Quotes About Uncertainty

The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness, and all the thousand bitters which those men I speak of must necessarily taste in going over the following pages.

I should have known that every time I open the door of my room I am literally opening a Pandora's Box.

Once a person was asked to step into this brutal century, anything could happen

Ignatius, all at once you're your horrible old self. All at once I think I'm making a very big mistake.

Mr. Gonzalez watched Mr. Zalatimo probing his long index finger high into one of his nostrils. What would this one do? His feet tingled with fear.

In economics, it is often professionally better to be associated with highly respectable error than uncertainly established truth.

The only purpose of economic forecasts is to give astrology a better image.

To these there are no answers; no one knows, and anyone who presumes to answer does not know he doesn't know. But one thing is certain: there will be another of these episodes and yet more beyond. Fools, as it has long been said, are indeed separated, soon or eventually, from their money. So, alas, are those who, responding to a general mood of optimism, are captured by a sense of their own financial acumen. Thus it has been for centuries; thus in the long future it will also be.

When people are least sure they are often most dogmatic. We

La qualifica più comune di chi fa previsioni in campo economico consiste non già nel sapere, ma nel non sapere di non sapere. Il suo grande vantaggio è che tutte le previsioni, giusta o sbagliate che siano, vengono rapidamente dimenticate.

But that was the nature of love: one did not offer it with any assurance that it would change the world, even if in the end it was the only thing that could.

From my locker I collected my sneakers, jock strap, and gym pants and then turned away, leaving the door ajar for the first time, forlornly open and abandoned, the locker unlocked. This was more final than the moment when the Headmaster handed me my diploma. My schooling was over now.

There were several trees bleakly reaching into the fog. Any one of them might have been the one I was looking for.

But there are times you pull something out of the water for which there's no accounting, the only remnant of a story whose contours are a mystery.

How can I go forward when I don't know which way I'm facing?

The world is still spinning and so are we and so are you. When the spinning stops, that'll be the time to worry. Not before.

Life is something that happens while you're busy making other plans.

For just as no politics can be pure, so no "grand strategy" will remain unaffected by the unforeseen.

Xerxes tinha razão. Se tentarmos prever tudo, arriscamo-nos a não fazer nada. Mas também a tinha Artabano. Se não nos prepararmos para tudo o que pode acontecer, garantimos que alguma parte disso acontecerá.

To settle for anything less than certainty about the truth of the ideas guiding you in the pursuit of your goals would be to leave your life literally to chance.

Information is fleeting. Human records are broken; new particles are discovered; fresh historical documents come to light. Dinosaurs turn out not to be giant grey iguanas after all, but multicoloured feathery proto-birds of all shapes and sizes. Right now, even the daddy of all facts, the Big Bang theory, is looking wobbly.

What we need is a treasure house, not of knowledge, but of ignorance. Something that gives not answers but questions. Something that shines light, not on already garish facts, but into the dark, damp corners of ignorance. And

Uncertainty follows distrust, fear follows uncertainty, and, under conditions such as these, terror follows fear.

conditions such as these, terror follows fear.