“The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.”

— Yoshida Kenkō

Essays in Idleness (1967 Columbia University Press, Trns: Donald Keene)
Context: If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty. Consider living creatures- none lives so long a man. The May fly waits not for the evening, the summer cicada knows neither spring nor autumn. What a wonderfully unhurried feeling it is to live even even a single year in perfect serenity.

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Yoshida Kenkō 31

japanese writer 1283–1350

Ally Carter (1974) American writer

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Robert A. Heinlein book Starship Troopers

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

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“A beautiful thing is precious, no matter the price. Those who do not know how to see the precious things in life will never be happy…”

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“One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike—and yet it is the most precious thing we have.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Letter to Hans Muehsam (9 July 1951), Einstein Archives 38-408, quoted in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (2010) by Alice Calaprice, p. 404 http://books.google.com/books?id=G_iziBAPXtEC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA404#v=onepage&q&f=false
1950s

“If all things are in common among friends, the most precious is Wisdom.”

Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) Italian philosopher, mathematician and astronomer

As quoted in Giordano Bruno : His Life and Thought (1950) by Dorothea Waley Singer http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/bruno03.htm#CH3
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