Quotes About Uncertainty

Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold. What have we to offer in exchange? Uncertainty! Insecurity! – Isaac Asimov

It is impossible for a Die, with such determin'd force and direction, not to fall on such determin'd side, only I don't know the force and direction which makes it fall on such determin'd side, and therefore I call it Chance, which is nothing but the want of art.

Death is complicated." -Johann Kraus

For this is action, this not being sure, this carelessPreparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow,Making ready to forget, and always coming backTo the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.

Ambiguity supposes eventual resolution of itself whereas certitude implies further ambiguity.

There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralysed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will.

A prepared mind is always made up; it knows what it thinks and why it thinks that. When it's time to change, it just makes itself up a different way. A really made-up mind--made up properly, knowing what it knows and on what basis it knows it--is open. People close an undecided mind because they're trying to protect those sore uncertainties from getting bumped and scraped.

Amatus waited a long time, but at last he broke the silence. "There is much I don't understand." "That will never change," Mortis said decisively. "Except that what you don't understand will change.

Nobody knew how to be what they were right.

Unexplained noises are best left unexplained.

There was one big rule in life - the things you worried about never happened, and the things that happened were never the ones you expected. Not that this bit of advice helped Johnny much. It simply meant that he spent more time guessing at what the unexpected disasters in his life would be.

You put something down and you don't know immediately what it is. It has always been like that. ...All you have to know is whether you're lying or whether you're telling the truth, you can't afford to make a mistake about that distinction any longer.

But I do guess mos peoples gonna lose.

The trouble with this country is that a man can live his entire life without knowing whether or not he is a coward.

Don't lay any certain plans for the future it is like planting toads and expecting to raise toadstools.

I'm not sure history has ended.

If there is one thing I've learned in more than seven decades of life, it's that the world is a completely fucked-up place. You never know what's around the corner and it's often something unpleasant.

There isn't, unfortunately, any way of discovering whether you can write a publishable novel except by writing it.

The Fed has gone about as if the problem is a shortage of liquidity. That is not the basic problem. The basic problem for the markets is that uncertainty that the balance sheets of financial firms are credible. -Anna J. Schwartz interviewed in the Wall Street Journal, October 18-19, 2008.

Nobody knows and you can't find out

After all, there have never been loonies carrying signs saying, "The End is Not Near.

One of my favorites is "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research.

Twain said: "What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, it's what we know for sure that just ain't so.

Information is a measure of uncertainty reduced.