Quotes about uncertainty

A collection of quotes on the topic of uncertainty, use, time, timing.

Quotes about uncertainty

“This is how, without the consent of the two lovers, of its two main characters, of the only ones who were originally worth anything in this short story, the narrator decided to incorporate two more words into the plot: “doubt” and “uncertainty.””

José Baroja book El curioso caso de la sombra que murió como un recuerdo y otros cuentos

Lovers

“We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Faith is a place of mystery, where we find the courage to believe in what we cannot see and the strength to let go of our fear of uncertainty.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Source: The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

Faith, Fear, Faith, Courage

“Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.”

Carl von Clausewitz book On War

On War (1832), Book 1

Nature

“I felt the first soft glow of intoxication that makes the blood warmer and spreads an illusion of adventure over uncertainty.”

Erich Maria Remarque book Three Comrades

Source: Three Comrades

“Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Education

“You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with your uncertainty!”

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English playwright and poet

Source: Tragedy of Coriolanus

Love, Men, Hate, Cry

“If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear. If it is perfectly acceptable, it turns into increased aliveness, alertness, and creativity.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

Fear

“I really don't see what is so romantic about proposing. One may be accepted - one usually is, I believe - and then the excitement is ended. The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest

Algernon, Act I.
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
Context: I really don’t see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty.

“Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope: In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2004, Democratic National Convention speech (July 2004)
Context: In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope? I'm not talking about blind optimism here... No, I'm talking about something more substantial. It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a millworker's son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too. Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope: In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead.

God, Hope

“Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

God, Idea, Passion, Time

“So what do we do? Anything. Something. So long as we just don't sit there. If we screw it up, start over. Try something else. If we wait until we've satisfied all the uncertainties, it may be too late. - Lee Iacocca”

Lee Iacocca (1924–2019) American businessman

Waiting

“There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.”

Yukio Mishima book The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

Source: The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

Fear

“Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Knowledge

“The universe, they say, depended for its operation on the balance of four forces which they identified as charm, persuasion, uncertainty, and bloody-mindedness.”

Terry Pratchett book The Light Fantastic

Source: The Light Fantastic

Universe, Dependency

“The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Variant: The very essence of romance is uncertainty.
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

Romantic, Wedding

“If you aren’t in the moment, you are either looking forward to uncertainty, or back to pain and regret.”

Jim Carrey (1962) Canadian-American actor, comedian, and producer

Carrey: 'Life Is Too Beautiful': Star Talks About Bouts With Depression And His Spirituality http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/18/60minutes/main656547.shtml 60 Minutes (21 November 2004)

Pain

“Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness; and this truth is in itself so excellent that, even when it dwells on humble and lowly matters, it is still infinitely above uncertainty and lies, disguised in high and lofty discourses; because in our minds, even if lying should be their fifth element, this does not prevent that the truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects, though not of wandering wits. But you who live in dreams are better pleased by the sophistical reasons and frauds of wits in great and uncertain things, than by those reasons which are certain and natural and not so far above us.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.

Truth, Dreams, Lying, Fraud

“According to the pronouncements of our state rulers and their intellectual bodyguards (of whom there are more than ever before), we are better protected and more secure than ever. We are supposedly protected from global warming and cooling, from the extinction of animals and plants, from the abuses of husbands and wives, parents and employers, from poverty, disease, disaster, ignorance, prejudice, racism, sexism, homophobia, and countless other public enemies and dangers. In fact, however, matters are strikingly different. In order to provide us with all this protection, the state managers expropriate more than 40 percent of the incomes of private producers year in and year out. Government debt and liabilities have increased without interruption, thus increasing the need for future expropriations. Owing to the substitution of government paper money for gold, financial insecurity has increased sharply, and we are continually robbed through currency depreciation. Every detail of private life, property, trade, and contract is regulated by ever higher mountains of laws legislation), thereby creating permanent legal uncertainty and moral hazard. In particular, we have been gradually stripped of the right to exclusion implied in the very concept of private property. … In short, the more the state has increased its expenditures on social security and public safety, the more our private property rights have been eroded, the more our property has been expropriated, confiscated, destroyed, or depreciated, and the more we have been deprived of the very foundation of all protection: economic independence, financial strength, and personal wealth.”

