Quotes about Uncertainty

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

Faith means living with uncertainty - feeling your way through life, letting your heart guide you like a lantern in the dark.

There is so little life, and it is fraught with chance. We meet, we don't meet, we take the wrong turning, and still bump into each other. We conscientiously choose the 'right road' and it leads nowhere.

You see, one thing is, 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 uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here . . . I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me.

All of you knowing now,
Tthat the Buddhas, the Teachers of the Ages,
In accord with what is peculiarly appropriate, have recourse to expedient devices,
Need have no more doubts or uncertainties.
Your hearts shall give rise to great joy,
Since you know that you yourselves
Shall become Buddhas.

One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

Well if we can't plan for it, and we can't let it distract us 24 hours a day every day, what can we do?

Beats me, is mostly my response.

But I have fallen deeply in love with a word that may be of use ... Resilience.

To deal with the absurdly unlikely, we can find resilient people and shape our organization to be more or less able to respond to a knockout blow—right out of left field.

According to these researchers, when people cannot form adequate expectations and are unable to predict what will happen in situations, they experience uncertainty....One reaction to this discomfort is to communicate to gain information and reduce uncertainty.

The quality of your life is in direct proportion to the amount of uncertainty you can comfortably deal with.

If I feel depressed I will sing.
If I feel sad I will laugh.
If I feel ill I will double my labor.
If I feel fear I will plunge ahead.
If I feel inferior I will wear new garments.
If I feel uncertain I will raise my voice.
If I feel poverty I will think of wealth to come.
If I feel incompetent I will think of past success.
If I feel insignificant I will remember my goals.
Today I will be the master of my emotions.

The character truest to itself becomes eccentric rather than immovably centered, as Emerson defined the noble character of the hero. At the edge, the certainty of borders gives way. We are more subject to invasions, less able to mobilize defenses, less sure of who we really are, even as we may be perceived by others as a person of character. The dislocation of self from center to indefinite edge merges us more with the world, so that we can feel “blest by everything.”

It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before various periods in the history of man.

“This ‘telephone’ has far too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communications.”

If the Devil's in yer pants make cheese with him.

No decision-making system is going to guarantee corporate success. The strategic decisions that corporations have to make are of mind-numbing complexity. But we know that the more power you give a single individual in the face of complexity and uncertainty, the more likely it is that bad decisions will get made.

If we are too busy, if we are carried away every day by our projects, our uncertainty, our craving, how can we have the time to stop and look deeply into the situation-our own situation, the situation of our beloved one, the situation of our family and of our community, and the situation of our nation and of the other nations?

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.

How little can we foresee the consequences either of wise or unwise action, of virtue or of malice. Without this measureless and perpetual uncertainty, the drama of human life would be destroyed.

Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.

Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing, though the overtaking and possessing of a wish discovers the folly of the chase.

The very essence of leadership is that you have to have a vision. It's got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion. You can't blow an uncertain trumpet.

The very essence of leadership is that you have to have vision. You can't blow an uncertain trumpet.

O woman! in our hours of ease Uncertain, coy, and hard to please, And variable as the shade By the light quivering aspen made; When pain and anguish wring the brow, A ministering angel thou!

Human life is proverbially uncertain; few things are more certain than the solvency of a life-insurance company.

The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.

To start blindly with a statement is a sign of arrogance and narrow-mindedness, and will lead to conflict. To start blindly with a question is a sign of uncertainty and honesty, and will lead to wisdom.

It is very natural for young men to be vehement, acrimonious and severe. For as they seldom comprehend at once all the consequences of a position, or perceive the difficulties by which cooler and more experienced reasoners are restrained from confidence, they form their conclusions with great precipitance. Seeing nothing that can darken or embarrass the question, they expect to find their own opinion universally prevalent, and are inclined to impute uncertainty and hesitation to want of honesty, rather than of knowledge.

He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.

The Myth of the Angry White Male What has sprung up is a strange kind of thinking. . . . Americans are unhappy with their lot. They are feeling insecure - layoffs and corporate downsizing have made their future uncertain. Stirred up by talk radio, the theory goes, large numbers of formerly sensible people have embraced 'hate' and 'extremism.' Most of these, according to the media, are white guys. A Washington Post/ABC pre-election poll asked voters if they were angry 'about the way the federal government works.' Four out of five white males said no. 62 percent of white men voted for Republican House candidates (38 percent for Democrats in 1994, a ten-point increase from the 1990 midterm elections). But was this special to their gender? In 1994 white women voted for Republican House candidates by a 55 to 45 percent majority. Significantly, there isn't single article decrying 'angry white females.'