“There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing.”
Reported as attributed to Burns but unverified in Suzy Platt (ed.), Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations Requested from the Congressional Research Service (Washington, DC : Library of Congress 1989) http://www.bartleby.com/73/172.html <br class="br">Disputed <br class="br">Source: Collected Poems of Robert Burns
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Robert Burns114
Scottish poet and lyricist 1759–1796Related quotes
Ikujiro Nonaka (1935) Japanese business theorist
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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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Act IV, scene xx
Love for Love (1695)
“I have known that thing the Greeks knew not – uncertainty.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature
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The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)
Variant: I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.
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“Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.”
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Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
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