Quotes About Uncertainty

They were on the side of the angels, even if the angels weren't entirely sure that this was a good thing.

For a moment they still lived and I experienced their deaths as a fresh loss with each waking, so that I was unsure whether I was a man waking from a dream of death or a dreamer entering a world of loss, a man dreaming of unhappiness or a man waking to grief.

The door, when I tried it, was locked, but a locked door is more the promise of security than security itself.

Now that it's time to leave, I'm not sure I wan to go.

aside. "How long will it take?" He was scared, and he wasn't pretending. "Not long," I said. "Not long at all." You

Perhaps it was just a function of realizing, as the years went by, how little he really knew about very much at all.

You don't have much faith in people, do you?" said David. "I don't have much faith in anything," Roland replied. "Not even in myself.

The future of thousands is hanging in the balance right now. Everyone's boat will rise with the tide.

The world is going mad," she said. "The world was always mad. It just wasn't quite this frightening for most of us.

We are not meant to know the time or the nature of our deaths (for all of us secretly hope that we may be immortal).

You don't have much faith in people, do you?' asked David. 'I don't have much faith in anything,' Roland replied. 'Not even in myself.

For it is in the passage-times that fall between ages—when the laws of an old world weaken and begin to fail and the laws of the new are not yet in force—that we are visited with the notion that time is malleable, that the future is up for shaping, that nothing is fixed: then we are brushed by that wing, and it is the only call we will get.

He wavered suddenly, doubted doubts. He looked at his big beloved.

Inside it seemed much larger than it was, or was smaller than it looked, he couldn't tell which.

People in tales don't know, always. But there they are.

Are you sure," she said, looking within, "that this is where I'm spose to be?" "Oh, it certainly is." "Boy. It's real little in here." "Oh, yes it is. Won't you please step right on in.

I do not recommend ignorance and I am not saying that there is no truth, but I am arguing that the best way to think about truth is to call it the best interpretation that anybody has come up with yet while conceding that no one knows what is coming next. There are lots of competing truths battling with one another for their place in the sun, and the truth is that we have to learn to cope with the conflict. The skies do not open up and drop The Truth into our laps.

In the morning I'm often anti-semantic.

which has inspired at least one novel, Apostolos Doxiadis's Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture29).

Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable," President Obama explained to the author Michael Lewis. "Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. ... You can't be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out." Thomas Jefferson explained this to his secretary of the treasury: "What is good in this case cannot be effected. We have, therefore, only to find out what will be least bad.

And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, the element of fire is quite put out; the Sun is lost, and the earth, and no mans wit can well direct him where to look for it.

And what is so intricate, so entangling as death? Who ever got out of a winding sheet?

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men.

And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, The Element of fire is quite put out; The Sun is lost, and th'earth, and no mans wit Can well direct him where to looke for it ... 'Tis all in peeces, all coherence gone; All just supply, and all Relation.