Hans-Hermann Hoppe (1949) Austrian school economist and libertarian anarcho-capitalist philosopher

"The Private Production of Defense" http://www.mises.org/journals/scholar/Hoppe.pdf (15 June 1999)

Life, Money, Disease, Law

“He found that if people wrote about uncertain things - past, present, or future - they could be traumatic things, they could be uncertain things, that their physical health improved. He did a lot of detailed research to find out why this is. He basically figured out that it is an uncertainty reduction mechanism at work, because your brain is always figuring out how well situated you are in the world. How much do you not know compared to how much have you mastered. You can tell that you've mastered things because when you go somewhere and you act, things turn out the way you want them to. That's an indication of mastery. And your brain is keeping track of your whole life, recording information about how many places you have been where things haven't worked out compared to how many places you have been where things have worked out. And if all those places in your past where things haven't worked out, you need to map and master. And that decreases the existential load on you, but that actually decreases your psych-physiological load. It makes you healthier. It makes you less stressed. And so we have put all that together in this Self-Authoring Suite to help people write about their past and to sort it out in a detailed auto-biography.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

Life, People, Health, World

“Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Section 1, paragraph 18, lines 6-9.
The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

“The foundation upon which our nation stands is much richer and firmer than the sympathies that may occasionally divide us. And we never know this more truly than in Christmas time. In good times or in bad, under clear skies or under the shadow of uncertainty, the Christmas message is the imperishable one of joy, hope and brotherhood.”

Ferdinand Marcos (1917–1989) former President of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986

Christmas message to overseas Filipinos (25 December 1979)
1965

Hope, Time, Joy, Christmas

“"Grant me, ye gods, but one certainty," runs Parmenides' prayer, "and if it be but a log's breadth on which to lie. on which to ride upon the sea of uncertainty. Take away everything that comes-to-be, everything lush, colorful, blossoming, illusory, everything that charms and is alive. Take all these for yourselves and grant me but the one and only, poor empty certainty.””

Friedrich Nietzsche book Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

Source: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (posthumous), p. 81

God, Lie, Color, Sea

“Since sounds have no natural connection with our ideas … the doubtfulness and uncertainty of their signification … has its cause more in the ideas they stand for than in any incapacity there is in one sound more than another to signify any idea.”

John Locke book An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Book III, Ch. 9, sec. 4
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

Idea, Nature

“My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it 'information,' but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it 'uncertainty.' When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, 'You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.”

Claude Elwood Shannon (1916–2001) American mathematician and information theorist

Scientific American (1971), volume 225, page 180.
Explaining why he named his uncertainty function "entropy".

Idea

“A single part of physics occupies the lives of many men, and often leaves them dying in uncertainty.”

Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher

Une seule partie de la physique occupe la vie de plusieurs hommes, et les laisse souvent mourir dans l'incertitude.
"A Madame la Marquise du Châtelet, Avant-Propos," Eléments de Philosophie de Newton (1738)
Citas

Men, Parting

“ I asked my guide how it was possible the judicious part of them could suffer such incoherent prating? "We are obliged," said he, "to suffer it, because no one knows, when a brother rises up to hold forth, whether he will be moved by the spirit or by folly. In this uncertainty, we listen patiently to every one. We even allow our women to speak in public; two or three of them are often inspired at the same time, and then a most charming noise is heard in the Lord's house." "You have no priests, then?" said I. "No, no, friend," replied the Quaker; "heaven make us thankful!" Then opening one of the books of their sect, he read the following words in an emphatic tone: "'God forbid we should presume to ordain any one to receive the Holy Spirit on the Lord's day, in exclusion to the rest of the faithful!' ”

Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher

Further account of his conversations with Andrew Pit
The History of the Quakers (1762)

