Quotes on Uncertainty

Without uncertainty and the unknown, life is just a stale repetition of outworn memories. You become the victim of the past, and your tormentor today is yourself left over from yesterday. Relinquish your attachment to the known, step into the unknown, and you will step into the field of all possibilities.

The experience of being in between-between the time we leave home and arrive at our destination; between the time we leave adolescence and arrive at adulthood; between the time we leave doubt and arrive at faith. It is like the time when a trapeze artist lets go the bars and hangs in midair, ready to catch another support: it is a time of danger, of expectation, of uncertainty, of excitement, or extraordinary aliveness.

If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear. If it is perfectly acceptable, it turns into increased aliveness, alertness, and creativity.

Overcome your uncertainties and free yourself from dwelling on sorrow. When you delight in existence, you will awaken, and become a guide to those in need, revealing the path to many.

Uncertainty that comes from knowledge (knowing what you don't know) is different from uncertainty coming from ignorance.

And there came a point in my treatment where I couldn't see that end in sight. And that was the most challenging, I think, to know how to kind of anchor yourself when you're swimming in a sea of uncertainty.

Many people have the impression that there is significant scientific disagreement about global climate change. It's time to lay that misapprehension to rest. There is a scientific consensus on the fact that Earth's climate is heating up and human activities are part of the reason. We need to stop repeating nonsense about the uncertainty of global warming and start talking seriously about the right approach to address it.

Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing.

There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.

The disorder, uncertainty, and strife of a revolution make citizens yearn for stable authority, or they turn to radicalism.

We necessarily operate in an environment in which there's a great deal of uncertainty. In such an environment, it makes sense to use a risk-management approach to identify and avoid the big mistakes. That's one reason I favor a cautious approach.

Our great struggle in medicine these days is not just with ignorance and uncertainty. It's also with complexity: how much you have to make sure you have in your head and think about. There are a thousand ways things can go wrong.

The unpredictability of the weather, the increasing possibility of intelligence introducing a species more powerful than ours, the growing uncertainty that animals can or should be slaughtered for our pleasure, has led many of us to start asking more complex questions about what is and isn't normal.

My prospects for life, though in a measure shaded with uncertainty, hardship and danger, are very animating and bright. My prospects for another life, blessed be God, are still brighter.

Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.

Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.

Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.

Faith can give us courage to face the uncertainties of the future.

I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation of something I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being.

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.

When I consider this carefully, I find not a single property which with certainty separates the waking state from the dream. How can you be certain that your whole life is not a dream?