Quotes About Uncertainty

I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.

A person's got to be scared all the time - of God, if there is one, and of looking like a fool if there isn't.

nada es fijo ni permanece inmóvil en el trémulo corazón del hombre.

Mysterious love, uncertain treasure, hast thou more of pain or pleasure! Endless torments dwell about thee: Yet who would live, and live without thee!

On you, my lord, with anxious fear I wait, and from your judgment must expect my fate.

Mysterious love, uncertain treasure, hast thou more of pain or pleasure! Chill'd with tears, kill'd with fears, endless torments dwell about thee: yet who would live, and live without thee!

The woman that deliberates is lost.

The future is hidden by a dark impenetrable veil, and yet we struggle to pierce through it.

God's people should plan for a voyage of a thousand years, but be prepared to abandon ship tonight.

Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.

We live in the flicker -- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.

Alice might end up neither good nor bad. She might end up somewhere in between. That would make her very dangerous to know. That girl could be the bane of your life, a blight, a poison on everything you do. Or she might turn out to be the best and strongest friend you'll ever have. Someone who'll make all the difference in the world. I just don't know which way it will go. I can't see it, no matter how hard I try.

In the heat of battle, all things are uncertain.

While I was fearing it, it came, but came with less of fear. . . . 'Tis harder knowing it is due, than knowing it is here." —EMILY DICKINSON2

Because he could not afford to fail, he could not afford to trust.

Well, you know, a wise man once said that one of the great tragedies of our century is that a man can live his whole life and never know if he's a coward or not." I smiled, held up a forefinger. "Russell told me that.

There is nothing we fear so much as the unknown, and the Surgeon was not going to enlighten her.

Why are they going to disappear him?' I don't know.' It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good grammar.

Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night.

Anxious people exhibit: (1) increased attention to threats; (2) deficient discrimination of threat and safety; (3) increased avoidance of possible threats; (4) inflated estimates of threat likelihood and consequences; (5) heightened reactivity to threat uncertainty; and (6) disrupted cognitive and behavioral control in the presence of threats.

As I have argued, the essence of anxiety is the unpleasant feeling—the apprehension, dread, angst, and worry—that one experiences when one perceives a lack of control in situations of uncertainty and risk. It

Anxiety, in short, is a conscious feeling. It can arise in a bottom-up way, driven by activity in defensive circuits or from higher processes that conceptualize worry, either about an uncertain future or about existence itself.

As soon as there is life there is danger." —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Life is a goddam mess...but you wouldn't want to miss it!