Women, God, Books, Faith

“I have never believed that the securing of material resources ought to form the central interest of human life—but have instead maintained that personality is an independent flowering of the intellect and emotions wholly apart from the struggle for existence. Formerly I accepted the archaic dictum that only a few can be relieved of the engulfing waste of the material struggle in its bitterest form—a dictum which is, of course, true in an agricultural age having scanty resources. Therefore I adopted an aristocratic attitude; regretfully arguing that life, in any degree of fulness, is only for the fortunate few whose ancestors' prowess has given them economic security and leisure. But I did not take the bourgeois position of praising struggle for its own sake. While recognising certain worthy qualities brought out by it, I was too much impressed by its stultifying attributes to regard it as other than a necessary evil. In my opinion, only the leisured aristocrat really had a chance at adequate life—nor did I despise him because he was not forced to struggle. Instead, I was sorry that so few could share his good fortune. Too much human energy was wasted in the mere scramble for food and shelter. The condition was tolerable only because inevitable in yesterday's world of scanty resources. Millions of men must go to waste in order that a few might really live. Still—if those few were not upheld, no high culture would ever be built up. I never had any use for the American pioneer's worship of work and self-reliance for their own sakes. These things are necessary in their place, but not ends in themselves—and any attempt to make them ends in themselves is essentially uncivilised. Thus I have no fundamental meeting-ground with the rugged Yankee individualist. I represent rather the mood of the agrarian feudalism which preceded the pioneering and capitalistic phases. My ideal of life is nothing material or quantitative, but simply the security and leisure necessary for the maximum flowering of the human spirit.... Well—so much for the past. Now we live in an age of easy abundance which makes possible the fulfilment of all moderate human wants through a relatively slight amount of labour. What shall be the result? Shall we still make resources prohibitively hard to get when there is really a plethora of them? Shall we allow antique notions of allocation—"property," etc.—to interfere with the rational distribution of this abundant stock of resources among all those who require them? Shall we value hardship and anxiety and uncertainty so fatuously as to impose these evils artificially on people who do not need to bear them, through the perpetuation of a set of now irrelevant and inapplicable rules of allocation? What reasonable objection is there to an intelligent centralised control of resources whose primary object shall be the elimination of want in every quarter—a thing possible without removing comfortable living from any one now enjoying it? To call the allocation of resources something "uncontrollable" by man—and in an age when virtually all natural forces are harnessed and utilised—is simply infantile. It is simply that those who now have the lion's share don't want any fresh or rational allocation. It is needless to say that no sober thinker envisages a workless equalitarian paradise. Much work remains, and human capacities differ. High-grade service must still receive greater rewards than low-grade service. But amidst the present abundance of goods and minimisation of possible work, there must be a fair and all-inclusive allocation of the chances to perform work and secure rewards. When society can't give a man work, it must keep him comfortable without it; but it must give him work if it can, and must compel him to perform it when it is needed. This does not involve interference with personal life and habits (contrary to what some reactionaries say), nor is the absence of insecurity anything to deplore.... But of course the real need of change comes not from the mere fact of abundant resources, but from the growth of conditions making it impossible for millions to have any chance of getting any resources under the present outworn set of artificial rules. This development is no myth. Machines had displaced 900,000 men in the U. S. before the crash of '29, and no conceivable regime of "prosperity" (where by a few people will have abundant and flexible resources and successfully exchange them among one another) will ever make it possible to avoid the permanent presence of millions of unemployed, so long as old-fashioned laissez-faire capitalism is adhered to.... And so I have readjusted my ideas. … I have gone almost reluctantly—step by step, as pressed by facts too insistent to deny—and am still quite as remote from Belknap's naive Marxism as I am from the equally naive Republican orthodoxy I have left behind. I am as set as ever against any cultural upheaval—and believe that nothing of the kind is necessary in order to achieve a new and feasible economic equilibrium. The best of culture has always been non-economic.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Hitherto it has grown out of the secure, non-struggling life of the aristocrat. In future it may be expected to grow out of the secure and not-so-struggling life of whatever citizens are personally able to develop it. There need be no attempt to drag culture down to the level of crude minds. That, indeed, would be something to fight tooth and nail! With economic opportunities artificially regulated, we may well let other interests follow a natural course. Inherent differences in people and in tastes will create different social-cultural classes as in the past—although the relation of these classes to the holding of material resources will be less fixed than in the capitalistic age now closing. All this, of course, is directly contrary to Belknap's rampant Stalinism—but I'm telling you I'm no bolshevik! I am for the preservation of all values worth preserving—and for the maintenance of complete cultural continuity with the Western-European mainstream. Don't fancy that the dethronement of certain purely economic concepts means an abrupt break in that stream. Rather does it mean a return to art impulses typically aristocratic (that is, disinterested, leisurely, non-ulterior) rather than bourgeois.
Letter to Clark Ashton Smith (28 October 1934), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 60-64
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life, Men, People, Age

“One of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

New England Weather, speech to the New England Society (December 22, 1876)

Weather

“Standing alone,
eager to just believe,
it's good enough to be what you really are,
but in your heart,
uncertainty forever lies,
and you'll always be,
somewhere on the outside.”

Mariah Carey (1970) American singer-songwriter

"Outside", "Butterfly", 1997
Lyrics

Heart

“He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

No. 57 (May 19, 1759)
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“The oppressors alleged that Allah’s proof is invalid, and if we were permitted to speak out, the uncertainty would disappear.”

