Quotes About Uncertainty

How many people live in the moment? A few? How many people live for tomorrow at the sacrifice of today?" Dreyfus opened his fist to reveal it to be empty. "...When tomorrow is never a guarantee.

Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.

Life is stranger than any of us expected, There is a somber, imponderable fate. Enigma rules, and the heart has no certainty.

Almost all arguments for skepticism make reference to seemingly ridiculous possibilities—we are being deceived by an evil demon, life is just a dream, we are brains in vats. You might propose psychoanalysis, rather than philosophical reflection, for anyone who worries about these possibilities.

Someone ... tell us what's important, because we no longer know.

There is no final truth in palaeontology. Every new observer brings something of his or her own: a new technique, a new intelligence, even new mistakes. The past mutates. The scientist is on a perpetual journey into a past that can never be fully known, and there is no end to the quest for knowledge.

History envelops the past in uncertainty, like the mist obscuring the beech trees in the valley below me. The deeper the history, the more the outlines blur, the more inferences about the past are subject to change.

PROBLEM 1. Assume yourself richer by $300 than you are today. You are offered a choice between A. A sure gain of $100, or [72%] B. A 50% chance to gain $200 and a 50% chance to lose $0. [28%] PROBLEM 2. Assume yourself richer by $500 than you are today. You are offered a choice between A. A sure loss of $100, or [36%] B. A 50% chance to lose $200 and a 50% chance to lose $0.

individual risk taking, especially in the domain of risks to life and health.

predictions can't vary more than the thing being forecast.

people who are threatened with big losses and have a chance to break even will be unusually willing to take risks

Just about a month from now I'm set adrift, with a diploma for a sail and lots of nerve for oars.

I thought of our situation, living under a tyranny; of the character of the country we were in; of the length of the voyage, and of the uncertainty attending our return to America; and then, if we should return, of the prospect of obtaining justice and satisfaction for these poor men; and vowed that if God should ever give me the means, I would do something to redress the grievances and relieve the sufferings of that poor class of beings, of whom I then was one. The

It's been my experience that worse-case scenarios are very rare indeed. Rare to the extend that you can almost count on them not happening.

All my worries had been for nothing. That's usually how it is with worrying. More often than not, we get ourselves all in a sweat over something that might happen, then everything turns out just fine.

Because there was only one thing worse than dying. And that was knowing you were going to die. And where. And how. ("Death Ship")

Why do you want me to stay?" she asked unhappily. He looked at her without a definite answer in his mind. Then he said, "Even if you are infected, I can't let you go out there. You don't know what they'd do to you." Her eyes closed. "I don't care," she said. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN "I don't understand it," he told her over supper.

And the answer was always lost in a tangle of becauses and wells and endless reasons that he clung to like a drowning man at straws.

I stood there feeling nowhere.

the whole world felt like a loaded gun on a hair trigger.

But the difficulty of changing a typescript can also have what seems to be the opposite effect: You let go. You stop caring about certainty; you stop editing yourself, stop second-guessing yourself, and simply write—mistakes and all.

Chance was just an order that you hadn't yet perceived.

As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.

The thing about music was that you never knew the shape of anyone's desire.