“Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing.”
Act IV, scene xx
Love for Love (1695)
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William Congreve 35
British writer 1670–1729Related quotes
“The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.”
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.
1990
Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 4
Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 5 “The Domestication of Hunch” (p. 70)
“Sir, my life, drab and insipid though it may seem to others, is the only life given me to live.”
Source: Lyonesse Trilogy (1983-1989), The Green Pearl (1985), Chapter 4, section 3 (p. 419)
“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
Disputed
Source: Collected Poems of Robert Burns
“Peace and joy are not things you attain at the end of life. They are the basis of your life.”
Source: Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy