Quotes About Uncertainty

In the end it all comes down to this: you have a choice (or more accurately a rolling tangle of choices) between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot - and thereby guaranteeing that it will not make you happy. It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty. And curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice.

Would any thing but a madman complain of uncertainty? Uncertainty and expectation are joys of life; security is an insipid thing; and the overtaking and possessing of a wish discovers the folly of the chase.

Certainty creates strength. Certainty gives one something upon which to learn. Uncertainty creates weakness. Uncertainty makes one tentative if not fearful, and tentative steps, even when in the right direction, may not overcome significant obstacles.

In detachment lies the wisdom of uncertainty...in the wisdom of uncertainty lies the freedom from our past, from the known, which is the prison of past conditioning. And in our willingness to step into the unknown, the field of all possibilities, we surrender ourselves to the creative mind that orchestrates the dance of the universe.

Religious faith obscures uncertainty where uncertainty . . . exists, allowing the unknown, the implausible, and the . . . false to achieve primacy over the facts.

Vision, Uncertainty, and Knowledge of Materials are inevitabilities that all artists must acknowledge and learn from: vision is always ahead of execution, knowledge of materials is your contact with reality, and uncertainty is a virtue.

Insecurity refers to a profoud sense of self-doubt-a deep feeling of uncertainty about our basic worth and our place in the world. Insecurity is associated with chronic self-consciousness, along with a chronic lack of confidence in ourselves and anxiety about our relationships. The insecure man or woman lives in constant fear of rejection and a deep uncertainty about whether his or her own feelings and desires are legitimate.

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.'

Markets are fundamentally volatile. No way around it. Your problem is not in the math. There is no math to get you out of having to experience uncertainty.

I think love is often a bit selfish, even before we had consumerism. That's not new. A consumer society gives you the illusion of having massive amounts of choice and saddles you with the freedom of being able to dabble in that choice. And at the same time, you are left with the tyranny of self-doubt and uncertainty about whether you made the right choice.

The last thing Australia needs right now is instability and uncertainty.

Each time you stay present with fear and uncertainty, you're letting go of a habitual way of finding security and comfort.

Every single problem that you have in your life, is the seed of an opportunity for some greater benefit. Stay alert to opportunities by being grounded in the wisdom of uncertainty! When your preparedness meets opportunity the solution will spontaneously appear!

The psychology of the saver and the psychology of the investor is very closely connected with Keynes' distinction between risk and uncertainty. When the future is uncertain, he thought that a lot of saving would be directed towards securing, securing more, getting more security in the present, rather than building wealth in the future, which was the classical view, you save in order to invest, in order to consume more later on. What he had called the propensity to hoard or liquidity preference would normally be stronger than the inducement to invest.

Madness is not a consequence of uncertainty but of certainty.

If you ask me, the hypothetical zenith of gaming technology is direct neural interface - no body to hamper you and your brain is in whatever you want it to be in. Plus it leads to existential uncertainty, which could be entertaining.

The Government should take a firm, bold line. This delay - this uncertainty, by which, abroad, we are losing our prestige and our position, while Russia is advancing and will be before Constantinople in no time! Then the Government will be fearfully blamed and the Queen so humiliated that she thinks she would abdicate at once.

It is instructive to see how organizations pursue their goal of reducing errors and uncertainty. They impose standards, employ checklists, demand that knowledge workers list assumptions for their conclusions and document all sources. These actions either directly interfere with forming insights or create an environment where insights and discoveries are treated with suspicion because they might lead to errors. They signal to knowledge workers that their job is not to make mistakes. Even if they don't make discoveries, no one can blame them as long as they don't make mistakes.

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

The uncertainty of our future is nothing more than a fog of breath on a windowpane.

There cannot be any peace where there is uncertainty.

In the face of uncertainty, there is nothing wrong with hope.

Violence, with its ever-present economy of uncertainty, fear, and terror, is no longer merely a side effect of police brutality, war, or criminal behavior. It has become fundamental to neoliberalism as a particularly savage facet of capitalism. And in doing so it has turned out to be central to legitimating those social relations in which the political and pedagogical are redefined in order to undercut possibilities for authentic democracy.

