Quotes About Uncertainty

Embrace relational uncertainty. It's called romance. Embrace spiritual uncertainty. It's called mystery. Embrace occupational uncertainty. It's called destiny. Embrace emotional uncertainty. It's called joy. Embrace intellectual uncertainty. It's called revelation.

Quantum mechanics brought an unexpected fuzziness into physics because of quantum uncertainty, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. String theory does so again because a point particle is replaced by a string, which is more spread out.

I'm suggesting that principles meant to deal with uncertainty that occurs naturally can be useful to manage the uncertainty that characterizes any new idea.

Life can only be understood backwards but you have to live it forward. You can only do that by stepping into uncertainty and by trying, within this uncertainty, to create your own islands of security....The new security will be a belief that ...if this doesn't work out you could do something else. You are your own security.

The general uncertainty about the prospects of medical treatment is socially handled by rigid entry requirements. These are designed to reduce the uncertainty in the mind of the consumer as to the quality insofar as this is possible. I think this explanation, which is perhaps the naive one, is much more tenable than any idea of a monopoly seeking to increase incomes.

Change is all about motion, motion is all about uncertainty and we are deeply uncomfortable with uncertainty.

You must not procrastinate. Rather, you should make preparations so that even if you did die tonight, you would have no regrets. If you develop an appreciation for the uncertainty and imminence of death, your sense of the importance of using your time wisely will get stronger and stronger.

I grew up in the South Bronx, raised by my grandmother, who scrapped and scraped to make sure I had a roof over my head and food in my stomach. I was painfully aware of what it was like to live with limited resources and a certain level of uncertainty.

When I talk about an "empathy bank," I don't mean literally opening up a bank and putting in deposits. What I mean is that the more we can, as individuals and as members of a community, empathize with, understand the pain and uncertainty economic crisis causes other people, the more we lay the groundwork for political change.

In a climate of uncertainty and fear, without strong and visionary leadership, people panic.

However, optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers. One of the lessons of the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession is that there are periods in which competition, among experts and among organizations, creates powerful forces that favor a collective blindness to risk and uncertainty.

In the face of ambiguity, uncertainty, and conflicting demands, often under great time pressure, leaders must make decisions and take effective actions to assure the survival and success of their organizations. This is how leaders add value to their organizations. They lead them to success by exercising good judgment, by making smart calls when especially difficult and complicated decisions simply must be made, and then ensuring that they are well executed.

How small we humans are. All our scrambling around, trying to buttress ourselves against death. All our efforts to insulate ourselves against uncertainty with codes of behavior and meaningless busyness.

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

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.

Nobody becomes a writer overnight. Well, I'm sure somebody did, but that person's head probably went all asplodey from paroxysms of joy, fear, paranoia, guilt and uncertainty. Celebrities can be born overnight. Writer's can't. Writers are made - forged, really, in a kiln of their own madness and insecurities - over the course of many, many moons. The writer you are when you begin is not the same writer you become.

The issue of imitation has always occupied fly fishers, and part of its endless attraction has been the imponderable uncertainty of how much it matters to the fish in the first place.

It was like sawdust, the unhappiness: it infiltrated everything, everything was a problem, everything made her cry - school, homework, boyfriends, the future, the lack of future, the uncertainty of future, fear of future, fear in general - but it was so hard to say exactly what the problem was in the first place.

Hope -- 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...A belief in things not seen. A belief that there are better days ahead.

I believe that uncertainty is really my spirit's way of whispering, I'm in flux. I can't decide for you. Something is off-balance here.

We animals live life in all its glorious uncertainty. Why do politicians think they can control events?

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.

The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty

Turns out Picasso's passion for uncertainty, mystery, and the thrill of life never ended.

Without uncertainty and the unknown, life is just a stale repetition of outworn memories. You become the victim of the past, and your tormentor today is yourself left over from yesterday. Relinquish your attachment to the known, step into the unknown, and you will step into the field of all possibilities.

