Quotes About Uncertainty

They played chess and Frank won. John laughed. How stupid, he said. What do you mean? Games don't mean anything. Are you sure? Sometimes life seems like a kind of game to me. John shook his head. In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing. You could put your bishop out there to mate the other guy's king, and he could lean down and whisper in your bishop's ear, and suddenly it's playing for him, and moving like a rook. And you're fucked.

Also it isn't clear yet whether it was an act of God or an act of war.

I don't think you can get good answers to questions about—human nature. Better to think of it as a black box. You can't apply the scientific method. Not well enough to be sure of your answers.

Something strange happened to me out there in the desert; I don't know what.

Against our lives we would like to rebel, But we worry that then it would all go to hell." Aram

We just may have started a volcano!" "Is that good?" Coyote laughed wildly. "I don't know! But no one's ever done it before, so it has that at least to recommend it.

that until you know for sure what the outcomes of a decision will be, you can't decide what to do.

Decisions are hard. Everyone has the halting problem.

Please Jeff? You're sounding scary." "I'm just saying! Besides, what's scarier than right now?

Round and round and round we go,  And where we stop, nobody knows.

Only when things fall apart do you realize it can happen to you. You never think it can happen to you, until it does.

Each reality is followed by one stranger than the last.

Reality is mathematical, as long as you understand that uncertainty and contingency can be mathematically described, without them becoming any more certain.

The Aztecs had believed the world would end in one of four ways: earthquake, fire, flood, or jaguars falling from the sky. Here there would be no fire. Nor earthquake nor flood, now that he thought of it. Leaving only the jaguars.

No one knows anything. But I know less than that, because I thought I knew something, but it was wrong. So I know negatively. I unknow.

Anticipation worse than the act itself, as with so many things.

But that was life on Mars. They could be dead within minutes of any number of untoward events, as always.

Cited by the author of 'Lucky Jim' as one of the most dismal depressing questions in the English language: Shall we go straight in?

In it {a film Peter saw} a sadistic sergeant broke the spirit of soldier in a military prison by beating him up at systematically random intervals, from more than a day down to a quarter of an hour, so that the victim never knew when the next attack was coming, never felt safe. Life with Muriel, it seemed to Peter, had over the last seven or eight years turned into a decreasingly bearable version of that.

Malcolm said nothing to that. He swayed from side to side in his chair as a way of suggesting that life held many such small puzzles.

Even now dread still struck her down sometimes if she found herself counting on things being fine

quizá incluso tenía miedo— a especular.

Ruhe gibt es nicht, bis zum Schluss. Und dann? Auch am Schluss steht noch ein Fragezeichen. (There is no peace until the end and even then there would still be a question mark.)

Small things and great occur; a tooth falls from the mouth, a man out of the ranks, a sparrow to the ground.