Quotes About Uncertainty

Do you think it's going to rain?" I asked. "Yes. Why?" My heart quickened. "I don't know," I said. Then I realized I wanted it to rain because maybe Ivan and his family would come back to Budapest a day early and Ivan might call me. I knew there were a lot of flaws in this reasoning. But my body didn't know.

I had often flipped through a calendar wondering on which of the 366 days (counting February 29) I would die, but it had never once occurred to me to wonder whether I had already met the first person I would have sex with.

Atheism is having the weight of doubt lifted, just to be replaced with the weight of mortality.

inasmuch as a dead rock wants anything—it wants you dead too. So you can go quickly. A landslide can bury you. A lava tube can collapse on you. You can plunge headlong into a crater. A meteoroid can strike your habitat at seventy thousand kilometers per hour. A micrometeorite can bust open your spacesuit. A sudden burst of static electricity can blow

ANDREW: Supposing someone saw you climing in? MILO: Who? You're not overlooked. ANDREW: Who knows? A dallying couple. A passing sheep rapist.

There are things that are not yet true today, perhaps we dare not find them true, but tomorrow they may be. So every man whose fate is to go his individual way must proceed with hopefulness and watchfulness, ever conscious of his loneliness and its dangers

Be ready to be surprised. Be ready to hear evidence and arguments for positions you may not like. Be ready, even, to let yourself be swayed. True thinking is an open-ended process. The whole point is that you don't know when you start where you'll find yourself in the end.

No destiny attacks us from outside. But, within him, man bears his fate and there comes a moment when he knows himself vulnerable; and then, as in a vertigo, blunder upon blunder lures him.

Once men are caught up in an event, they cease to be afraid. Only the unknown frightens men.

Whether this was fashion or indigence was never clear to me.

don't think I wanted so much to be married as I was trying to wipe out the anxiety I was feeling about our inevitable drifting apart.

All of life and human relations have become so incomprehensibly complex that, when you think about it, it becomes terrifying and your heart stands still.

Moscow is a city that has much suffering ahead of it.

But perhaps the universe is suspended on the tooth of some monster.

Seneca has a wealth of such reminders: 'Everything is dangerous and deceptive and more changeable than the weather; everything tumbles about and passes at fortune's behest into its opposite; and in all this tumult of human affairs there is nothing we can be sure of except death alone.' Since there is 'no way to know the point where death lies waiting for you, … you must wait for death at every point'.

Everybody knew everything now. Or did everybody know nothing? Nobody knew anything... Nobody could know everything.

Where does someone go when he dies?', 'When does fear end?', 'Where are all the single socks that disappeared in the washing machine?

Possibly, she thought, the pool of answers was limited. There are fewer answers in the world than questions, and if you ask me now why that is so, I must tell you that there is no answer to that question.

They saw him walk away, leave a world he'd never really been part of. They saw him pull his hat down low and get onto his bike. He forgot the Walkman's earplugs. Maybe, Anna thought, he didn't need them anymore; maybe the white noise had finally made it into his head.

There are fewer answers in the world than questions, and if you ask me now why that is so, I must tell you that there is no answer to that question.

Das Leben war eine Ansammlung von Fluren, die man entlangging, ohne zu wissen, was für Räume an ihrem Ende lagen.

I see in the act of throwing the dice and of risking the affirmation of some intuitively felt truth, however uncertain, my whole reason for living.

Life consists of burning up questions.

There remained the fear of dreams, which are incontrollable.