Muhammad al-Mahdi (869–941) 12th and last Imam in Twelver Shia Islam

Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.51 p. 4
Religious-based Quotes

“Faith is not a certainty. Faith is the courage to live with uncertainty.”

Jonathan Sacks (1948) British rabbi

The Case for God, first broadcast on BBC1, 6 September 2010

Faith, Courage

“Institutions are the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic, and social interaction. They consist of both informal constraints (sanctions, taboos, customs, traditions, and codes of conduct), and formal rules (constitutions, laws, property rights). Throughout history, institutions have been devised by human beings to create order and reduce uncertainty in exchange.”

Douglass C. North (1920–2015) American Economist

Douglass North. (1991). "Institutions." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 5(1): 97-112; Abstract

Law, History

“The American model – democracy – must be regarded as a historical error, economically as well as morally. Democracy promotes shortsightedness, capital waste, irresponsibility, and moral relativism. It leads to permanent compulsory income and wealth redistribution and legal uncertainty. It is counterproductive. It promotes demagoguery and egalitarianism. It is aggressive and potentially totalitarian internally, vis-à-vis its own population, as well as externally. In sum, it leads to a dramatic growth of state power, as manifested by the amount of parasitically – by means of taxation and expropriation – appropriated government income and wealth in relation to the amount of productively – through market exchange – acquired private income and wealth, and by the range and invasiveness of state legislation. Democracy is doomed to collapse, just as Soviet communism was doomed to collapse.”

Hans-Hermann Hoppe (1949) Austrian school economist and libertarian anarcho-capitalist philosopher

‘Demokratie. Der Gott, Der Keiner Ist’ http://www.lewrockwell.com/hoppe/hoppe9.html

Error, Democracy, Communication, Wealth

“But so long as men are not trained to withhold judgment in the absence of evidence, they will be led astray by cocksure prophets, and it is likely that their leaders will be either ignorant fanatics or dishonest charlatans. To endure uncertainty is difficult, but so are most of the other virtues.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1940s, Philosophy for Laymen (1946)
Context: The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. If you take your children for a picnic on a doubtful day, they will demand a dogmatic answer as to whether it will be fine or wet, and be disappointed in you when you cannot be sure. The same sort of assurance is demanded, in later life, of those who undertake to lead populations into the Promised Land. “Liquidate the capitalists and the survivors will enjoy eternal bliss.” “Exterminate the Jews and everyone will be virtuous.” “Kill the Croats and let the Serbs reign.” “Kill the Serbs and let the Croats reign.” These are samples of the slogans that have won wide popular acceptance in our time. Even a modicum of philosophy would make it impossible to accept such bloodthirsty nonsense. But so long as men are not trained to withhold judgment in the absence of evidence, they will be led astray by cocksure prophets, and it is likely that their leaders will be either ignorant fanatics or dishonest charlatans. To endure uncertainty is difficult, but so are most of the other virtues. For the learning of every virtue there is an appropriate discipline, and for the learning of suspended judgment the best discipline is philosophy.
But if philosophy is to serve a positive purpose, it must not teach mere skepticism, for, while the dogmatist is harmful, the skeptic is useless. Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or of ignorance.

Men, Training

“We must consider both the ultimate end and all clear sensory evidence, to which we refer our opinions; for otherwise everything will be full of uncertainty and confusion.”

Epicurus (-341–-269 BC) ancient Greek philosopher

22
Sovereign Maxims

“I really don’t see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest

Algernon, Act I
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

Love, Making love

“Uncertainty is the equivalent of a predator waiting in the shadows and pounces upon us when least expected. Frequently, we are aware of pending uncertainty, such as, waiting for the results; of a test, a pending loan application, a promotion or potential employment, and the fact uncertainty will be present for our entire life.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1990

Life, Waiting

“If you don't live in the Moment;

You are looking Forward to Uncertainty

or Back to acute Pain, Fear, Regret and Remorse.

It is an Insane World…make it Simple.”

Stephie Pahlavi Zan

Pain, World, Fear

“I looked around. As flock leader, everyone was expecting me to make a decision. Jeb's presence here would bring uncertainty, chaos, probably danger.
It would perk up my day.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Angel

Decision

“The mistake is in thinking there can be an antidote to the uncertainty.”

