Quotes About Uncertainty

The next day the stock market crashed. Hemmingway didn't quite understand what it all meant, but from the way the white people in town were running around like chickens without heads, she took it as an omen.

We freeze up because we expect a certain result or because we want things to be perfect.

Usually, people die unknowingly. Come to think of it, can you die knowingly? Putting it akwardly: We are died as we are delivered. Nobody delivers himself on this planet, just as nobody dies himself off it. So dying is hard to define. The most satisfactory idea is that of a struggle near the exit, after which you are let through.

Every time they have time to queue up and come slow-rolling through, plenty of people get killed. The most hopeless feeling in the world is when you just have to sit there and wait for it, knowing you're either going to be dead in a couple of seconds, or you're still going to be one of the lucky ones, one of the breathing ones who came through it.

Where did God go? It's like he just abandoned us. Without so much as a 'good luck.' It's every man for himself now and it just -- sucks.

Let nothing be called natural In an age of bloody confusion, Ordered disorder, planned caprice, And dehumanized humanity, lest all things Be held unalterable!

Today every invention is received with a cry of triumph which soon turns into a cry of fear.

Wir stehen selbst enttäuscht und sehn betroffen // Den Vorhang zu und alle Fragen offen

Di tutte le cose sicure la più certa è il dubbio.

Chi sa perché il dubbio appare agli uomini come una felicità.

We crawl by inches. What we find today we will wipe from the blackboard tomorrow and reject it—unless it shows up again the day after tomorrow. And if we find anything which would suit us, that thing we will eye with particular distrust.

A compass needle, though it's made of steel, Always trembles before it settles down. Your hand's just looking for its pole, that's all.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

To teach how to live with uncertainty, yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy can do.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.

Man himself is so buffeted by shifts of thought and mood, not knowing from one day to the next what he truly feels, that a shifting earth is well-nigh the last straw.

Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late.

I'm constantly thinking about what I'll do next. I never count on music being a career of longevity. I mean, longevity is key, and I hope that it lasts, but you just don't know, because it's not in your hands, you don't make the decision.

The human mind holds tightly to those things it can't reconcile.

I knew the flight into the crazy skies of love would always outweigh the uncertainty of days that didn't yet belong to me.

Memories haunt. So do fears that you don't know half the things you are supposed to know since your name now sits on the jackets of some books. I had come to books in autodidact fashion, with a handful of workshops tossed in. What course could I teach? What were to be the rules? From what hollow in what bone was I to extract the necessary charm, the more necessary authority? I had no mystique and no defense against my own uncertainty and yet months of indecision melted into yes.

Meander within the space of insufficient evidence.