uncertainty Quotes

“‘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’”

“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.”

″‘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.”

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

“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.”

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

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.

″ 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!‘”

“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.”

“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 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 – ”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“You can’t always see God’s plan.”

“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. ”

“Nothing is ever certain.”

“‘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.″

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

“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.”

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.

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

“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!”

“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.”

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

“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.”