Quotes About Uncertainty

You'll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that. Would Columbus have discovered America if he'd said 'What if I sink on the way over? What if I meet pirates? What if I never come back?' He wouldn't even have started!

There's no earthly way of knowing Which direction they are going! There's no knowing where they're rowing, Or which way the river's flowing! Not a speck of light is showing, So the danger must be growing, For the rowers keep on rowing, And they're certainly not showing Any signs that they are slowing. . . .

Take faith, for example. For many people in our world, the opposite of faith is doubt. The goal, then, within this understanding, is to eliminate doubt. But faith and doubt aren't opposites. Doubt is often a sign that your faith has a pulse, that it's alive and well and exploring and searching. Faith and doubt aren't opposites, they are, it turns out, excellent dance partners.

This is because conviction and humility, like faith and doubt, are not opposites; they're dance partners. It's possible to hold your faith with open hands, living with great conviction and yet at the same time humbly admitting that your knowledge and perspective will always be limited.

One of the great "theologians" of our time, Sean Penn, put it this way: "When everything gets answered, it's fake. The mystery is the truth."21

There are always two risks: the risk of trying something new, and the risk of not trying. You risk settling and continuing in the same way, wondering about other paths and possibilities, believing that this is as good as it gets while discontent gnaws away at your soul.

I realize I've been living for years with the assumption that at some point you arrive. You get it all nailed down. You sort it all out. And then from there you get on with it.

You start with your 1, and then you suspend judgment on what you're doing, because you don't know what you have when you start. No one does.

We spend so much time searching and longing for solid ground, only to discover it's better than that. There's Spirit. You try this, you try that. You throw yourself into it, and you hold it loosely. You give it everything you have as you acknowledge that this is what we're doing now, who knows what will come next?

The truth is, you want risk. Not too much that it overwhelms you, but some. You want some risk in your life. Risk is where the life is.

We want a little risk in our lives because it keeps things interesting. It wakes us up, it gives us a sense that we're alive and breathing and doing something with our lives.

We surrender the outcomes because we cannot control how people are going to respond to us and our work in the world.

in between. It's like the whole thing is winking at us.

There are always two risks. There's the risk of not trying something new, and there's the risk of not trying it. . . . Either way, there's risk. And sometimes stepping out and trying something new is actually the less risky thing to do.

Once again I distrusted happiness, mistaking it for complacency.

Of course I'm going to jump into the abyss. That's what I do—throw myself into the unknown.

For me, this wasn't a big leap—our fleeing known New York for the uncertainty of life in Europe was within the continuum of leaps I had been making my entire life.

Excuse me for troubling your capraesque lives with this first-ever note of moral unclarity.

With Johnson, you never quite knew if he was out to lift your heart or your wallet. Roy Wilkins

There is no conclusive evidence of life after death, but there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know, so why fret about it?

The worst that can possibly have happened to him is death and that we are all in for---if not this morning, then in days, or weeks, or years at most.

Random chance is not sufficient to explain random chance. ~Jubal Harshaw

There is no safety this side of the grave.

A man can face known danger. But the unknown frightens him. We