Quotes About Uncertainty

On se connaît si mal, se dit-elle confusément avant de s'endormir dans son lit. On a beau se dire plus jamais... Dans le fond, c'est peut-être ça qui nous aide à vivre... L'inattendu. Ce qui arrive contre toute attente...

Il a passé sa vie à sauter d'une plaque de glace à une autre sur ce fleuve gelé qui l'emporte inexorablement vers les eaux noires.

C'est comme d'attendre Dieu ou Godot, sauf qu'à la place, c'est Jansson qui arrive.

More enslaving than our occupations, however, are our preoccupations. To be pre-occupied means to fill our time and place long before we are there. This is worrying in the more specific sense of the word. It is a mind filled with "ifs." We say to ourselves, "What if I get the flu? What if I lose my job? What if my child is not home on time? What if there is not enough food tomorrow? What if I am attacked? What if a war starts? What if the world comes to an end? What if . . . ?

Holding the cup of life means looking critically at what we are living. This requires great courage, because when we start looking, we might be terrified by what we see. Questions may arise that we don't know how to answer. Doubts may come up about things we thought we were sure about. Fear may emerge from unexpected places.

Hope is not dependent on peace in the land, justice in the world, and success in the business. Hope is willing to leave unanswered questions unanswered and unknown futures unknown. Hope makes you see God's guiding hand not only in the gentle and pleasant moments but also in the shadows of disappointment and darkness.

No one can truly say with certainty where he or she will be ten or twenty years from now. You do not know if you will be free or in captivity, if you will be honored or despised, if you will have many friends or few, if you will be liked or rejected. But when you hold lightly these dreams and fears, you can be open to receive every day as a new day and to live your life as a unique expression of God's love for humankind.

If a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.

A man sits as many risks as he runs.

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.

If ever I was sure that someone was coming to help me, I should run like hell.

A wise man has doubts even in his best moments. Real truth is always accompanied by hesitations. If I could not hesitate, I could not believe.

I am a parcel of vain strivings tied By a chance bond together, Dangling this way and that, their links Were made so loose and wide, Methinks, For milder weather.

The wind that blows Is all that any body knows.

Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, wether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain.

Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

Considering the unforeseen events of this world, we should be taught that no human condition should inspire men with absolute despair.

No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don't know what I don't see—what I don't fear!

I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his perhaps being innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I?

Nothing is my last word on anything.

You were to suffer your fate. That was not necessarily to know it.

And if I wavered for the instant it was not with what I kept back.

I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong.

But if we may perish by cracks in things that we don't know.