Quotes About Uncertainty

Vet jeg hvor virkeligheten er? Er jeg rot eller er jeg krone? Er det ikke stjerner også der, av svakt lysende sten?

Vagabonding is about gaining the courage to loosen your grip on the so-called certainties of this world. Vagabonding is about refusing to exile travel to some other, seemingly more appropriate, time of your life. Vagabonding is about taking control of your circumstances instead of passively waiting for them to decide your fate.

Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical mixture, if one of us is changed, both of us will be. Will we grow in self-actualization, or will it destroy us? The one thing we can be certain of is that if we let ourselves fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected.

The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt. (p. 21)

A fear is a reaction to a specific danger, to which the individual can make a specific adjustment. But what characterizes anxiety is the feeling of diffuseness and uncertainty and the experience of helplessness toward the threat.

This is a time, as Herman Hesse puts it, "when a whole generation is caught . . . between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standards, no security, no simple acquiescence.

Bertrand Russell writes that the painful thing "about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

It is the seeming contradiction that we must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong.

In anxiety, however, we are threatened without knowing what steps to take to meet the danger. Anxiety is the feeling of being "caught," "overwhelmed"; and instead of becoming sharper, our perceptions generally become blurred or vague.

When we look below the surface of our individual anxiety, we find that it also comes from something more profound than the threat of war and economic uncertainty. We are anxious because we do not know what roles to pursue, what principles for action to believe in. Our individual anxiety, somewhat like that of the nation, is a basic confusion and bewilderment about where we are going.

Our aim is to discover ways in which we can stand against the insecurity of our time, to find a center of strength within ourselves, and as far as we can, to point the way toward achieving values and goals which can be depended upon in a day when very little is secure.

The novel is a haunting and subtly terrifying picture of the modern man who is truly a "stranger" to himself.

In its full-blown intensity, anxiety is the most painful emotion to which the human animal is heir. "Present dangers are less than future imaginings," as Shakespeare puts it; and people have been known to leap out of a lifeboat and drown rather than face the greater agony of continual doubt and uncertainty, never knowing whether they will be rescued or not.

This is what anxiety does to the human being: it disorients him, wiping out temporarily his clear knowledge of what and who he is, and blurring his view of reality around him.

Or if, as in the majority of cases in the present day, the parents themselves are anxious and bewildered in the tumultuous seas of the changing times, unsure of themselves and beset by self-doubts, their anxiety will carry over and lead the child to feel that he lives in a world in which it is dangerous to venture into becoming one's self.

Kendini adama ve ?üphe aras?ndaki ili?ki hiçbir ?ekilde ula??lmaz de?ildir. Kendini adama ?üphe içermedi?i zaman de?il, ?üpheye ra?men oldu?unda en sa?l?kl?d?r.

But how can one write a book with any integrity," he wonders, "if there is no assurance of the few years time any good book takes?

the present phase of our century may well be called, as Auden and Camus call it, the "age of overt anxiety.

Je devais un jour opter pour la littérature, qui me paraissait le dernier refuge, sur cette terre, de tous ceux qui ne savent pas où se fourrer.

I don't consider myself to be definite, but in waiting position and eventual appearance

v?n chÆ°Æ¡ng là nÆ¡i nÆ°Æ¡ng tá»±a cu?i cùng trên cõi ??i cho nh?ng ai không bi?t náu mình vào Ä'âu n?a

You can say anything you like about life, but one thing is certain: life doesn't give a damn. It has never made any clear distinction between happiness and misery. It simply doesn't watch where it's going.

La speranza è uno spavento.

Ce qu'il y a en effet de frappant dans l'« accélération de l'histoire » que nous vivons, c'est que cette vitesse vertigineuse à laquelle le monde court vers l'avenir s'accompagne d'une absence de contrôle sur la direction de marche.