Uncertainty Quotes

Human nature turns out to be more complicated than the idea that people will get along if only the rules are clear enough. Uncertainty, the ultimate evil that modern law seeks to eradicate, generally fosters cooperation, not the opposite.

~ Philip K. Howard

We spend so much time defending our choice to do this that it becomes hard to show any vulnerability at all. There's only so many times you can handle someone asking about your fall back for when things don't work before you start thinking that maybe the fall back should just be your plan.

~ Cora Carmack

There is stability in walking an uncertain path, because you never allow yourself to be misled by what you think you know.

~ A.j. Darkholme

When we change and grow into new versions of ourselves, we have to tolerate a lot of uncertainty.

~ Nancy Levin

I didn't know where it would lead. I wanted things to develop naturally.

~ Earl Lovelace

The trait [Morey] looked for was awareness that they were seeking answers to questions with no certain answers--that they were inherently fallible. I always ask them, 'Who did you miss?' he said. Which future superstar had they written off, or which future bust had they fallen in love with? If they don't give me a good one, I'm like, 'Fuck 'em.

~ Michael Lewis

Having all the answers just means you've been asking boring questions.

~ Joey Comeau

Nobody knows how things will turn out, that's why they go ahead and play the game...You give it your all and sometimes amazing things happen, but it's hardly ever what you expect.

~ Gennifer Choldenko

Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

In a world of increasing uncertainty, expect...

~ Gino Norris

If your goal is to deliver a product that meets a known and unchanging specification, then try a repeatable process. However, if your goal is to deliver a valuable product to a customer within some targeted boundaries, when change and deadlines are significant factors, then reliable Agile processes work better.

~ Jim Highsmith

As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don't deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.

~ Pema Chödrön

There's no work so tirin' as danglin' about an' starin' an' not rightly knowin' what you're goin' to do next, and keepin' your face i' smilin' order like a grocer o' market-day for fear people shouldna think you civil enough.

~ George Eliot

Technology tends toward avoidance of risks by investors. Uncertainty is ruled out if possible. People generally prefer the predictable. Few recognize how destructive this can be, how it imposes severe limits on variability and thus makes whole populations fatally vulnerable to the shocking ways our universe can throw the dice.

~ Frank Herbert

A blind man sees with his cane, like all the rest of us.

~ Marty Rubin

Creation, like love, is a seductive pursuit filled with uncertainty and fluttering heartbeats. (Report to Greco)

~ N. Kazantzakis

This was the first time I had not just rushed in and followed my instincts, and it wasn't working out. I was beginning to actively regret it.

~ Gwenda Bond

Unanswered? I would've answered any question, Hannah. But you never asked.

~ Jay Asher

In the grand scheme of life, nobody grows old keeping their soul unblemished.

~ A.j. Darkholme

I push against the tree and run away, stumbling, the unreal night playing with me, gravity pulling from below, behind, above, making me fall. And I run through a world that is rotating, conscious of the earth's spin, of our planet twirling as it careens through nothingness, of the stars spiraling above, of the uncertainty of everything, even ground, even sky. Mumtaz never calls out, although a thousand and one voices scream in my mind, sing, whisper, taunt me with madness.

~ Mohsin Hamid

You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Who's to say that once I run, I'll find that isn't enough? Who's to say I won't end up feeling exactly the way I do right now-not safe, but stifled? Maybe I'll want to run again, and again, and eventually I'll end up back on those old tracks, because there's nowhere left to go. Maybe. Maybe not. You have to take the risk, don't you

~ Paula Hawkins

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

~ Toba Beta

Was it a doubt - a fear - a wandering uncertainty seeking rest, but finding none - so tear-blinded were its eyes - Mr. Thornton, instead of being shocked, seemed to have through that very stage of thought himself, and could suggest where the exact ray of light was to be found, which should make the dark places plain. Man of action as he was, busy in the world's great battle, there was a deeper religion binding him to God in his heart, in spite of his strong willfulness, through all his mistakes, than Mr. Hale ever dreamed.

