Quotes About Uncertainty

the universe has no respect for our personal comfort zones.

the melancholy of a world eternally under construction...

I've never shot like that in my life. That's unholy." Uncle Cal claimed credit for teaching her to shoot, but while Margo had felt his guidance, she had felt just as strongly the guidance of the gun itself. It held her steady, and then sadness perfected her aim.

Learning to swim meant learning how to relinquish control, to thrive in a space of uncertainty.

There's a point where you find yourself tiptoeing as an artist, and then you know that you're in the wrong place.

It takes great faith to have no faith.

I'm drawn to conversation because in the best kind you don't know where you're going, only that you will get somewhere good.

To young, inexperienced minds there seems to be a kind of fatal charm about the vague, the distant, and the mysterious.

We writers constantly try to build up our own confidence by getting published, making sales, winning prizes, joining cliques or proclaiming theories. The passion to write constantly strips this vanity aside and forces us to confront that loneliness and the uncertainty with which human beings, in the end, live and die.

But Pelagia didn't wait for the second circle: with a sickening squeal, she thrust the two needles straight through the cloth of the bag into the murderer's only eye. At the final moment she suddenly felt frightened: What if she hadn't remembered which eye was the natural one? However, to judge

I read somewhere that it's called American roulette. It was invented in America, in the goldfields. You put a single shot in the cylinder, give it a twirl, and then—bang! If you're lucky you break the bank; if not, then it's good-bye

There are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.

The Commission pressed Churchill: when did he imagine that this would be

Our lives are brief, they are like strings of illusions that die, like little bubbles in our entrails. We don't even know what game it's playing at with us, but we have nothing else. It's the only thing that's more or less certain on this earth.

In every moment of conscious happiness there mingles an undertone of sadness. However full of enjoyment the present, the future is always uncertain, and it is the feeling of this--the feeling that we are of the class of ephemera--perpetually recurring in the rarest and sweetest moments of existence, that constitutes, more than any other, the "one touch of nature that makes the whole world kin."

The wise build their doctrines--theological and philosophical--upon a basis of probabilities, never upon the foundation of absolute certainty.

Faith, to be faith, must center around something that is not known. Faith, to be faith, must go beyond that for which there is confirming evidence. Faith, to be faith, must go into the unknown. Faith, to be faith, must walk to the edge of the light, and then a few steps into the darkness.

We would rather be sure of a correctly predicted negative outcome than face the realistic uncertainty of an unpredictable future even if it includes the possibility of great joy and success.

Life is filled with trapdoors.

general relativity and quantum mechanics cannot both be right,

Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case.

What we are doing here is building a giant rocket ship, and we're going to light the fuse. Then it's either going to go to the moon or leave a giant smoking crater in the ground. Either way I want to be here when it happens.

precipitously,

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,