The number one thing I urge people to remember is it is all about being scientific about managing strategic uncertainty, while striking the important balance between being thorough and being flexible.

The only reason you do not do great things is because you timidly cling to small things. Will you let loose of small things and bear the uncertainty of having nothing for a while? Do this and eventually you will do great things.

The fastest way to break the cycle of perfectionism and become a fearless mother is to give up the idea of doing it perfectly - indeed to embrace uncertainty and imperfection.

Uncertainty is the friend of the buyer of long term values.

A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

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

A review of the science suggests that uncertainty is so high as to raise a good prospect that mandatory green house gas reductions will produce little or no environmental benefit.

This is my prayer for all of us — 'Lord, increase our faith.' Increase our faith to bridge the chasms of uncertainty and doubt. Grant us faith to look beyond the problems of the moment to the miracles of the future. Give us faith to do what is right and let the consequence follow.

Trust in my wisdom. I do not make mistakes. Love my uncertainty for it is not a mistake. It is my intent and will. Remember - nothing happens without my will. Be still. Do not ask to understand. Do not want to understand.

Rather than managing by clarifying events, the creative process may require raising the level of uncertainty. Sometimes this can be done by issuing a creative challenge that has resonance in that it inspires the team to activity.

It's the uncertainty, the challenge and the willingness to put it all on the line that draws a lot of people to climb mountains. That can also apply to a lot of other challenges in life, whether it's running for office, starting a family, going to grad school or taking all of your cash and assets and starting a business.

Macroeconomic stability will be more elusive and that will affect all of our lives: from the risks many will face in childhood, to the security of employment at working age, to the challenge of accumulating for retirement. More financial instability will introduce more uncertainty all down the line, and that will be a very different world than the one we would have lived in only a couple of decades ago.

Uncertainty in the pressure of vivid hopes and fears is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.

... we know that productivity suffers when uncertainty is high. But we've failed to realize the equally destructive effects of too little anxiety. ... By protecting people from risk, we destroy their self-esteem. We rob them of the opportunity to become strong, competent people.

True strategy is about placing bets and making hard choices under conditions of uncertainty, not about assuming plans can remove risk.

The interval between the decay of the old and the formation and establishment of the new constitutes a period of transition which must always necessarily be one of uncertainty, confusion, error, and wild and fierce fanaticism.

Vulnerability is not weakness. And that myth is profoundly dangerous... I define vulnerability as emotional risk, exposure, uncertainty. It fuels our daily lives.

The gender prism is just descending upon us. For instance, when we're girls of nine or 10 we may be climbing trees and saying, "I know what I want. I know what I think." And then suddenly at 11 or 12, the gender role takes hold, and adults tell us, "How clever of you to know what time it is." It happens to boys, too and even sooner - between five and eight. Before that, boys cry and express uncertainty.

The seduction of safety is always more dangerous than the illusion of uncertainty.

The way we deal with uncertainty says a lot about whether Jesus is ahead of us leading, or behind us just carrying our stuff.

There was great political uncertainty in South Asia at the time of the Buddha. The older small tribal societies were cracking up and gave way to bigger states. There was much more trade and travel going on than before. To people in the cities the experience of living in a small place where you knew everyone and governed your affairs by consensual democracy had been lost.

I think my work is very American because I'm American. But I found that Europeans like uncertainty and doubt.

To live with the conscious knowledge of the shadow of uncertainty, with the knowledge that disaster or tragedy could strike at any time; to be afraid and to know and acknowledge your fear, and still to live creatively and with unstinting love: that is to live with grace.

[L]eave nothing to the uncertainty of procuring a warlike apparatus at the moment of public danger.

The artist is always searching for the meaning of life, his own and that of mankind, searching for truth. A system of uncertainty has entered our daily life. The pressures of mechanization and uniformity to which it is subject call for protest and the artist has only one means of expressing this, by music.