Quotes About Uncertainty

On an important decision one rarely has 100% of the information needed for a good decision no matter how much one spends or how long one waits. And, if one waits too long, he has a different problem and has to start all over. This is the terrible dilemma of the hesitant decision maker.

But honestly... I just don't know what anyone's thinking. To me, that's scarier than any half-rotten ghoul trying to eat my flesh.

Sun keeps rising. Days keep passing. World keeps spinning. Time, it just keeps moving forward. Weeks, months, even years go by... while you try to make sense of it all. Try to find where you belong. Try to look ahead to a better future. But the truth is the path ahead has only grown darker. It's harder to see. You can feel so lost, so alone, so desperate for something, anything that might show you the way.

Living in the moment" all the time may not be practical if one lives for many years. Planning for the future confers benefits, especially financially. What may be good for a twenty-year plan might not be best for five years. It causes incredible tension . . . the uncertainty just becomes a part of your life. But it is tiring. I've thought, "I wish I could just get sick." I just didn't have the energy to keep living, waiting to get sick. It takes energy to be optimistic: I run out of steam.

If a deep-wreck diver stays in the sport long enough, he will likely either come close to dying, watch another diver die, or die himself. There are times in this sport when it is difficult to say which of the three outcomes is worst.

In other words, what we know for sure is entirely limited, and all the rest is basically opinion.

About the best that can be done is to try to place oneself in a position to get lucky. Nothing is certain, but shrewd, well-informed planning, a determined use of every possible advantage, and a continuous awareness and acceptance of an ever-shifting environment can raise the odds.

The second round of toast popped up behind David. He said, "I don't know what destiny feels like, but if this is it, I don't like it. I want to un-destiny this place from my life.

We need to take our cue from the drug dealers in Hoboken who, when they reach twenty, go to the local undertaker and prepay their funeral because they don't expect to live to thirty.

Everything, as Mr. Yul Brynner used to tell us six nights a week and Saturday matinees, is a puzzlement.

The untented Kosmos my abode,I pass, a willful stranger;My mistress still the open roadAnd the bright eyes of danger.

We feel the machine slipping from our handsas if someone else were steering;if we see the light at the end of the tunnel,it's the light of the oncoming train.

The light at the end of the tunnel is just the light of an oncoming train.

The cruelest thing you can do to a person who's living in panic is to offer him or her hope that turns out false. When the crash comes its intolerable.

I had expected a certain amount of exitment from the staff when they found out I wasn't totaly helpless. Instead, they looked unfomfortable. They exchanged glances, then looked at the sky, then at the ground. "umm.... does this mean we're going on? Guido said at last.

It is also a near-perfect summary of what happens in the void of war and how history is more often than not a messy combination of intention, courage, preparation, and chance. If

Through participation, the field researcher sees firsthand and up close how people grapple with uncertainty and ambiguity, how meanings emerge through talk and collective action, how understandings and interpretations change over time, and how these changes shape subsequent actions.

What I know concerns me. What I don't know concerns me even more. What people aren't telling me worries me the most.

When it comes to predicting future conflicts, what kind of fights they will be, and what will be needed, we need a lot more humility.

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.

An inspired and infallible passage whose meaning you cannot be sure of is not much more useful than an uninspired, fallible passage.

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, having to do with the fact that the very act of observing something changed the position and course of the thing being observed—at least on the subatomic level.

Rebecca West would not be a passing fancy; she would assume a leading role in his life—he could feel it in his bones—and was he ready for that?

he had no doubt that the earth would be a vastly different place—a place where the sword of Damocles hung above it by only the most slender thread, forever after.