Quotes About Uncertainty

Watching the man, hard-of-hearing, hard-of-speech Patty learns that real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze. 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.

Insecurity will always be a growth industry. The economy now depends on fear.

She sat on her porch those first nights, wrapped in the brackish tidal air. The future's breeze split across her face and joined up again behind her. She felt herself a spinster whose sudden new suitor must be either sadistic, blind, or a confused fortune hunter. She'd read all the cautionary fairy tales and knew the one inevitable outcome. Still, she consented to this courtship, and even decided to court it back.

There is no safety. There is only forgetfulness.

It was like so, but wasn't.

The day would come when the last clean cause and effect would disappear into thickets of tangled networks.

The great paradox of existence may be that only the dead certainty of losing everything makes anything at all worth keeping.

What we want, finally, from friends, is that they have no more clue than we do.

Earth's atmosphere at different times in history." You can't predict the past, Dad. "You can if you don't know it yet.

Things with clean, concise, right answers are antidotes to human existence.

Life could crash and spin out, pretty much overnight.

The phone rings, but she doesn't pick up. It's one of three men whose beliefs about her logistics she can no longer keep straight.

THEY SHARE A LOT, ASTRONOMY AND CHILDHOOD. Both are voyages across huge distances. Both search for facts beyond their grasp. Both theorize wildly and let possibilities multiply without limits. Both are humbled every few weeks. Both operate out of ignorance. Both are mystified by time. Both are forever starting out. For

Everyone's confusing. And everyone's confused

Every one of us is an experiment, and we don't even know what the experiment is testing.

Art and acorns: both profligate handouts that go mostly wrong.

wouldn't turn away . . . but having made all those calculations, I thought the blast might be rather bigger than expected. So I put on some suntan lotion.

Oppenheimer first described the so-called tunnel effect whereby an uncertainly located particle sails through the electrical barrier around the nucleus on a light breeze of probability, existing—in particle terms—then ceasing to exist, then instantly existing again on the other side.549 But George Gamow, the antic Russian, lecturing in Cambridge, devised the tunnel-effect equations that the experimenters used.

I presume, everyone feels who has done something that he knows will have very far-reaching consequences which he cannot foresee.

there was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief.

THE MALE JOURNEY t some point in time, a man needs to embark on a risky -journey. It's a necessary adventure that takes him into uncertainty, and it almost always involves some form of difficulty or failure. On this journey the man learns to trust God more than he trusts a sense of right and wrong or his own sense of self-worth.

You normally have to let go of the old and go through a stage of unknowing or confusion, before you can move to another level of awareness or new capacity.

It is important to know that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but in fact, certitude and the demand for certitude!

The British-American author D.H. Lawrence said that "the world fears a new experience more than anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences.