Quotes About Uncertainty

The adventure is its own reward—but it's necessarily dangerous, having both negative and positive possibilities, all of them beyond control.

For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away.

She feared the unknown as we all do, and her ignorance made the unknown infinitely vast.

Don't be too sure,' he continued. "The other day I took up a man who hanged himself on the road. He was a Swede, too.' 'Hanged himself! Why, in God's name?' I cried. He kept on looking out watchfully. 'Who knows? The sun too much for him, or the country perhaps.

Fatalism is born of the fear of failure, for we all believe that we carry success in our own hands, and we suspect that our hands are weak.

The world of finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear, evaporation precedes liquidation. First the capital evaporates, and then the company goes into liquidation. These are very unnatural physics ...

I don't know the world, nor yet the people in it; I have been too solitary - I am too young to trust my own opinions.

for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.

one moment and bright the next. When the manager, escorted by the pilgrims, all of them armed to the teeth, had gone to the house, this chap came on board. 'I say, I don't like this. These natives are in the bush,' I said. He assured me earnestly it was all right. 'They are simple

Perhaps life is just that...a dream and a fear.

While there's life there is hope, truly; but there is fear, too.

The audacity of youth reckons upon what it fancies an unlimited time at its disposal; but a millionaire has unlimited means in his hand—which is better. One's time on earth is an uncertain quantity, but about the long reach of millions there is no doubt.

Not the faintest sound of any kind could be heard. You looked on amazed, and began to suspect yourself of being deaf—then the night came suddenly, and struck you blind as well.

a stone image shed a miraculous tear of compassion over the incertitudes of life and death....

Mankind, asserted the Professor with a self-confident glitter of his iron-rimmed spectacles, does not know what it wants.

camino se apartaba de los peñascos y torcía en presencia de un vagón de tren tirado boca abajo; una de sus ruedas faltaba, y reposaba como el cadáver de un animal desconocido

There is something peculiar in a small boat upon the wide seas. Over the lives born from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.

I had immense plans,' he irresolutely muttered.

When your ship fails you, your whole world seems to fail you; the world that made you, restrained you, has taken care of you. It is as if the souls of men floating on an abyss and in touch with immensity had been set free for any excess of heroism, absurdity, or abomination.

this castaway, that, like a man transplanted into another planet, was separated by an immense space from his past and by an immense ignorance from his future.

No, no es modestia exactamente. No estoy nada seguro de ser modesto;

One step beyond that boundary line which resembles the line dividing the living from the dead lies uncertainty, suffering, and death. And what is there? Who is there?—there beyond that field, that tree, that roof lit up by the sun? No one knows, but one wants to know. You fear and yet long to cross that line, and know that sooner or later it must be crossed and you will have to find out what is there, just as you will inevitably have to learn what lies the other side of death.

That's how she was. You could never be sure what she would be up to next. There are ships difficult to handle, but generally you can depend on them behaving rationally. With that ship, whatever you did with her you never knew how it would end. She was a wicked beast. Or, perhaps, she was only just insane.

Finally, my mind just settled into the realization that accidents happen, and a mantra suddenly appeared in my mind, one that has served me well since: anything can happen anytime.