Quotes About Uncertainty

How can these things be?

They say, "There is nothing but our present life; we die, and we live, and nothing but Time destroys us." Of that they have no knowledge; they merely conjecture.

What is past I know, but what is for to come I know not.

Doubtful disputations.

Ever underestimate the potential for disaster !

It's not the bullet with my name on it that worries me. It's the one that says "To whom it may concern."

Quais as asneiras?, pensou ele, intrigado, vasculhando o súbito, angustioso, enorme vazio da memória até onde o braço da lembrança conseguia.

E acabamos fatalmente por desembocar na pergunta essencial, que se encontra por detrás de todas as outras quando todas as outras se afastam ou foram afastadas e que é, se me permitem, Quem Sou Eu? Interrogo-me e a resposta consiste, obcecantemente, invariavelmente, assim: Uma Merda.

In my mind ran the immortal line of James Thurber, that phrase at once so intensely comic and so pregnant with suggestions of unnameable terror: "Now we go up to the garrick and become warbs." We were going up to the garrick all right, and warbs suddenly seemed the least terrifying of the things we might become.

Certainty is the culprit. The spiritual person knows uncertainty—a state of mind unknown to the religious fanatic.

The first reaction is one of fear. It's not that we fear the unknown. You cannot fear something that you do not know. Nobody is afraid of the unknown. What you really fear is the loss of the known. That's what you fear.

Cuarto: siempre que te sientas inseguro acerca de lo que puede depararte el futuro, limítate simplemente a recordar que en los últimos seis o doce meses has estado igualmente inseguro acerca de los acontecimientos que habrían de producirse; y que cuando, finalmente, éstos se produjeron, te las arreglaste para dominarlos de un modo u otro, gracias a las energías

Yet my experience is that it's precisely the ones who don't know what to do with this life who are all hot and bothered about what they are going to do with another life.

Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.

Just when we think we have a system, ...the system collapses. Just when we know our way around, we get lost. Just when we think we know what's coming next, everything changes.

You ever hope for something so much? So much you can't sleep, so much your skull hurts? But the thing is, you don't even know if the thing you're wishing for is possible? You don't even know if it could happen? And it's all out of your control?

Not-knowing is always more thrilling than knowing. Not-knowing is where hope and art and possibility and invention come from. It is not-knowing, that old, old thing, that allows everything to be renewed.

all I feel sure of are questions.

To select one word was to commit to a single path when the maze contains thousands.

There is only chance in this world, chance and physics.

Maybe living was no more than getting swept over a riverbed and eventually out to sea, no choices to make, only the vast, formless ocean ahead, the frothing waves, the lightless tomb of its depths.

But to raise one's hopes is to risk their falling further.

Nearly every species that has ever lived has gone extinct, Laurette. No reason to think we humans will be any different!

Marie-Laure will indeed smell something, whether because her uncle is passing coffee grounds beneath her nose, or because they really are flying over the coffee trees of Boreno, she does not want to decide (151).