobody could say for sure, but the fear of persecution was such that not even a practical man grounded in his everyday tasks, a person who tried his best to contain the uncertainty and the anxiety and the anger and operate according to the dictates of reason, could hope to preserve his equilibrium any longer.

That's it," he told Shepsie Tirschwell, "I can't live any longer not knowing what will happen tomorrow

Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.

That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.

It's never been easy to say what you really are, Mickey." "Oh, failure will do." "But at what?" "Failure at failing, for one.

Il coula sans venir voir le coup, sans jamais pressentir l'issue, avide au contraire de s'assouvir encore, mais il ne se réveilla pas. Arrêt cardiaque. Il n'était plus. Affranchi de l'être, entré dans le nulle part, sans même en avoir conscience. Comme il le craignait depuis le début.

If he no longer gave a shit, why did he give a shit?

The deeper reasonability of seeking danger is that there is, in any event, no escaping it.

But he was in his fifties and there I always question how hard can they get. With a younger guy you know it's an easier thing. With an older one you don't know.

A emoção principal, como já disse, era o desejo ardente. E ainda é. Não há alívio para esse desejo nem para a minha noção de mim mesmo como suplicante. Está claro: temo-lo quando estamos com ela e temo-lo quando estamos sem ela. Sendo assim, quem terminou? Fui eu, não indo à festa, ou foi ela ao aproveitar o facto de eu não ter ido?

The drive was interminable. Had he missed a turn or was this itself the next abode: a coffin that you endlessly steer through the placeless darkness, recounting and recounting the uncontrollable events that induced you to become someone unforeseen. And so fast! So quickly! Everything runs away, beginning with who you are, and at some indefinable point you come to half understand that the ruthless antagonist is yourself.

when real doubt ensues it disrupts our usual behavioural patterns.

Consensus is not always good; disagreement not always bad. If you do happen to agree, don't take that agreement—in itself—as proof that you are right. Never stop doubting.

If you have to plan for a future beyond the forecasting horizon, plan for surprise. That means, as Danzig advises, planning for adaptability and resilience.

All models are wrong," the statistician George Box observed, "but some are useful.

Fuzzy thinking can never be proven wrong. And only when we are proven wrong so clearly that we can no longer deny it to ourselves will we adjust our mental models of the world—producing a clearer picture of reality. Forecast, measure, revise: it is the surest path to seeing better.

Knowing what we don't know is better than thinking we know what we don't.

And yet this stagnation is a big reason why I am an optimistic skeptic. We know that in so much of what people want to predict—politics, economics, finance, business, technology, daily life—predictability exists, to some degree, in some circumstances. But there is so much else we do not know.

In one of history's great ironies, scientists today know vastly more than their colleagues a century ago, and possess vastly more data-crunching power, but they are much less confident in the prospects for perfect predictability.

Where there is no longer any opportunity for doubt, there is no opportunity for faith either.

And yet when I wish to explore how faith works, I usually sneak in by the back door of doubt, for I best learn about my own need for faith during its absence. God's invisibility guarantees I will experience times of doubt. Everyone dangles on a pendulum that swings from belief to unbelief, back to belief, and ends - where?