351 Uncertainty Quotes

We live in the midst of alarms; anxiety beclouds the future; we expect some new disaster with each newspaper we read.

Not one of us knows what effect his life produces, and what he gives to others; that is hidden from us and must remain so, though we are often allowed to see some little fraction of it, so that we may not lose courage.

O tell me, friends, while yet we part, And heart can yet be heard of heart, O tell me then, for what is it Our early plan of life we quit; From all our old intentions range, And why does all so wholly change? O tell me, friends, while yet we part!

I've learned to accept birth and death . . . but sometimes I still worry about what lies between.

This is what I see, and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and everywhere I see nothing but obscurity. Nature offers me nothing that is not a matter of doubt and disquiet.

If bin Laden is in fact publicly killed, then the US military will find itself standing around with its hands in its pockets, wondering what's supposed to come next.

As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.

Horror is always aware of its cause; terror never is. That is precisely what makes terror terrifying.

Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation.

The future... seems to me no unified dream but a mince pie, long in the baking, never quite done.

There never has been security. No man has ever known what he would meet around the next corner; if life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul When hot for certainties in this our life! - In tragic hints here see what evermore Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force, Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse, To throw that faint thin fine upon the shore!

Chaos is perhaps at the bottom of everything.

The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios... The idea that you can actually predict what's going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market.

We have some control over when we retire. However, we have very little control over how long we will live.

There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of The Street.

No straight lines make up my life; And all my roads have bends; There's no clear-cut beginnings; And so far no dead-ends.

Many things are possible. Few things are certain.

About the time we can make the ends meet, somebody moves the ends.

One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.

The best-laid plans of mice and comedians usually wind up on the cutting-room floor.

There is nothing in this world constant, but inconstancy.

The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.

I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeosis epoch from all earlier ones.

I am having a very difficult time. Things happen unexpectedly.

Anything you don't understand is dangerous until you do understand it.

I never got good at predicting what millions of people will suddenly decide is rational.

Obviously I was either onto something, or on something.

We didn't know if it was humanly possible to reach the top of Mt. Everest. And even using oxygen as we were, if we did get to the top, we weren't at all sure whether we wouldn't drop dead or something of that nature.

What we need are some dancers. Or maybe...answers? does anybody have any answers?'

I have left Act I, for involution And Act II. There, mired in complexity I cannot write Act III.

'Hey, there's something falling down in there,' said the chief clerk. Gregor tried to suppose to himself that what had happened to him might some day also happen to the chief clerk. There was no denying that anything was possible.

' Mmmm. Aye. Oh aye. Y'know?'

Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances, but on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad...Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.

I confess that I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much indetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false. The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the present instance shows, have grave consequences.

What are hopes, what are plans?

The greater the uncertainty, the more people are influenced by the market trends; and the greater the influence of trend following speculation, the more uncertain the situation becomes.

We may still find weapons. We haven't found them yet.

We were the kids that made America famous. The kind of kids that long since drove our parents to dispair. We were lazy long hairs dropping out, lost confused, and copping out. Convinced our futures were in doubt and trying not to care.

'I belong to the don't-know school of economics.'

Ille potens sui laetusque deget, cui licet in diem dixisse 'vixi: cras vel atra nube polum pater occupato vel sole puro.'

Niggle went, quite quietly. The Driver gave him no time to pack, saying that he ought to have done that before, and they would miss the train; so all Niggle could do was to grab a little bag in the hall. He found that it contained only a paint-box and a small book of his own sketches: neither food nor clothes. They caught the train all right. Niggle was feeling very tired and sleepy; he was hardly aware of what was going on when they bundled him into his compartment. He did not care much: he had forgotten where he was supposed to be going, or what he was going for. The train ran almost at once into a dark tunnel.

Niggle was lying in the dark, resting completely; so that, as he had not been either feeling or thinking at all, he might have been lying there for hours or for years, as far as he could tell. But now he heard Voices: not voices that he had ever heard before. There seemed to be a Medical Board, or perhaps a Court of Inquiry, going on close at hand, in an adjoining room with the door open, possibly, though he could not see any light.

Granted, religion is wishful thinking, but there is no other kind of thinking.

And Kay wrote to me from Bielefeld, where he or she is stationed. He or she or uncommited, I don't know.

Just like a feeling that you're sending out, I pick it up. But I can't let you go. If I let you go, You slip into the fog...

Well, I couldn't see what was to be, So I just stood there laughing.

I know where I'm going. But I don't want to leave. I just have one problem We're best friends, yeah? We tied ourselves in knots Doing cartwheels 'cross the floor Just forget it alright.

Jesus Pietro was worried. The Sons of Earth, if they got this far, would go straight to the vivarium to free their compatriots. But if Matthew Keller was his own agent... If the ghost of Alpha Plateau was not a rebel, but a thing with its own unpredictable purpose... Jesus Pietro worried.

: No comment, since this is still hovering (see Larry's reply). Flutter, flutter.

: 1. What is the possibility of this being added in the future? In the near future, the probability is close to zero. In the distant future, I'll be dead, and posterity can do whatever they like... :-)

Most of us are pawns in a game of love we don't understand.