An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.

Where focus goes, energy flows. And where energy flows, whatever you're focusing on grows. In other words, your life is controlled by what you focus on. That's why you need to focus on where you want to go, not on what you fear. When you next find yourself in a state of uncertainty, resist your fear. Shift your focus toward where you want to go and your actions will take you in that direction.

It is in the realm of uncertainty, that your passion is found.

Uncertainty is the normal state.

Fear comes from uncertainty. When we are absolutely certain, whether of our worth or worthlessness, we are almost impervious to fear.

I push against the tree and run away, stumbling, the unreal night playing with me, gravity pulling from below, behind, above, making me fall. And I run through a world that is rotating, conscious of the earth's spin, of our planet twirling as it careens through nothingness, of the stars spiraling above, of the uncertainty of everything, even ground, even sky. Mumtaz never calls out, although a thousand and one voices scream in my mind, sing, whisper, taunt me with madness.

Uncertainty as to our relationship to God is one of the most enfeebling and dispiriting of things. It makes a man heartless. It takes the pith out of him. He cannot fight; he cannot run. He is easily dismayed, and gives way. He can do nothing for God.

The root of suffering is resisting the certainty that no matter what the circumstances, uncertainty is all we truly have.

The dream of coming back is becoming a reality. A lot of the uncertainty about the future has been cleared up. A lot of people are no longer cursing the darkness and have started lighting candles and doing positive things.

Fear is born in uncertainty and nourished by pessimism.

There are no conventional games involving conditions of uncertainty without risk.

But I am living in the midst of the uncertainty and risk, amid things that can and do bring physical destruction, because I am running from things that can destroy my soul: complacency, comfort, and ignorance. I am much more terrified of living a comfortable life in a self-serving society and failing to follow Jesus than I am of any illness or tragedy.

External means of escape like alcohol, drug use, and even overeating are a means of pushing uncertainty away and covering it up temporarily. And they may feel comforting for a moment, but I don't need to tell you that eventually they will cause more trouble than they ever solve.

Once, at the dreaming dawn of history -- before the world was categorized and regulated by mortal minds, before solid boundaries formed between the mortal world and any other -- fairies roamed freely among men, and the two races knew each other well. Yet the knowing was never straightforward, and the adventures that mortals and fairies had together were fraught with uncertainty, for fairies and humans were alien to each other.

We're in a pretty tumultuous world, and there's a lot of uncertainty. Treasurys are where people go as one of the few safe havens in the world.

There is no other proposition in economics that has more solid empirical evidence supporting it than the Efficient Market Hypothesis... In the literature of finance, accounting, and the economics of uncertainty, the EMH is accepted as a fact of life.

We make pictures. At the end of the day, we create something potentially significant that did not exist at the beginning of the day. We go forward, despite the uncertainty. Because this is an act of love and passion, which defies reason and prudence.

You get such a kick and then it's all over. That's good ground for uncertainty and depression. I usually burst into tears.

The inherent preferences of organizations are clarity, certainty and perfection. The inherent nature of human relationships involves ambiguity, uncertainty, and imperfection. How one honors, balances, and integrates the needs of both is the real trick of feedback.

When we reflect on the shortness and uncertainty of life, how despicable seem all our pursuits of happiness.

In this world that God (or Mother Nature) created, it is always hazard and novelty-hazard and novelty-which assert themselves, thereby rendering notions of fixity absurd. Incongruously enough, however, when we allow ourselves to fully accept uncertainty, to embrace and cultivate it even, then we actually can begin to feel within ourselves the presence of an Absolute. The person who cannot welcome ambiguity cannot welcome God.

The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.

Well, to me, the tensile strength and the very definition of an artist is something that I would place at the top of a vertical hierarchy. To be an artist is to suffer and to lead a life without shelter. It takes a great amount of daring-do, self reinvention, imagination, familial loyalty, sacrifice, economic uncertainty, and the right to be wrong, the right to fail in order to achieve something of noticeable value.