Quotes About Uncertainty

She thought that trying to live life according to any plan you actually work out is like trying to buy ingredients for a recipe from the supermarket. You get one of those trolleys which simply will not go in the direction you push it and end up just having to buy completely different stuff. What do you do with it? What do you do with the recipe? She didn't know.

That's right … we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty

She stared at them with the worried frown of a drunk trying to work out why the door is dancing.

Trying to predict the future is a mug's game. But increasingly it's a game we all have to play because the world is changing so fast and we need to have some sort of idea of what the future's actually going to be like because we are going to have to live there, probably next week.

Arthur lay in startled stillness on the acceleration couch. He wasn't certain whether he had just got space-sickness or religion.

Hey, er ... said Zaphod, what's your name? The man looked at them doubtfully. I don't know. Why, do you think I should have one? It seems very odd to give a bundle of vague sensory perceptions a name.

when we get down to the subatomic level, the solid world we live in also consists, again rather worryingly, of almost nothing and that whenever we do find something it turns out not to actually something, but only the probability that there may something there.

He turned left, therefore, in the hope of finding better fortune in that direction, but after a while lost his nerve and turned a speculative right, and then chanced another exploratory left, and after a few more such maneuvers was thoroughly lost.

There are limitless futures stretching out in every direction from this moment—and from this moment and from this. Billions of them, bifurcating every instant! Every possible position of every possible electron balloons out into billions of probabilities! Billions and billions of shining, gleaming futures!

anything that was Infinitely Improbable was actually very likely to happen almost immediately.

Yeah, I'm sure that's him, he would add when shown a picture of Gordon Way. I only wasn't sure at first because in the picture he's got his mouth closed.

But now he felt as if the whole world were tipping backwards over his head, and this, he couldn't help feeling, was a very worrying thing for the world to do.

Predicting the future is a mug's game, but any game is improved when you can actually keep the score.

He was trying to marshal his arguments for proving that he did not now constitute a mental-health hazard himself. He was far from certain about this – his mind seemed to be full of noise, horses, smoke, and the stench of blood.

DIDLING (participal vb.) The process of trying to work out who did it when reading a whodunnit, and trying to keep your options open so that when you find out you can allow yourself to think that you knew perfectly well who it was all along.

In the great debate that has raged for centuries about what, if anything, happens to you after death, be it heaven, hell, purgatory or extinction, one thing has never been in doubt—that you would at least know the answer when you were dead. Gordon Way was dead, but he simply hadn't the slightest idea what he was meant to do about it.

That's right," shouted Vroomfondel, "we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!

Perhaps I would like a glass of whisky. Yes, that seems more likely.

Oh, er, well the hatchway in front of us will open in a few moments and we will shoot out into deep space I expect and asphyxiate. If you take a lungful of air with you you can last for up to thirty seconds, of course.

Well, there's probably a lot you don't know about me," said Arthur. "Come to mention it, there's probably a lot I don't know about me either.

We're going,' he said excitedly, and shivered with energy. 'Where? How?' said Arthur. 'I don't know,' said Ford, 'but I just feel that the time is right. Things are going to happen. We're on our way.' He lowered his voice to a whisper. 'I have detected,' he said, 'disturbances in the wash.' He

Trouble with a long journey like this,' continued the Captain, 'is that you end up just talking to yourself a lot, which gets terribly boring because half the time you know what you're going to say next.

Do you think they came today?' he said. 'I do. There's mud on the floor, cigarettes and whisky on the table, fish on a plate for you and a memory of them in my mind. Hardly conclusive evidence I know, but then all evidence is circumstantial.

Arthur sat at the bar and rested. He was used to not knowing what was going on. He felt comfortable with it.