The man is making preparations for a year, and does not know that he will die before evening. And I remembered God's second saying, 'Learn what is not given to man.' 'What dwells in man' I already knew. Now I learnt what is not given him. It is not given to man to know his own needs.

There is no safety. Only varying states of risk. And failure.

O grandes e gravissimos perigos! O caminho de vida nunca certo: Que aonde a gente poe sua esperanca, Tenha a vida tao pouca seguranca! No mar tanta tormenta, e tanto dano, Tantas vezes a morte apercebida! Na terra tanta guerra, tanto engano, Tanta necessidade avorrecida! Onde pode acolher-se um fraco humano, Onde tera segura a curta vida, Que nao se arme, e se indigne o Ceu sereno Contra um bicho da terra tao pequeno?

A votary of truth is often obliged to grope in the dark.

Probable nor'east to sou'west winds, varying to the soutard and westard and eastard and points between; high and low barometer, sweeping round from place to place; probable areas of rain, snow, hail, and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes with thunder and lightning.

A casino is the only human venture I know where the probabilities are known.

Lets say I'm a suspector. I suspect there may be someone who cares what happens to us. That's one step better than merely wishing. And one step below hoping.

They would not meet, but they would pass close to each other. She would notice him or not. He would speak to her or not. She still loved and needed him. Or not.

You aren't very good at determining what other people want and need from you... No one is. We're all as likely to hurt as help.

[He] didn't know what to say. He didn't even know the name for what he was feeling. 'I think that I don't know you.' she looked at him, a little perplexed. 'No that's wrong. I think that I didn't know you before, even though I thought I knew you, and know that I finally know you, I don't really know you at all.'

You don't understand everything, but you still make decisions. Well, we don't understand everything, either. But we decided didn't we? And we made the right choice, didn't we?

Faithfulness had taken me by surprise. I wondered how long the phase would last.

I'm on my way, I don't know where I'm goin', I'm on my way, I'm takin' my time, but I don't know where. Goodbye to Rosie, the Queen of Corona See you, me and Julio down by the schoolyard.

There were incidents and accidents There were hints and allegations...

And even if. I don't know what the day will bring. Still I can tell most anything. To a girl like you. ~ 'A Girl Like You'

I've twisted and turned them every way, And can see no ending to our play.

So I have these occasional visions that may or may not come true. [to Nikki Logan]

It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge what energy is. We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount.

I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything, and in many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the question might mean. I might think about a little, but if I can't figure it out, then I go to something else. But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me.

We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified-how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don't know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.

I cannot define the real problem, therefore I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem.

What does it mean, to understand? ... I don't know.

Consider: the darkening ease, the brightening trouble; the pleasure pleasure because it was, the pain pain because it shall be; the glad acts grown proud, the proud acts growing stubborn; the panting and trembling towards a being gone, a being to come; and the true true no longer, and the false true not yet. And to decide not to smile after all, sitting in the shade, hearing the cicadas, wishing it were night, wishing it were morning, saying, No, it is not the heart, no, it is not the liver, no, it is not the prostate, no, it is not the ovaries, no, it is muscular, it is nervous.

I felt weak, perhaps I was.

'The first challenge is that we cannot generalise about India. One of the few generalisations that can safely be made about India is that nothing can be taken for granted about the country.' - Shashi Tharoor at the recently concluded PANIIT 2006 in Bombay.

There is nothing exempt from the peril of mutation.

Our discombobulated lives need to sink some anchors in numerical stability. (I still have not recovered from the rise of a pound of hamburger at the supermarket to more than a buck.)

The history of a species, or any natural phenomenon that requires unbroken continuity in a world of trouble, works like a batting streak. All are games of a gambler playing with a limited stake against a house with infinite resources. The gambler must eventually go bust. His aim can only be to stick around as long as possible, to have some fun while he's at it, and, if he happens to be a moral agent as well, to worry about staying the course with honor.

All of a sudden I had to remember some words that Marlowe had told me over fifteen years ago: 'Dead men don't wear plaid.' Hmm... Dead men don't wear plaid. I still don't know what it means.

Ante paucos quam occideretur menses cornix in Capitolino elocuta est: ????? ????? ?????, nec defuit qui ostentum sic interpretaretur: Nuper Tarpeio quae sedit culmine cornix, 'Est bene' non potuit dicere, dixit: 'Erit.'

Moreover she, and Clare also, stood as yet on the debatable land between predilection and love; where no profundities have been reached; no reflections have set in, awkwardly inquiring, 'Whither does this new current tend to carry me? What does it mean to my future? How does it stand towards my past?'

I am too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything... but I don't see my way to your conclusion.

I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing in it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it.

It's hard to say who you are these days but you run on anyway, don't you baby?

Waiting for the sun to shine And you know sometimes it gets so painful Just like talking to yourself When everything don't seem to have no rhyme or reason we all go Do do loo do do, do do loo do do Waiting for the sun to shine.

'Well that remains to be seen'