Uncertainty Quotes

All knowledge begins with an expression of curiosity pertaining to the unknown or unknowable. Expressions of uncertainty and a doubtful nature lead a person to useful discoveries.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. I think, therefore I am says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences.

~ Bertrand Russell

Trap yourself inside your own brain, switch off the light, block all the escape routes, then turn your back on everything you know to be reality and try and survive there. Try. Living. Nowhere.

~ Carla H. Krueger

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.

~ Carla H. Krueger

He remembers how someone – he forgets who – once said in a sarcastic tone, “Isn’t she just Little Miss Sweetness and Light?” – and it was a statement that put him off proposing. It made him seriously reassess his options. He didn’t want to be with someone others saw as overly-moral because he has flaws, he has weaknesses. How would his mistakes compare to her virtuousness? She used to dislike the competitiveness at work, the way she claimed she could never really make friends with anyone because everything was always so fake and cut-throat and he used to berate her for it, used to tell her to accept it, to realise the truth about life and relationships – but she wouldn’t take it. She was always thinking too hard about everything, always questioning her motives. Surely, if he’d married her, she’d have started questioning his.

~ Carla H. Krueger

Time is not an enemy as such, but a missing person, sending cryptic postcards from the past.

~ Carla H. Krueger

My confidence is in the idea that I may be wrong on this or that. No man in this life should ever have to bear the burden of perfection.

~ Criss Jami

The most self-damaging words in the English language are: try, might, and if. These are words of uncertainty. Will you fail? That is possible. But continue doubting your abilities and you’ll never succeed.

~ Dannika Dark

Summers was simply a master explainer, able to deftly boil down the complexities of economic and financial, and to put them in terms the non-expert could understand. He was brilliant at cultivating a sense of control, even as events spun far beyond what could be managed with any certainty. He could will into being the confidence that eluded others, those less self-assured and, maybe sensibly, on humbler terms with the world.

~ Ron Suskind

Ian pretended that not knowing what to do was the hard part when, somewhere inside, I think he knew that making a choice about something is when the real uncertainty begins. The more terrifying uncertainty is wanting something and not knowing how to get it. It is working toward something even though there is no sure thing. When we make choices, we open ourselves up to hard work and failure and heartbreak, so sometimes it feels easier not to know, not to choose, and not to do.

~ Meg Jay

You ask me why I don’t love you, but surely you must believe I am very fond of you and if to desire to possess a person wholly, to admire and honour that person deeply, and to seek to secure that person’s happiness in every way is to “love” then perhaps my affection for you is a kind of love. I will tell you this that your soul seems to me to be the most beautiful and simple soul in the world and it may be because I am so conscious of this when I look at you that my love or affection for you loses much of its violence.

~ James Joyce

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.

~ Criss Jami

I always liked the unknown. Ironically I familiarized myself with the uncertainty of life. Life can change in any minute of the day. God can turn anything around in a speck of a moment. I know for a fact that everything changes. Nothing stays the same. This too shall pass.

~ Diana Rose Morcilla

...to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender...

~ Rebecca Solnit

What need of prompt or hint when it is open to yourself to discern what needs to be done - and, if you can see your way, to follow it with kind but undeviating intent. If you cannot see the way, hold back and consult your best advisors. if some other factors obstruct this advice, proceed on your present resources, but with cautious deliberations, keeping always to what seems just. Justice is the best aim, as any failure is in fact a failure of justice.A man following reason in all things combines relaxation with initiative, spark with composure.

~ Marcus Aurelius

When you lose your path, you get an opportunity to discover a world you have never known! And better worlds are often found this way! Darkness and uncertainty hide presents in itself!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Sounds like a great place to get killed. Hard pass.

~ Jackson Lanzing

He looked around. The room, a few suitcases, some belongings, a handful of well-read books— a man needed few things to live. And it was good not to get used to many things when life was unsettled. Again and again one had to abandon them or they were taken away. One should be ready to leave every day. That was the reason he had lived alone— when one was on the move one should not have anything that could bind one. Nothing that could stir the heart. The adventure— but nothing more.