David Levithan The Lover's Dictionary

Variant: The mistake is thinking that there can be an antidote to the uncertainty.
Source: The Lover's Dictionary

Thinking

“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

Love

“Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Source: Man for Himself (1947), Ch. 3
Context: The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

“I brought Hassan’s son from Afghanistan to America, lifting him from the certainty of turmoil and dropping him in a turmoil of uncertainty”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

“His whole life was now summed up in two words: absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Life

“If and perhaps…. The language of procrastination and uncertainty. That's just people looking to justify their own lack of action.”

John Flanagan (1873–1938) Irish-American hammer thrower

Source: The Emperor of Nihon-Ja

People

“I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Hunger, Heart, Loneliness

“In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty…”

Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) American writer and philosopher

Country

“And the pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseparable from angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair.”

Christopher Hitchens Letters to a Young Contrarian

Source: Letters to a Young Contrarian

Pleasure, Despair

“The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices—after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's.”

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

People, Truth

“There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing.”

Robert Burns (1759–1796) Scottish poet and lyricist

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

“Let go of certainty. The opposite isn't uncertainty. It's openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow.”

Tony Schwartz (1952) American writer

Learning

“Worry is the secret weapon perpetrated upon us by the dark forces of the world that lurk in the shape of fear, uncertainty, confusion, and loss.

We, on the other hand, have our own secret weapon against these incorporeal fiends.

It is laughter.”

Vera Nazarian (1966) American writer

Source: The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

Secret, World, Fear, Laughter

“My voice is born repeatedly in the fields of uncertainty.”

Terry Tempest Williams (1955) American writer

Source: When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

“Uncertainty is the normal state.”

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

Beauty

“… to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender…”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

Source: A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“It seems that the rebels found the chaos of transition more difficult to accept than the tyranny they had known before. They joyfully welcomed back authority-even oppressive authority-for it was less painful for them than uncertainty.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Well of Ascension

Pain

“Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God idea, not God Himself.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

God, Idea, Passion, Heart

“To live is to have worries and uncertainties. Keep them inside, and they will destroy you for certain--leaving behind a person so callused that emotion can find no root in his heart.”

Brandon Sanderson Elantris

Source: Elantris

Heart, Personality

“Learning not to crumple before these uncertainties fuels my resolve to print myself upon the texture of each day fully rather than forever.”

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist

Learning

“Waiting on God requires the willingness to bear uncertainty, to carry within oneself the unanswered question, lifting the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes upon one's thoughts.”

Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) American missionary

God, Question, Waiting, Heart

“Wholeheartedness. There are many tenets of Wholeheartedness, but at its very core is vulnerability and worthiness; facing uncertainty, exposure, and emotional risks, and knowing that I am enough.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Source: Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

“Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way”

Paul Theroux (1941) American travel writer and novelist

Source: Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents

Way, Confidence, Failure, Cooking

“I cannot have chaos erupting around me until I am prepared for it. I am a collector. I am an observer. I don't participate. My resources, and my standing, must be secure before I can allow the uncertainty of war to crash down upon us.”

Derek Landy Skulduggery Pleasant

Source: Skulduggery Pleasant

War

“The bittersweetness of uncertainty: To win or to lose.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

“Folklore is the perfect second skin. From under its hide, we can see all the shimmering, shadowy uncertainties of the world.”

Jane Yolen (1939) American speculative fiction and children's writer

World, Perfection

“The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms”

Bruno Latour (1947) French sociologist, philosopher and anthropologist

Source: Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory

World

“I pursue no objectives, no systems, no tendency; I have no program, no style, no direction. I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes, or variations that lead to mastery. I steer clear of definitions. I don't know what I want. I am inconsistent, non-committal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 60, note 92

Time

“The difficulty in defining a field for the so-called institutional economics is the uncertainty of meaning of an institution. Sometimes an institution seems to mean a framework of laws or natural rights within which individuals act like inmates. Sometimes it seems to mean the behavior of the inmates themselves. Sometimes anything additional to or critical of the classical or hedonic economics is deemed to be institutional. Sometimes anything that is "economic behavior" is institutional. Sometimes anything that is "dynamic" instead of "static," or a "process" instead of commodities, or activity instead of feelings, or mass action instead of individual action, or management instead of equilibrium, or control instead of laissez faire, seems to be institutional economics.”

John R. Commons (1862–1945) United States institutional economist and labor historian

Source: "Institutional Economics," 1931, p. 648

Law, Behavior, Feeling, Nature

“In retrospect… it is interesting to note that the original problem that started my research is still outstanding -- namely the problem of planning or scheduling dynamically over time, particularly planning dynamically under uncertainty. If such a problem could be successfully solved it could eventually through better planning contribute to the well-being and stability of the world.”

