uncertainty Quotes

“‘Listen to me, Greenbean.’ The boy wrinkled up his face, folded his arms. ‘I’ve seen you before. Something’s fishy about you showing up here, and I’m gonna find out what’”

″There’s no certainty about anything. This basic truth hurts, and we want to run away from it.″

“‘You think we’re safe with these people?’ Minho asked. Thomas pondered the question for a moment. There was only one answer to hold onto. ‘Yeah, I think we’re safe’”

″‘When I was your age, I left Spain with my mother, father, and sisters. [...] We had to take several ships and the journey lasted months. When we arrived, nothing was as promised. There were many hard times. But life was also exciting. And we had each other.‘”

“She tried to find the place in her heart where her life was anchored, but she couldn’t, so she closed her eyes and pressed the palms of her hands against the earth, making sure it was there.”

“The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.”

“At that moment they heard from behind them a loud noise—a great cracking, deafening noise as if a giant had broken a giant’s plate.... The Stone Table was broken into two pieces by a great crack that ran down it from end to end; and there was no Aslan.”

Estragon: “You’re sure it was this evening?” Vladimir: “What?” Estragon: “That we were to wait.” Vladimir: “He said Saturday. (Pause.) I think.”

Uncertainty is the first step toward self-determination. Courage comes next.

“She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it but too late to go back, she had left him stranded there – like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.”

“It’s a great huge game of chess that’s being played—all over the world—if this is the world at all, you know.”

“Faith does not grow in the house of certainty.”

“It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas – only I don’t know exactly what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate – ”

“And perhaps that was the worst of it. Whether you were a banker or a baker, a homemaker or homeless, it was with you night and day - a terrible, unrelenting uncertainty about the future, a feeling that the ground could drop out from under you for good at any moment.”

“In today’s rapidly changing world, the people who are not taking risk are the risk takers.”

“Young men who had fought for an uncertain cause had equally uncertain about their place in modern America. An exodus was, therefore, underway, led by artists and intellectuals in search of less restrictive intellectual climates.”

“Nothing is ever certain.”

“I love you but don’t know what to do.”

“If we know exactly where we’re going, exactly how to get there, and exactly what we’ll see along the way, we won’t learn anything. ”

“I’d never played the role of older brother quite so seriously before, had scarcely ever . . . I sensed myself in the presence of something I didn’t really know how to handle, didn’t understand.”

“Though we tremble before uncertain futures may we meet illness, death and adversity with strength may we dance in the face of our fears.”

“The forces that moved our forebears to their great decision—the decision to leave their homes and begin an adventure filled with incalculable uncertainly, risk and hardship—must have been of overpowering proportions.”

“The little waiter’s eyebrows wandered about his forehead in confusion.”

“The forces that moved our forebears to their great decision—the decision to leave their homes and begin an adventure filled with incalculable uncertainly, risk and hardship—must have been of overpowering proportions.”

″ You’ll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won’t matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you’ll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. ”

“The man who has everything figured out is probably a fool. College examinations notwithstanding, it takes a very smart fella to say ‘I don’t know the answer!‘”

“What if you did not feel uncertainty, the white writing says. Are you exempt from doubt? Why not rename it excitement?”

“Even if we did survive and Mr. Tanaka adopted us, would my own family cease to exist?”

“The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.”

“I do not know what ages passed before the human race was created, yet I have no doubt that no created thing is co-eternal with the Creator.”

“I don’t know what will happen to me without you. Only you. Only you love me. Out of everyone in the world.”

“Most people would rather live in the predictability of captivity than risk the uncertainty that comes in a fight for freedom.”

“You can’t always see God’s plan.”

“The more difficult the task, the more uncertain the outcome, the more costly talk will be and the farther we run from actual accountability.”

“I think about how sometimes, no matter how convinced you are that your life will turn out a certain way, all that certainty can be washed away with a simple change in tide. ”

“In short, the truth of the matter was Nippers knew not what he wanted.”

“He saw how hard Jude tried…he saw how determined he was, he saw how brave he was being. And this reminded him that he, too, had to keep trying. Both of them were uncertain; both of them were trying as much as they could; both of them would doubt themselves, would progress and recede. But they would both keep trying, because they trusted the other, and because the other person was the only other person who would ever be worth such hardships, such difficulties, such insecurities and exposure.”

