Quotes About Uncertainty

Plans can break down. You cannot plan the future. Only presumptuous fools plan. The wise man steers.

DO NOT PUT ALL YOUR TRUST IN ROOT VEGETABLES. WHAT THINGS SEEM TO BE MAY NOT BE WHAT THEY ARE. -Death

There was always something that you had to do before you could do the thing you wanted to do and even then you might get it wrong.

You're wondering whether I really would cut your throat, panted Magrat. I don't know either. Think of the fun we could have together, finding out

But...well, Reg, tomorrow the sun will come up again, and I'm pretty sure that whatever happens we won't have found Freedom, and there won't be a whole lot of Justice, and I'm damn sure we won't have found Truth. But it's just possible that I might get a hard-boiled egg.

And this is because people are riddled by Doubt. It is the engine that drives them through their lives. It is the elastic band in the little model aeroplane of their soul, and they spend their time winding it up until it knots. Early morning is the worst time - there's that little moment of panic in case You have drifted away in the night and something else has moved in.

Wow-Wow Sauce, a mixture of mature scumble, pickled cucumbers, capers, mustard, mangoes, figs, grated wahooni, anchovy essence, asafetida and, significantly, sulfur and saltpetre for added potency. Ridcully inherited the formula from his uncle who, after half a pint of sauce on a big meal one evening, had a charcoal biscuit to settle his stomach, lit his pipe and disappeared in mysterious circumstances, although his shoes were found on the roof the following summer.

It was the heart of any scam or fiddle -- keep the punter uncertain, or, if he is certain, make him certain of the wrong thing.

The mere fact you're delivering any will help, I'm sure, said Professor Pelc, smiling like a doctor telling a man not to worry, the disease is only fatal in 87 per cent of cases.

That's how it goes, you think you're on top of the world, and suddenly they spring Armageddon on you.

Good Omens was written by two people who at the time were not at all well known except by the people who already knew them. They weren't even certain it would sell.

study was never a one-way thing. A man might spend his life peering at the private life of elementary particles and then find he either knew who he was or where he was, but not both.

with the expression of one who knows that the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.

At least nothing particularly dreadful was happening to him right now. Probably it was only a matter of time.

The street was full of animals, milling around uncertainly. When animals are in a state of uncertainty they get nervous, and the street was already, as it were, paved with anxiety.

Plan A had worked. Plan B had failed. Everything depended on Plan C, and there was one drawback to this: he had only ever planned as far as B.

WILL THERE BE A MOVIE, THEN? Neil likes to think that one day maybe there will, and Terry is certain that it will never happen. In either case, neither of them will believe it until they're actually eating popcorn at the premiere. And even then, probably not.

He'd learned in recent days, though, that rather than drown in uncertainty it was best to surf right over the top of it.

The universe, they said, depended for its operation on the balance of four forces which they identified as charm, persuasion, uncertainty and bloody-mindedness.

So computers are tools of the devil? thought Newt. He had no problem believing it. Computers had to be the tools of somebody, and all he knew for certain was that it definitely wasn't him.

Sometimes when your life seems most out of control, you know there's a direction. I don't mean you can't have free will--in fact, that can be the most important part.

Life is not so predictable. I am forced to listen more carefully. In the right and left worlds, the stories told are largely set, there much to defend at the expense of the other, rhetoric is charged with certitude; it's safer here, we are sure we are correct. We become missionaries for a position, yes, exactly, no doubt about it, practitioners of the missionary position. Variety is lost. Diversity is lost. Creativity is lost in our inability to make love with the world.

Our fate like the fate of all species, is determined by chance, by circumstance, and by grace.

Sometimes, the stars line up, the gods smile, and love gets a fighting chance. Just a chance. That's all it can really hope for. No guarantees, no certainties