George Dantzig (1914–2005) American mathematician

Dantzig (1991) as cited in: " Professor George Dantzig: Linear Programming Founder Turns 80 http://www.stanford.edu/group/SOL/dantzig.html", in: SIAM News, November 1994.

World, Problem, Time

“There may be a rationalist who has never wavered in his conviction of the mortality of the soul, and there may be a vitalist who has never wavered in his faith in immortality; but at the most this would prove that just as there are natural monstrosities, so there are those who are stupid as regards heart and feeling, however great their intelligence, and those who are stupid intellectually, however great their virtue. But, in normal cases, I cannot believe those who assure me that never, not in a fleeting moment, not in the hours of direst loneliness and grief, has this murmur of uncertainty breathed upon their consciousness.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VI : In the Depths of the Abyss

Stupidity, Faith, Feeling, Soul

“Often, very often, I am alone. My studio in Amsterdam, [Beckmann lived and worked in the heart of Amsterdam during World War 2. ] an enormous old tobacco storeroom is again filled in my imagination with figures from the old days and from the new, like an ocean moved by storm and sun and always present in my thoughts. Then shapes become beings and seem comprehensible to me in the great void and uncertainty of the space which I call god.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

1930s, On my Painting (1938)

God, War, World, Imagination

“How to know, oh how to know! All is relative ease and facility in orthodoxy, yet how can it be denied that good is in itself undeniable? Absolutes are the most uncertain of all formulations, while the uncertainties are the most real…”

Jack Vance book The Dragon Masters

Section 7
The Dragon Masters (1962)

“Well, at first I wanted to put blinds on the building [of the outdoor-sculpture Josef Strau did for her recently]. But when I do something I've already done before, I sometimes have a certain feeling of uncertainty. Although I am falling back on something that I know is safe and pretty good. But then it was all too expensive. I had seen glowing green, fresh bamboo at the KaDeWe store. It had attracted my attention and I thought it would be nice to do something with it. Back home, sitting over the photo, drawing some things on it, I remembered this lovely green bamboo again and also that there was this fascist building – or partly fascist building – next to the store, a theater, an ugly building. And then I thought, bamboo is politically correct, that's just the thing. But I also think it's visually beautiful. Simple. The work is called 'Haare wachsen wie sie wollen”

Isa Genzken (1948) German sculptor

'Hair grows the way it wants'
2001 - 2010, Isa Genzken in conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans' (2003)

Love, Beauty, Way, Feeling

“He moved with some uncertainty, as if he didn't know
Just what he was there for, or where he ought to go
Once he reached for something golden hanging from a tree
And his hand come down empty…”

Carole King (1942) Nasa

Tapestry
Song lyrics, Tapestry (1971)

Tree

“Third, this allowed us to propose what we called the cosmological interpretation of quantum mechanics. Here we interpret the wavefunction for an object as describing not some funky imaginary ensemble of possibilities for what the object might be doing, but rather the actual spatial collection of identical copies of the object that exist in our infinite space. Moreover, quantum uncertainty that you experience simply reflects your inability to self-locate in the Level I multiverse, i. e., to know which of your infinitely many copies throughout space is the one having your subjective perceptions.”

Max Tegmark book Our Mathematical Universe

Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (2014)

“There are some things that you know to be true, and others that you know to be false; yet, despite this extensive knowledge that you have, there remain many things whose truth or falsity is not known to you. We say that you are uncertain about them. You are uncertain, to varying degrees, about everything in the future; much of the past is hidden from you; and there is a lot of the present about which you do not have full information. Uncertainty is everywhere and you cannot escape from it.”

Dennis Lindley (1923–2013) British statistician

Preface. p. xi.
Understanding Uncertainty (2006)

Truth, Knowledge, Past, Future

“We know, since the theory of relativity at least, that empirical sciences are to some degree free in defining dynamical concepts or even in assuming laws, and that only a system as a whole which includes concepts, coordinating definitions, and laws can be said to be either true or false, to be adequate or inadequate to empirical facts. This "freedom," however, is a somewhat doubtful gift. The manifold of possibilities implies uncertainty, and such uncertainty can become rather painful in a science as young as psychology, where nearly all concepts are open and unsettled. As psychology approaches the state of a logically sound science, definitions cease to be an arbitrary matter. They become far-reaching decisions which presuppose the mastering of the conceptual problems but which have to be guided entirely by the objective facts.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1930s, Principles of topological psychology, 1936, p. viii.

