Quotes About Uncertainty

The night is a very bad time for questions to which there are no answers." Mr Badule looked at her. "You are very right, my sister. There is

That place is the place we have always been, and if you think that where you have been is where you should be, then why go to another place that you do not know at all and may not be as good as the place you were in before somebody came along and said to you that you must go forwards—which is not what you wanted to do?

But she realised that this was what anxiety was like—it knew no rhyme or reason; just as a fear of the dark cannot be assuaged by the pointing out that there was nothing there, anxiety could be without foundation.

The queue for happiness was not well ordered, he thought; it stretched out and wound round corners, and sometimes, it seemed, the end was so hard to see.

all the good things that we have in life are on temporary loan, at best, and can be taken away from us in an instant.

The sight of such beauty can make us quiet with fear; fear that it might not be real, fear that it might be taken from us, as is everything that we love, which is only on loan to us.

He became quiet. It is always a special moment when you raise a submarine's periscope, because that is when you find out where you are. You hope that you have come up in the right place, but you can never be absolutely sure. So if your hands shake a little as the periscope rises above the waves, and if you feel your heart thump a bit more loudly, then that is entirely normal.

we live out our years as best we can, not knowing their number, not really knowing, in the case of most of us, why we do what we do and how we came to be where we are; thinking we know it, but suspecting that we do not really know.

A road followed in faith was the road that led nowhere, because it stopped, suddenly and without warning, at a sign which said, unambiguously, Wrong way.

All of us, Mma Ramotswe thought, wanted something, even if we were unable to tell anybody exactly what it was that we wanted.

Are we facing a new Dark Age, Angus? Possibly, Lou. A dark age in which our concentration spell is this long.

None of us, she thought, wants the world we know to come to an end; we do not want familiar things to be taken from us.

Sometimes there were doubts, and those doubts could persist, but often you really had no choice. You had to feel your way through the complexities of this life and hope, just hope, that you got it right more often than you got it wrong.

But there were many things that one did not really believe that one did not want to disbelieve, just in case they might be true – which they clearly were not, of course.

Life's goalposts, and hurdles too, are never in the right place, she told herself; and they have the unfortunate habit of shifting within seconds. One sees them, and then suddenly they are no longer there, where they should be, but somewhere altogether elsewhere.

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had been uncertain what to say. He wondered whether he should ask Mma Ramotswe why she had not consulted him, but decided against it. If husbands started to question their wives' decisions, then where would it end, and what purpose would it serve? You could not undo what your wife had done.

Do not think that in any case where there are two competing arguments one of them has to be right: both can be wrong.

Now, as he finished the last of his porridge, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni reminded himself that the one thing he felt certain about when it came to women was that you could never be sure.

It would be good if there could be an end to need in this world; it would be good if people did not have to worry about what would happen to them if their crops failed, or if their cattle got sick and died, or if they lost the jobs on which they, along with a number of hungry mouths, depended.

How complex this world is, he thought; how easily may things appear to be one thing and then prove to be another. And how easy it was to see the worst

That was the problem with being a philosopher: it was not easy. As a philosopher one could not believe in just one thing; one had to explore the possibility that what one thought was true might be false; that what one wanted to believe might not be what one really should hold to be true. So much for the examined life: how uncomfortable it could be. But at least she knew what she wanted for lunch.

was astonishing how life had a way of working out, even when everything looked so complicated and unpromising.

Now that he had invited Tilly, William found himself trying to remember what she looked like. It was almost like going on a blind date, he thought, something that previously he would never have dreamed of doing but he now found rather exciting. She was certainly attractive, he was sure of that, even if he had seen her only once, and for a very brief period.

Angus smiled. "So nothing's certain, then?" "That's right," said Big Lou. "Except death and taxes," interjected Matthew. "Isn't that how the saying goes?" "They don't pay taxes in Italy," observed Angus. "I knew a painter in Naples who never paid taxes–ever. Very good painter too." "What happened to him?" asked Matthew. "He died," said Angus. 33.