~ Elizabeth Gaskell

The reason stories have dramatic tension is because LIFE has dramatic tension.

~ Donald Miller

Whether it is good or evil, whether life in itself is pain or pleasure, whether it is uncertain-that it may perhaps be this is not important-but the unity of the world, the coherence of all events, the embracing of the big and the small from the same stream, from the same law of cause, of becoming and dying.

~ Hermann Hesse

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

~ Elizabeth Eulberg

Faith, is the road that goes straight past the gravel, and cloud-mesh dirt into a mirage, where still you believe to go straight, and when you finally catch up with it, it ends at a lake where you stretch your eyes across, but unable to glimpse the other side- so you jump in and swim, gliding each stroke with tiredness and swallow of water, you reach the end, put a hand out and pull yourself up on concrete, where the same road continues straight into another blue-white blur.

~ Anthony Liccione

Most argument, and in fact most conflict, has nothing to do with the present. It's always about the past or the future. People can't agree on the details of what has happened or is going to happen. But we rarely know what has happened, and we never know what is going to happen. What is really at dispute is how we will deal with not knowing.

~ Steven Galloway

History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.

~ Ian Fleming

Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain.(Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)

~ Blaise Pascal

We have minds that are equipped for certainty, linearity and short-term decisions, that must instead make long-term decisions in a non-linear, probabilistic world.

~ Paul Gibbons

...the ratings agencies' problem was in being unable or uninterested in appreciating the distinction between risk and uncertainty.

~ Nate Silver

And then it struck him what lay buried far down under the earth on which his feet were so firmly planted: the ominous rumbling of the deepest darkness, secret rivers that transported desire, slimy creatures writhing, the lair of earthquakes ready to transform whole cities into mounds of rubble. These, too, were helping to create the rhythm of the earth. He stopped dancing and, catching his breath, stared at the ground beneath his feet as though peering into a bottomless hole.

~ Haruki Murakami

There is a saying about surgeons, meant as a reproof: Sometimes wrong; never in doubt. But this seemed to me their strength. Each day surgeons are faced with uncertainties. Information is inadequate; the science is ambiguous; one's knowledge and abilities are never perfect. Even with the simplest operation, it cannot be taken for granted that a patient will come through better off - or even alive. Standing at the table my first time, I wondered how the surgeon knew that he would do this patient good, that all the steps would go as planned, that the bleeding would be controlled and infection would not take hold and organs would not be injured. He didn't, of course. But still he cut.

~ Atul Gawande

The core predicament of medicine - the thing that makes being a patient so wrenching, being a doctor so difficult, and being a part of society that pays the bills they run up so vexing - is uncertainty. With all that we know nowadays about people and diseases and how to diagnose and treat them, it can be hard to see this, hard to grasp how deeply uncertainty runs. As a doctor, you come to find, however, that the struggle in caring for people is more often with what you do not know than what you do. Medicine's ground state is uncertainty. And wisdom - for both the patients and doctors - is defined by how one copes with it.

~ Atul Gawande

Ideally, the pursuit of truth is said to be at the heart of the intellectual's business, but this credits his business too much and not quite enough. As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of truth is itself gratifying whereas consummation often turns out to be elusive. Truth captured loses its glamour; truths long known and widely believed have a way of turning false with time; easy truths are bore and too many of them become half truths. Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily playful, he begins to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties. Harold Rosenberg summed up this side of the life of the mind supremely well when he said that the intellectual is one who turns answers into questions.

~ Richard Hofstadter

What if you have all the pieces and the puzzle still doesn't fit?

~ Marty Rubin

The problem with living forever, of course, is you have to live forever before you know you're immortal...or invincible. Even the gods, in this way, must always remain uncertain. Time trumps immortality just as uncertainty trumps omniscience, for a knower can only ever know what it knows, never what it doesn't. (attrib: F.L. Vanderson)

~ Mort W. Lumsden

I barely know how to be with someone when I’m whole. How the hell am I supposed to be with you when I’m so fucking broken?

~ Katie Ashley