Quotes About Uncertainty

Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.

Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary.

You're never confident. You go in fear and trembling every day. It would be awfully nice to think that you know how to write a novel. But what you know is the novel you just wrote. You don't have the slightest notion how to write the one you're going to do next.

Some Heisenberg principle frustrates critics who try to analyze how stories are written. Whatever they can analyze has to be dead before it can be dissected.

This was what could happen to you: you could end up this far from where you thought you were going.

All the Congress, all the accountants and tax lawyers, all the judges, and a convention of wizards all cannot tell for sure what the income tax law says.

Action is a business of risk; the real question is the magnitude of that risk.

Life is a school of probability. In the writings of every man of patient practicality, in the midst of whatever other defects, you will find a careful appreciation of the degrees of likelihood; a steady balancing of them one against another; a disinclination to make things too clear, to overlook the debit side of the account in mere contemplation of the enormousness of the credit.

Life is a school of probability.

I had come for certitude, but the poetic speech does not give certitude.

Second, the elders of the city (Bethlehem) are trembling. They want to know why he comes. They do not even know yet whose side he is on. They presume he is still an agent of Saul. If so, the Judeans tremble because Saul is no friend of southerners. Or if he is not an agent of Saul, it is even more dangerous, because then he may come to include them in an act of betrayal, which is more risk than they want.

What a haunting, inescapable riddle life was.

There was still an hour or two of daylight - even though clouds admitted only a greyish light upon the world, and his Uncle Timothy's house was by nature friendly to gloom. ("Out Of The Deep")

If you are sure you understand everything that is going on, you are hopelessly confused

If only the heart's advice were infallible.

It's the little deceptions that no one catches that are going to dissolve it all someday. We'll look at clocks and we won't believe the hands. They'll forecast sun but we'll pack our slickers anyway.

We are unsettled to the very roots of our being. There isn't a human relation, whether of parent and child, husband and wife, worker and employer, that doesn't move in a strange direction. We don't know how to behave when personal contact and eternal authority have disappeared. There are no precedents to guide us, no wisdom that wasn't made for a simpler age. We have changed our environment faster than we can change ourselves.

Whatever truth you contribute to the world will be one lucky shot in a thousand misses. You cannot be right by holding your breath and taking precautions.

Overriding everything else, the Titanic also marked the end of a general feeling of confidence.

Im as good as dead, but they haven't buried me yet.

Nothing is what one thinks it is. Cloth is stone and circus is an art. There are no certainties.

I had dispensed with a rudder on the principal that fate must be given a chance.

Amar sin apegos es amar sin miedos. Es asumir el derecho a explorar intensamente el mundo, a hacerse cargo de uno mismo y a buscar un sentido de vida. También significa tener una actitud realista frente al amor, afianzar el autorespeto y fortalecer el autocontrol. Es disfrutar de la dupla placer/seguridad, sin volverla imprescindible. Es hacer las paces con Dios y la incertidumbre. Es tirar la certeza a la basura y dejar que el universo se haga cargo de uno. Es aprender a renunciar.

El miedo llamó a la puerta, la confianza abrió y afuera no había nadie. PROVERBIO CHINO