Quotes About Uncertainty

The risk from viruses is an unanswered question - and it won't be answered until you have had organs transplanted into humans over many years.

You were not in control You had no visibility: maybe there was a car in front of you, maybe not.

Everything is just very, very blurry. I've never had proper vision.

Life doesn't care about your vision. Stuff happens, and you've just got to deal with it. You roll with it; that's the beauty of it all.

Monsters just outside our peripheral vision are scarier to contemplate than monsters miles away or in someplace only a fool would set foot in.

When the world is in the midst of change, when adversity and opportunity are almost indistinguishable, this is the time for visionary leadership and when leaders need to look beyond the survival needs of those they're serving.

I don't know whether I can call myself a visionary.

once told Wendell that I'm a terrible decision maker, that often what I think I want doesn't turn out the way I'd imagined.

I think about how it's the not knowing that torments all of us. Not knowing why your boyfriend left, not knowing what's wrong with your body. Not knowing if you could have saved your son. At a certain point, we all have to come to terms with the unknown and the unknowable. Sometimes we'll never know why.

Quase' é sempre o mais difícil, não é?" disse, certa tarde. "Quase conseguir alguma coisa, quase ter um bebê, quase conseguir uma tomografia sem problemas, quase não ter mais câncer." Pensei em como muitas pessoas evitam tentar coisas que realmente querem na vida, por ser mais doloroso chegar perto do objetivo, mas não consegui-lo, do que nem chegar a arriscar.

Not knowing is a good place to start," he says, and this feels like a revelation. I spend so much time trying to figure things out, chasing the answer, but it's okay to not know .

Uncertainty, I'm starting to realize, doesn't mean the loss of hope – it means there's possibility. "I don't know what will happen next – how potentially exciting!" I'm going to have to figure out how to make the most of the life I have, illness or not, partner or not, the march of time notwithstanding.

Instead of wondering, Am I happy?, maximizers wonder, Is this the best I can do? They experience what Schwartz calls regret in anticipation of making a decision. As he puts it in his book, "You imagine how you'll feel if you discover that there was a better option available. And that leap of imagination may be all it takes to plunge you into a mire of uncertainty.

Julie started to see that we're all in Holland, because most people don't have lives that go exactly as planned.

The hiccup at this stage is that change involves the loss of the old and the anxiety of the new. Although often maddening for friends and partners to witness, this hamster wheel is part of the process; people need to do the same thing over and over a seemingly ridiculous number of times before they're ready to change.

I would have to cope with not knowing what my future held, manage my worry, and focus on living now.

Uncertainty, I'm starting to realize, doesn't mean the loss of hope—it means there's possibility. I don't know what will happen next—how potentially exciting!

But, Wendell says, like my patient, I've come up with my own way to cope. If I screw up my life, I can engineer my own death rather than have it happen to me. It may not be what I want, but at least I'll choose it. Like cutting off my nose to spite my face, this is a way to say, Take that, uncertainty.

We are afraid to have hope for things that we might not get.

anymore." I thought about how many people avoid trying for things they really want in life because it's more painful to get close to the goal but not achieve it than not to have taken the chance in the first place. During

At a certain point, we all have to come to terms with the unknown and the unknowable. Sometimes we'll never know why.

Lately I've been anxious about pretty much everything. Even little things like making small commitments have left me paralyzed. I've become cautious, afraid of taking risks and making mistakes because I've made so many already and I fear I won't have time to clean up the mistakes anymore.

Life has a 100 percent mortality rate. Every single one of us will die, and most of us have no idea how or when that will happen. In fact, as each second passes, we're all in the process of coming closer to our eventual deaths. As the saying goes, none of us will get out of here alive.

Not knowing is a good place to start," he says, and this feels like a revelation. I