Quotes About Uncertainty

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

The fact that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of something does not put existence and non-existence on an even footing.

One way to express the answer is that it might happen by 'chance'. But 'chance' is just a word expressing ignorance. It means 'determined by some as yet unknown, or unspecified, means'.

There is much that we are unsure about in science. Where science scores over alternative world views is that we know our uncertainty, we can often measure its magnitude, and we work optimistically to reduce it.

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice.

The American biblical scholar Bart Ehrman, in a book whose subtitle is The Story Behind Who Changed the New Testament and Why, unfolds the huge uncertainty befogging the New Testament texts.

We are uneasily aware that a similar catastrophe[, that of an immense meteorite or comet hitting the earth and causing massive global extinction,] could hit us at any moment... [T]he odds that it will happen in some unfortunate individual's lifetime are near certainty... And the unfortunate individuals concerned will probably not be human, for statistical likelihood is that we shall be extinct before that anyway.

Each individual goes on for an unpredictable time. Unpredictable on any particular occasion, that is, but averaging the true value of the resource

I'll begin by distinguishing two kinds of agnosticism. TAP, or Temporary Agnosticism in Practice, is the legitimate fence-sitting where there really is a definite answer, one way or the other, but we so far lack the evidence to reach it (or don't understand the evidence, or haven't time to read the evidence, etc.).

But there is also a deeply inescapable kind of fence-sitting, which I shall call PAP (Permanent Agnosticism in Principle).

If you think you understand quantum theory . . . you don't understand quantum theory.'*

Always devise your rules as if you didn't know whether you were going be at the top or the bottom of the pecking order.

The sum of such chaos was that I seemed to be reading a book that never really started and never quite finished.

It had been a day to die, not because it was a special day but because it wasn't, and every day was a day to die now, and the only question that pressed on them, as to who might be next, had been answered.

They were men like other young men, unknown to themselves. So much that lay within them they were now travelling to meet.

You could never know when everything might change—a mood, a decision, a blanket. A life. They

We are past the end of things now, but I don't want to leave.

there's no right way to plan a life and no right way to live one—only plenty of wrong ways.

Everything has seemed beckoning and ahead, though I am unsure now if life has not suddenly passed me like a big rumbling semi and left me flattened here by the road.

The things you'll never do don't get decided at the end of life, but somewhere in the long gray middle, where you can't see the dim light at either end.

The most important things of your life can change so suddenly, so unrecoverably, that you can forget even the most important of them and their connections, you are so taken up by the chanciness of all's that happened and by all that could and will happen next.

no matter the evidence of your life, or who you believe you are, or what you're willing to take credit for or draw your vital strength and pride from--anything at all can follow anything at all.

I don't, after all, know what's wrong with him, am not even certain anything is, or that wrong isn't just a metaphor for something else, which may itself already be a metaphor. Though probably what's amiss, if anything, is not much different from what's indistinctly amiss with all of us at one time or another – we're not happy, we don't know why, and we drive ourselves loony trying to get better

It's odd how our fears, the ones we didn't know we had, alter our sight line and make us see things that never were.