~ Erich Maria Remarque

As time moves on the line will blur. It will no longer seem to be the simplicity of good versus evil, but good versus fools who think they are good.

~ Criss Jami

An uncertain evil causes anxiety because, at the bottom of one's heart, one goes on hoping till the last moment that it may not be true; a certain evil, on the other hand, instills, for a time, a kind of dreary tranquillity.

~ Alberto Moravia

Indeed, wounded loved can make for fierce vengeance. And, from what I know of Anissa, it does seem a bit out of character for her to behave so spitefully, so I'd like to think that she really is just deeply hurt, angry and looking for some way to injure me back...I hope she knows how well she's succeeded.

~ Zack Love

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

~ Kelly Thompson

It can be a good thing if deeper theology, or philosophy, only makes one more uncertain. It may lead to a healthy doubt; he may throw his hands up saying, 'God, I just don't know anymore. If you're out there, I'm giving it all to you.' From there, after the surrender, he is allowing God himself, rather than theories, books, and documents, to take over and lead him into all truth.

~ Criss Jami

When comparing 100 years of experience to 1, there is a way to close the gap. One must simply understand the choices that were taken, the roads that were walked, and that there are no guarantees to an unseen future.

~ Lionel Suggs

My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.

~ Grace Paley

But what now? What am I supposed to do with all these feelings?

~ Jenny Han

I feel lost and confused, but happy and certain. I am like a ball of tangled yarn. The parts that are untangled are available, useable; the rest is a mess, useless until it is untied. That mess feels endless and at most times unyielding.

~ Astrid Lee Miles

A lot of what people did and said when they predicted things, Morey now realized, was phony: pretending to know things rather than actually knowing things. There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, It's impossible to know for sure.

~ Michael Lewis

The human soul is heavy, clumsy, held in the mud of the flesh. Its perceptions are still coarse and brutish. It can divine nothing clearly, nothing with certainty.

~ Nikos Kazantzakis

And I said, 'That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all.

~ Jack Kerouac

when the uncertainty is known, certainty is guaranteed. Until we unravel the uncertainties of our lives, we shall always be uncertain with the life we live

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

The unknown...the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought...The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I have to admit that I'm feeling a little anxious these days. We've all been lied to so much. There's just all this uncertainty we're facing...I mean, what if the hokey-pokey ISN'T what it's all about?

~ Vernon Crumrine

If my journey was so easy, I would have missed out on life's invaluable lessons. From misery I learnt to comfort those in tears, from lack I learnt to give to the needy; from uncertainty I learnt to understand others and from my silence I learnt to listen to the voiceless.

~ Gift Gugu Mona

You'd think God would come right out and tell us what to do in the Bible, but He doesn't. He mostly tells stories, and He rarely stops the story to say what the point is. He just lets the characters and conflict hang in the air like smoke.

~ Donald Miller

Have you ever truly, keenly felt like you don't know who you are? Do you ever do something and think, Who is at the controls? Like some mad pilot has locked you out of the cockpit? I definitely do. I feel a kind of vertigo that makes me shake afterwards. I guess we all feel it when making a difficult-seeming choice, and sometimes you seriously don't know what you want because you don't know who you're supposed to be, or who you want to be. Physics, my first and second families, my philosophy degree, had all failed to help me answer that question. The former has led me to wonder whether I am one of an infinite number of Alices in multiple universes. A quantum fuck-up, which is someone who fucks up in every one of those universes but in different ways.

~ Olivia Sudjic

That, of course, depends entirely on who you mean by 'they'. It's a very vague term. Who is or are 'they'? Is there such a thing, are there such persons as 'they'? We don't know. But I can tell you this. If the most popular explanation of 'they' is accepted, then these people work in very close, self-contained cells. They do that for their own security.~Jessop

~ Agatha Christie

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.

~ Alain De Botton

In today's ambiguous world, character means despotism, tyranny, absolute intolerance. At last it is time to admire a lack of character, inner weakness. Our epoch is that of noble doubts, blessed uncertainty, sacred hypersensitivity, divine wishy-washiness.

~ Tadeusz Konwicki

Uncertainty is one of government recipes.

~ Toba Beta