Pain, Law, Problem, Decision

“Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily playful, he begins to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 30

Life, Truth

“Of course it is true that the public benefit, along with justice, is an objective of the law. And of course laws have value in and of themselves, even bad laws: the value, namely, of securing the law against uncertainty.”

Gustav Radbruch (1878–1949) German politician

"Five Minutes of Legal Philosophy" (1945)

Justice, Law

“Do not be worried about the events and earthquakes that have occurred. Know that God created this world as a test … The supreme leader holds a great many of the blessings God has given us and at a time of such uncertainties our eyes must turn to him.”

Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi (1934) Member of Iran's Assembly of Experts

"Discontented Muslim clergy challenge Iran's supreme leader behind scenes" by Bill Meyer in World News at Cleveland.com (8 July 2009) http://www.cleveland.com/world/index.ssf/2009/07/discontented_muslim_clergy_cha.html

God, World, Time

“What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as afield, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes—coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.”

Paul DiMaggio (1951) American sociologist

Source: "The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields," 1983, p. 147; abstract

Change, Dependency

“Without precise predictability, control is impotent and almost meaningless. In other words, the lesser the predictability, the harder the entity or system is to control, and vice versa. If our universe actually operated on linear causality, with no surprises, uncertainty, or abrupt changes, all future events would be absolutely predictable in a sort of waveless orderliness.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 280

Universe, Change, Future

“As a result of uncertainties caused by the French referendum, massive speculative flows have continued to disrupt the functioning of the exchange rate mechanism. As Chairman of Ecofin I have tonight called an urgent meeting of the EC's monetary committee to consider how stability might be restored to the markets over the next few days.
In the meantime the Government has decided that Britain's best interests would be best secured by suspending our membership of the ERM with immediate effect. As a result, the second of the two interest rate rises announced today will not take effect.”

Norman Lamont (1942) British politician

Larry Elliott, Will Hutton and Julie Wolf, " Pound drops out of ERM http://politics.guardian.co.uk/euro/story/0,,506405,00.html", The Guardian, 17 September 1992. <br class="br">Speech outside the Treasury on 'Black Wednesday' (16 September 1992) announcing the ERM withdrawal.

“…classic philosophy maintained that change, and consequently time, are marks of inferior reality, holding that true and ultimate reality is immutable and eternal. Human reasons, all too human, have given birth to the idea that over and beyond the lower realm of things that shift like the sands on the seashore there is the kingdom of the unchanging, of the complete, the perfect. The grounds for the belief are couched in the technical language of philosophy, but the grounds for the cause is the heart's desire for surcease from change, struggle, and uncertainty. The eternal and immutable is the consummation of mortal man's quest for certainty.”

John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

Time and Individuality (1940)

Idea, Birth, Reality, Change

“A criticism of Keynes and Hayek would have to begin by pointing out the fact that in their theoretical systems there is no place for the uncertainty factor and anticipations.”

Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987) Swedish economist

Source: Monetary Equilibrium (1939), p. 32; Cited in: Philip Pilkington, " Gunnar Myrdal’s Prescient Criticisms of Keynes’ General Theory http://fixingtheeconomists.wordpress.com/2013/08/10/gunnar-myrdals-prescient-criticisms-of-keynes-general-theory/" Posted on August 10, 2013

“Love has a particular trait: it has a task or purpose to fulfill - to abide. By its nature, love is enduring. The Holy Spirit offers our world love that dispels uncertainty; love that overcomes the fear of betrayal; love that carries eternity within; the true love that draws us into a unity that abides!”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2008, Youth Day Vigil (19 July 2008)

Love, World, Fear, Nature

“The basic proposition is that the greater the uncertainty of the task, the greater the amount of information that has to be processed between decision-makers during the execution of the task. If the task is well understood prior to performing it much of the activity can be preplanned. If it is n~t understood, then during the actual task execution more knowledge is acquired which leads to changes in resource allocations, schedules, and priorities.”

Jay R. Galbraith (1939–2014) American business theorist

Source: Organization design: An information processing view, 1977, p. 21

Knowledge, Decision, Change

“Political philosophy seems often to reside at a distance from the world. Principles are one thing, politics another, and even our best efforts to ‘live up’ to our ideals typically founder on the gap between theory and practice.But if political philosophy is unrealizable in one sense, it is unavoidable in another. This is the sense in which philosophy inhabits the world from the start; our practices and institutions are embodiments of theory.... for all our uncertainties about ultimate questions of political philosophy — of justice and value and the nature of the good life — the one thing we know is that we live some answer all the time.”

