Best 305 quotes in «uncertainty quotes» category

It's hard to know what happy is if you're not sure if you've felt it before.

It’s not enough to wish, dream, hope. Even children know this. We must set sail into the sea of uncertainty. We must meet fear face-to-face. We must take our dreams as maps for a greater journey. Dreams, to come true, need a good story. So go live one.

it's ok to feel unsure. it's fine to not know. keep in mind that uncertainty doesn't last forever. clarity always shows up for us.

It's okay to be honest about not knowing rather than spreading falsehood. While it is often said that honesty is the best policy, silence is the second best policy.

It sometimes requires ignorance and arrogance to know something for sure.

It’s the uncertainty of being accepted that creates the drama in our lives.

I was told that the disorder was not really in my eyes, but in my central nervous system. I might or might not experience symptoms of neural damage all my life. These symptoms, which might or might not appear, might or might not involve my eyes. They might or might not involve my arms or legs, they might or might not be disabling. Their effects might be lessened by cortisone injections, or they might not. It could not be predicted. The condition had a name, the kind of name usually associated with telethons, but the name meant nothing and the neurologist did not like to use it. The name was multiple sclerosis, but the name had no meaning. This was, the neurologist said, an exclusionary diagnosis, and meant nothing. I had, at this time, a sharp apprehension not of what it was like to be old but of what it was like to open the door to the stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have the knife. In a few lines of dialogue in a neurologist’s office in Beverly Hills, the improbable had become the probable, the norm: things which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me. I could be struck by lightning, could dare to eat a peach and be poisoned by the cyanide in the stone. The startling fact was this: my body was offering a precise physiological equivalent to what had been going on in my mind.

It was the promise of maybe, maybe one day.

I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.

I wanted to tell her then that I loved her. I thought that might help, by grounding us in something we were sure about rather than everything we weren't.

Looking at Tim, one cannot help feeling great waves of uncertainty, an absence of aim, of purpose, as if he is a person who simply doesn’t matter.

…Look, I’m real sorry about Cheryl, I know you loved her a lot,” Mandy apologized gloomily. “It’s wrong that people have to keep killing off Pollution.” “It’s alright, I think she wants to be remediated,” Alecto told her calmly, though his grief-stricken and depressed expression said more to Mandy than his words did. “You don’t have to forget Cheryl, no matter what Mearth said to you,” Mandy pointed out. “People shouldn’t be forced to forget what they love, or to just get over the death of what they love. Cheryl was your friend and nobody can make you forget her if you don’t want to.

......Love is not only weird, but elusive too.

Maar wie het zeker weet, is per definitie niet nieuwsgierig. Wie koste wat het kost vasthoudt aan zijn overtuigingen, staat nooit open voor nieuwe informatie. Willen we goed met cijfers – en informatie in het algemeen – omgaan, dan zullen we die onzekerheid moeten omarmen.

Love's Course A boatman crossing Yura Strait Has lost his rudder, and the boat Is drifting with uncertain fate, Like love's course, indeterminate.

Many times in life we’ll look far into our future with uncertainty. None of us can predict the future, so enjoying life one day at a time will remain much easier and fulfilling.

Maturity means being able to tolerate, on all sorts of planes, uncertainty and not knowing.

Might it be that the voice of truth can come from the suffering soul who has wrestled with God over mysteries and paradoxes? Might the voice of truth be the one that in wisdom and humility says, "I don't know"?

My life was uncertain till you have came making it Steady. Stable. Secure. I would not be thankful enough before you for this, but i will never forget that you have saved my life

Nearly two years of dates. Still no question. Her mother and father want to set a proper date. Still no question. Her friends keep asking, when, Natasha? When? But she still hasn’t been asked The Question. It’s enjoyable to be the one with all the secrets, but in her honest mind – the hidden part that’s always sleeping – the secrets he keeps about when and if give her a feeling inside she’s never really understood completely – a sensation she had as a child when she got to the end of a fairytale where never-ending love and happiness were all but expected and wondered whether there might be…. one last page.

Never perceive anything as being inevitable or predestined. The only absolute is uncertainty.

I wasn’t sure what was worse: being oblivious or living within reality. (Eric)

No one ever said that you would live to see the repercussions of everything you do, or that you have guarantees, or that you are not obliged to wander in the dark, or that everything will be proved to you and neatly verified like something in science. Nothing is: at least nothing that is worthwhile. I didn't bring you up only to move across sure ground. I didn't teach you to think that everything must be within our control or understanding. Did I? For, if I did, I was wrong. I fyou won't take a chance, then the powers you refuse because you cannot explain them, will, as they say, make a monkey out of you.

No matter what there always seems to be something clouding my existence, nothing is ever clear.

Nothing is what one thinks it is. Cloth is stone and circus is an art. There are no certainties.

