Quotes About Uncertainty

how time first grounds us and then confounds us....give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

and who's to say what would have been for the best? You only found out afterwards, when it was too late.

Cooking is the transformation of uncertainty (the recipe) into certainty (the dish) via fuss.

When you are in your twenties, if even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become.

It seemed to me that we ought occasionally to be reminded of instability beneath our feet.

The trouble was, how could you know what question to ask? It seemed to her that you were in a position to ask a really correct question only if you already knew the answer, and what was the point of that?

Well, in one sense, I can't know what it is that I don't know. That's philosophically self-evident.

Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? This was the question Adrian's fragment set off in me. There had been addition—and subtraction—in my life, but how much multiplication? And this gave me a sense of unease, of unrest.

But time Ã¢â'¬Â¦ how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time Ã¢â'¬Â¦ give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become.

Isn't growing up a necessary process of losing one's innocence? Maybe, maybe not. But the trouble with life is, you rarely know when that loss is going to happen, do you? And how it will be, afterwards.

If I asked you "What is life?", you would probably reply, in so many words, that it is all just a coincidence

That next week was one of the loneliest of my life. There seemed nothing left to look forward to.

as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. Even if you have assiduously kept records—in words, sound, pictures—you may find that you have attended to the wrong kind of record-keeping. What was the line Adrian used to quote? "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when that moment came, our lives—and time itself—would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.

Be approximately satisfied with approximate happiness. The only thing in life which is clear and beyond doubt is unhappiness

Time … give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

Y lo mismo ocurre con nuestra vida: tan clara, tan segura, hasta que por una razón u otra —el globo se mueve, la nube se dispersa, el sol cambia de ángulo— la imagen se pierde para siempre, se torna accesible sólo al recuerdo, se convierte en anécdota.

yet death has an obstinate way of denying us the solutions we imagine for ourselves.

1850) 'From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzy rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of shit. There'll be quite a lot of shouting.

Destiny. It was just a grand term for something you could do nothing about.

I considered ducking the appointment, but eventually decided to let the heart speak, and rolled up. I had, after all, spent three days wondering what it would be like to be married to her. In fact, I'd thought about Annick so much that I couldn't remember what she looked like. It was like putting layer after layer of papier mâché over an object and gradually seeing the original shape disappear. How terrible if I failed to recognise the woman I'd already been married to for three days.

Irony, he had come to realise, was as vulnerable to the accidents of life and time as any other sense. You woke up one morning and no longer knew if your tongue was in your cheek; and even if it was, whether that mattered anymore, whether anyone noticed. You imagined you were issuing a beam of ultraviolet light, but what if it failed to register because it was off the spectrum known to everyone else?

Chi poteva sapere come l'avrebbe pensata, il futuro? Ci aspettiamo troppo dal domani, sperando che sappia contrastare l'oggi.