“On the way home I wondered if this was not some trick of his, returning to the house, but his last words drove all my doubts away. As we had to go back to the village next day to see the mayor, it was certain that Barberin had not accepted Vitalis’ terms.”

Mack has several jobs that only last a certain period of time, which means that the uncertainty surrounding money is always evident to the children. After several house moves, including in with Mack’s mother in Scotland, the family is finally evicted and forced to move in a bed and breakfast hotel ironically named “The Royal Hotel”, which used to be a grand place but has become dirty and poorly maintained by ambivalent staff. Elsa nicknames the hotel “The Oyal Htl” due to the missing lettering on the hotel front.

“Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss, This world uncertain is; Fond are life’s lustful joys, Death proves them all but toys, None from his darts can fly. I am sick, I must die. Lord have mercy on us!”

“Embracing uncertainty empowers you to take risks. The beauty of uncertainty, I’ve found, is infinite possibility.”

“Uncertainty, I’ve come to learn, has to exist to give you room to shift. To make room for opportunity to walk in the door.”

“No person in a transaction should have certainty about the outcome while the other one has uncertainty.”

“He felt an uncertainty in the air, a feeling of change and of loss and of the gain of new and unfamiliar things.”

″...I’m not fool enough to give up certainty for an uncertainty.”

“Is he lost?” “Well,” said Rabbit, “nobody has seen him for a long time, so I suppose he is.”

Still with his eyes on the world Christopher Robin put out a hand and felt for Pooh’s paw. “Pooh,” said Christopher Robin earnestly, “if I—if I’m not quite——” he stopped and tried again—“Pooh, whatever happens, you will understand, won’t you?” “Understand what?” “Oh, nothing.” He laughed and jumped to his feet. “Come on!” “Where?” said Pooh. “Anywhere,” said Christopher Robin.

“So, perhaps,” he said sadly to himself, “Christopher Robin won’t tell me any more,” and he wondered if being a Faithful Knight meant that you just went on being faithful without being told things.

“That’s the question,” said Antony to himself, as he filled his pipe, “and bless me if I know the answer.

“I’m a bit lost for the moment, Bill, and that’s the fact.”

Even the tricks and cruelties he saw at Durham’ s had little meaning for him just then, save as they might happen to affect his future with Ona.

“Perhaps they had a secret process for making chickens chemically—who knows?”

There is no path to guide us out of this dismal maze!”

“He will doubtless seek other means of satiating his dark passion.”

“I have no place now. I must get one. But I—”

“Shall I tell you plainly one thing, sir? I dread almost as much to receive any tidings of my vessel as to remain in doubt. Uncertainty is still hope.”

“I’ve no place to go,” said Jurgis, sadly. “Neither have I,” replied the other, laughing lightly. “But we’ll wait till we get out and see.”

He was alone in the darkness with sailors whom he did not know, and who had no reason to be devoted to him; who knew that he had several thousand francs in his belt, and who had often examined his weapons,—which were very beautiful,—if not with envy, at least with curiosity. On the other hand, he was about to land, without any other escort than these men, on an island which had, indeed, a very religious name, but which did not seem to Franz likely to afford him much hospitality, thanks to the smugglers and bandits.

“I have been accustomed to see him at uncertain intervals, ever since I can remember. But I know him no better now, than I did before I could speak plainly.”

“Avail yourself of this evening to lay hold of his portable property. You don’t know what may happen to him. Don’t let anything happen to the portable property.”

We’d be puzzled to be more quiet and easy-going than we are at present. But—it’s a flowing so soft and pleasant through the water, p’raps, as makes me think it—I was a thinking through my smoke just then, that we can no more see to the bottom of the next few hours than we can see to the bottom of this river what I catches hold of. Nor yet we can’t no more hold their tide than I can hold this. And it’s run through my fingers and gone, you see!

“What’s happened to me?” he thought. It wasn’t a dream.

“If I am so scared now, what would it be if it somehow came to pass that I were really going to do it?”

Sergey Ivanovitch was clever, cultivated, healthy, and energetic, and he did not know what use to make of his energy.

“You are right, she doesn’t love me, but you can never be sure of what has passed between husband and wife or lover and mistress. There’s always a little corner which remains a secret to the world and is only known to those two.”