No peace is possible between the novelist and the agélaste [those who do not laugh]. Never having heard God's laughter, the agélastes are convinced that the truth is obvious, that all men necessarily think the same thing, and that they themselves are exactly what they think they are. But it is precisely in losing the certainty of truth and the unanimous agreement of others that man becomes an individual. The novel is the imaginary paradise of individuals. It is the territory where no one possesses the truth, neither Anna nor Karenin, but where everyone has the right to be understood, both Anna and Karenin.

Not everyone’s life is like a house that belongs to him and that he can go on decorating ever more richly with the furniture of his memory. Some people live in hotels, in many hotels. The years close behind them like hotel doors— and the only thing that remains is a little courage and no regrets.

Not only do I not know what I believe, but also I cannot know for sure that I believe. How can I define precisely what my attitude is toward something it cannot conceivably grasp? Can I be said to be in the relation of "belief," in any usual sense of that term, toward something that I cheerfully and readily acknowledge to be absolutely incomprehensible to me? (...) No man can be sure that he is in faith; and we can say of no man with certainty that he has or does not have faith. (...) Not only does faith always carry its opposite uncertainty within itself, but also this faith is never a static condition that is -had-, but a movement toward... And toward what? In the nature of the case we cannot state this "what." We cannot make a flat assertion about our faith like a simple assertion that we have blue eyes or are six feet tall. More than this, the affirmation of our faith can never be made in the simple indicative mood at all. The statement "I believe" can only be uttered as a prayer.

Naturally, I always place my word over anyone else's simply because I know why I said what I said.

Oh, get off it with that. So sensitive about language. Mate, love, nest, whatever. Point is, it stinks, especially when it goes bad. I get wanting to run away.

Now that the doors of possibility had magically opened one after the other, Ludens realised how much comfort he had derived from uncertainty.

One the grand paradoxes of existence and nonexistence is the uncertainty of uncertainty. Even uncertainty can be uncertain. However, can you be certain of such uncertainty?

One thing, however, is certain in life. No one survives it.

Only the stupid conquer in life; the other man foresees too many obstacles and becomes uncertain before he starts.

Not sure what of this you did offer me Never did amount to anything So with this I go

Oh no. Maybe I'd gotten too cocky. I was still relatively new to this friend business. Had I screwed up even asking? Should I have waited for her to offer up details?

Oh, we are in an angsty mood tonight!” “True, true. And what good does it do? Maybe ‘we’ think too much, in between bouts of not thinking enough.” “I think you’ve just written out the recipe for being human.

People need to stop accepting the evidence of reality, and start questioning it.

People too often tolerate uncertainty prior to taking action; worse, some people believe that omniscience or infallibility are prerequisites for being certain, so they conclude that certainty (and therefore knowledge) is never possible. To any person who proclaims that "you can never be certain of anything", ask them: "are you sure?" and watch what happens.

Perhaps she would never really know him. A year and a half ago that though would have been unbearable to her, but now she had learnt to live with uncertainty, even to love it.

Perhaps the savages will always be in control, Phillip said gloomily. Perhaps greed will always outweigh wisdom in the councils of the mighty; perhaps fear will always overcome compassion in the mind of a man with a sword in his hand.

Philo of Larisa, head of the Academy in Athens....inspired Cicero with a passion for philosophy, and in particular for the theories of Skepticism, which asserted that knowledge of the nature of things is in the nature of things unattainable. Such ideas were well judged to appeal to a student of rhetoric who had learned to argue all sides of a case. In his early twenties Cicero wrote the first two volumes of a work on 'inventin'--that is to say, the technique of finding ideas and arguments for a speech; in it he noted that the most important thing was 'that we do not recklessly and presumptuously assume something to be true.' This resolute uncertainty was to be a permanent feature of his thought.

Policy making invariably involves taking measured risks in the face of uncertainty, for one has neither a prior template nor the luxury of indecision.

Progress daily in your own uncertainty. Live in awareness of the questions.

Questioning anything within doubt, will just bring mind to no certainty.

On either side of a potentially violent conflict, an opportunity exists to exercise compassion and diminish fear based on recognition of each other's humanity. Without such recognition, fear fueled by uninformed assumptions, cultural prejudice, desperation to meet basic human needs, or the panicked uncertainty of the moment explodes into violence.

Satisfaction is a powerful sleep aid, and after the day I had yesterday, how could I not be content? Uncertainty has returned to my life, and I welcome the possibilities.

Sam didn't want to think of that. She wanted to feel carefree again, to live again, because who knows? Tomorrow might be the day she died.

Pearl was smarter than any of them and yet she seemed comfortable with everything she didn't know: she lingered comfortably in the gray spaces.

Sign above a drugstore counter: No Prescriptions For Life.