Quotes About Uncertainty

Somos prisioneiros de guerra, disse Chacko. Nossos sonhos foram manipulados. Não pertencemos a lugar nenhum. Navegamos sem âncora por mares turbulentos. Pode ser que nunca nos permitam desembarcar em terra. A tristeza de nossas tristezas nunca vai ser suficiente. Nem a alegria da nossa felicidade, nem o tamanho de nossos sonhos. Nossas vidas nunca terão importância suficiente para serem levadas em conta.

Sometimes. And sometimes not.

Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us?

We have journeyed to a place from which it looks unlikely that we can return, at least not without some kind of serious rupture with the past - social, political, economic and ideological.

There was no tour guide on hand to tell her that in Kashmir nightmares were promiscuous. That they were unfaithful to their owners, they cartwheeled wantonly into other people's dreams, they acknowledged no precincts, they were the greatest ambush artists of all. No fortification, no fence-building could keep them in check. In Kashmir the only thing to do with nightmares was to embrace them like old friends and manage them like old enemies.

My life has a superb cast, but I can't figure out the plot.

For all but our most recent history, death was a common, ever-present possibility. It didn't matter whether you were five or fifty. Every day was a roll of the dice.

What were her biggest fears and concerns? What goals were most important to her? What trade-offs was she willing to make, and what ones was she not? Not everyone is able to answer such questions

We want progress in medicine to be clear and unequivocal, but of course it rarely is. Every new treatment has gaping unknowns - for both patients and society - and it can be hard to decide what do do about them.

human beings fail the way all complex systems fail: randomly and gradually.

Medicine's ground state is uncertainty. And wisdom—for both patients and doctors—is defined by how one copes with it. This

The problem is that the wise course is so frequently unclear. For a long while, I thought that this was simply because of uncertainty. When it is hard to know what will happen, it is hard to know what to do. But the challenge, I've come to see, is more fundamental than that. One has to decide whether one's fears or one's hopes are what should matter most.

I'm in dread of what would happen if she becomes too hard for me to care for," he said. "I try not to think too far ahead. I don't think about next year. It's too depressing. I just think about next week." It's the route people the world over take, and that is understandable. But it tends to backfire. Eventually, the crisis they dreaded arrived

Human judgment, even expert human judgment, falls well short of certainty.

And for a moment—only a moment, mind you—I felt my confidence slip.

however, the doubts really set in.

Even totally random patterns will often appear non-random to us.

It disturbed me, however, to have felt so confident about what had happened that day and to have been so wrong.

I had little hope of succeeding.

I still have no idea what I did differently that day.

The choices don't stop, however. Life is choices, and they are relentless. No sooner have you made a choice than another is upon you.

But the truth of the matter is that it tends to raise as many questions as it answers.

we usually have only vague indicators to rely upon.

Precisely when and how many such procedures would be necessary over the years they could not say.