Michael J. Sandel (1953) American political philosopher

The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self, 1984

Life, World, Justice, Question

“Fools pretend to foretell what will be the issue of things, and are laughed at for their awkward conjectures. Wise men being aware of the uncertainty of human aflairs, and having observed how small a matter often produces a great change, are modest in their conjectures.”

James Burgh (1714–1775) British politician

The Dignity of Human Nature (1754)

Men, Fools, Change

“The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas — uncertainty, progress, change — into crimes.”

Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist

Herbert Reade Memorial Lecture (6 February 1990)

Idea, Change

“Why was progress in computing technology so fast compared with the lack of progress in space travel? The reason is very simple: computing technology is only now approaching scientific limits such as quantum uncertainty and the speed of light, while space technology has already run into its limits that derive from the basic principles of physics and chemistry.”

Mordechai Ben-Ari (1948) Israeli computer scientist

Source: Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (2005), Chapter 13, “The Future of Science: Surprises or Revolutions” (p. 210)

Travel, Light, Speed

“Probability theory is an ideal tool for formalizing uncertainty in situations where class frequencies are known or where evidence is based on outcomes of a sufficiently long series of independent random experiments. Possibility theory, on the other hand, is ideal for formalizing incomplete information expressed in terms of fuzzy propositions.”

George Klir (1932–2016) American computer scientist

Source: Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic (1995), p. 205 cited in: Flavio Comim, et al. (2008) The Capability Approach: Concepts, Measures and Applications. p. 298.

“The Principle of Uncertainty is a bad name. In science, or outside of it, we are not uncertain; our knowledge is merely confined, within a certain tolerance. We should call it the Principle of Tolerance. And I propose that name in two senses. First, in the engineering sense: Science has progressed, step by step, the most successful enterprise in the ascent of man, because it has understood that the exchange of information between man and nature, and man and man, can only take place with a certain tolerance. But second, I also use the word, passionately, about the real world. All knowledge – all information between human beings – can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance. And that is true whether the exchange is in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics, or in any form of thought that aspires to dogma. It's a major tragedy of my lifetime and yours that scientists were refining, to the most exquisite precision, the Principle of Tolerance – and turning their backs on the fact that all around them, tolerance was crashing to the ground beyond repair. The Principle of Uncertainty or, in my phrase, the Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out, there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930's, it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it – the ascent of man against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty.”

Jacob Bronowski The Ascent of Man

Episode 11: "Knowledge or Certainty"
The Ascent of Man (1973)

World, Religion, History, Literature

“We sleep in peace in the arms of God when we yield ourselves up to His providence, in a delightful consciousness of His tender mercies; no more restless uncertainties, no more anxious desires, no more impatience at the place we are in, for it is God who has put us there, and who holds us in His arms. Can we be unsafe where He has placed us, and where He watches over us as a parent watches a child? This confiding repose, in which earthly care sleeps, is the true vigilance of the heart; yielding itself up to God, with no other support than Him, it thus watches while we sleep. This is the love of Him that will not sleep even in death.”

François Fénelon (1651–1715) Catholic bishop

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 600.

Love, Death, God, Peace

“Whatever way uncertainty is approached, probability is the only sound way to think about it.”

Dennis Lindley (1923–2013) British statistician

5. The Rules of Probability. p. 71.
Understanding Uncertainty (2006)

Way, Thinking

“Observers are men, animals, or machines able to learn about their environment and impelled to reduce their uncertainty about the events which occur in it, by dint of learning… [We] shall examine human observers who, because we have an inside understanding of their observational process, belong to a special category. For the moment, we shall not bother with HOW an observer learns, but will concentrate upon WHAT he learns about, i. e. what becomes more certain.”

Gordon Pask (1928–1996) British psychologist

Source: An Approach to Cybernetics (1961), p. 18.

Men, Understanding, Learning, Animals

“Our existence in this world seems insignificant within the extent of space and of time. Therefore, nonreligious people have to come to terms with living in a world full of uncertainty and unknowns. Nevertheless, many people prefer facing the uncertainty, rather than believing in a certainty that makes no sense to them.”

Mordechai Ben-Ari (1948) Israeli computer scientist

Source: Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (2005), Chapter 8, “Science and Religion: Scientists Just Do Science” (pp. 136-137; minor grammatical errors corrected silently)

People, World, Sense, Time