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Uncertainty Quotes

Browse 1345 quotes about Uncertainty.

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Uncertainty Quotes

“In truth, Thomas was being a faithful disciple of Jesus, who warned His disciples that “many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am the Messiah!’ and they will lead many astray” (Matt. 24:5). Indeed, Jesus affirms those who believe without seeing because such belief takes great faith. But that in no way suggests we should ignore evidence when it is available, as though doing so makes us more faithful. This impulse, combined with an often uncritical biblicism, not only neglects God’s command to love him with our minds, but leads us into unnecessary divisiveness and shallow literalism that blinds us to the deeper truth of Scripture. Therefore, during this process of self-emptying, we must be aware of and honest with our uncertainties. While we should never throw around our doubt with rebellious defiance, neither should we view our genuine questions and uncertainties as liabilities. Sometimes allowing ourselves to question deeply held beliefs opens us up to discovering that we were, in fact, in error, offering us the opportunity for more faithful understanding. Other times we discover that our fears are unfounded, returning to our former beliefs without doubt, yet stronger for it.”

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Book:Vulnerable Faith: Missional Living in the Radical Way of St. Patrick
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“Setting out is always a leap of faith, a risk in the deepest sense of the term, and yet an adventure too. The familiar and the habitual are so falsely reassuring, and most of us make our homes there permanently. The new is always by definition unfamiliar and untested, so God, life, destiny, suffering have to give us a push--usually a big one--or we will not go.”

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Book:Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
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“Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds -- justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can't go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.”

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Book:The vampire Lestat
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“They say, "Look before you leap." So look. But do not look for too long. Do not look into the void of uncertainty trying to predict each and every possible outcome, to evaluate every possible mistake, to prevent each possible failure. Look for the opportunity to leap, and leap faster than your fear can grab you. Leap before you talk yourself out of it, before you convince yourself to set up a temporary camp that turns into a permanent delay on your journey into your own heart.”

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Author:Vironika Tugaleva
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“I’ve lived several years on this planet, but only now do I understand what true strength is. Strength is making a decision that goes against everything you believe in, a decision that causes your heart to scream out to you ‘NOOOOO!’, a decision that rips your soul apart ….. yet you still know it’s right. And despite all the uncertainty and hesitation and misgivings, you make a choice which leaves nothing but an empty hole in your heart. And all you’re left with is tears and doubt and emotions that have been hit by a fucking wrecking ball. And yet you still make that decision. That’s strength”

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Book:Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe
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“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.”

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Author:Richard P. Feynman
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“Did I know myself less, I might perhaps venture to handle something or other to the bottom, and to be deceived in my own inability; but sprinkling here one word and there another, patterns cut from several pieces and scattered without design and without engaging myself too far, I am not responsible for them, or obliged to keep close to my subject, without varying at my own liberty and pleasure, and giving up myself to doubt and uncertainty, and to my own governing method, ignorance.”

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Book:The Complete Essays
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“During the flames of controversy, opinions, mass disputes, conflict, and world news, sometimes the most precious, refreshing, peaceful words to hear amidst all the chaos are simply and humbly 'I don't know.”

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Book:Killosophy
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“На поминках по моему отцу за одним столом в первый и последний раз встретились две ветви моей семьи — дед по матери, уроженец юга Украины и выпускник техникума, сталинист, ветеран Финской и Великой Отечественной, и двоюродная бабушка по отцу, яркий представитель московской еврейской интеллигенции, доктор наук, муж которой чудом не попал в лагерь. В какой-то момент речь зашла о репрессиях — семья отца была репрессирована, его отец погиб в лагере, а сам он провел несколько лет в ссылке. И произошла удивительная вещь. Оказалось, что эти два человека прожили свои жизни в разных странах, никак не пересекавшихся друг с другом. Дед, по его словам, не знал о репрессиях, их, скорее всего, и не было. А в той стране, где жила бабушка, все всё знали с 20-х годов, и аресты и лагеря были, в общем, главной реальностью, в которой существовали она и ее круг. Тот разговор за столом со всей очевидностью продемонстрировал то, что абстрактно кажется невероятным. Объективной реальности прошлого не существует. Ее формирует память, а память необъективна. Но гораздо важнее, что такое неопределенное прошлое, в свою очередь, формирует настоящее. Замороженная и «непредсказуемая» история страны с двоящейся памятью оборачивается двоящейся реальностью в настоящем. Такая раздвоенность чревата, в лучшем случае, «просто» невозможностью двигаться вперед, в худшем — гражданской войной.”

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Author:Николай Эппле
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“Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain also about your own; if your knight could shuffle himself on to a new square by the sly; if your bishop, at your castling, could wheedle your pawns out of their places; and if your pawns, hating you because they are pawns, could make away from their appointed posts that you might get checkmate on a sudden. You might be the longest-headed of deductive reasoners, and yet you might be beaten by your own pawns. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with the game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for his instruments.”

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Book:Felix Holt: The Radical
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“There's a kind of saying that you don't understand its meaning, 'I don't believe it. It's too crazy. I'm not going to accept it.'… You'll have to accept it. It's the way nature works. If you want to know how nature works, we looked at it, carefully. Looking at it, that's the way it looks. You don't like it? Go somewhere else, to another universe where the rules are simpler, philosophically more pleasing, more psychologically easy. I can't help it, okay? If I'm going to tell you honestly what the world looks like to the human beings who have struggled as hard as they can to understand it, I can only tell you what it looks like.”

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Author:Richard Feynman
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“When there is no way of knowing exactly how long our skeins will run--and when we imagine ourselves to have much more time than we do--our every impulse is to fight, to die with chemo in our veins or a tube in our throats or fresh sutures in our flesh. The fact that we may be shortening or worsening the time we have left hardly seems to register. We imagine that we can wait until the doctors tell us that there is nothing more they can do. But rarely is there nothing more that doctors can do. They can give toxic drugs of unknown efficacy, operate to try to remove part of the tumor, put in a feeding tube if a person can't eat: there's always something. We want these choices. But that doesn't mean we are eager to make the choices ourselves. Instead, most often, we make no choice at all. We fall back on the default, and the default is: Do Something. Fix Something. Is there any way out of this?”

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Book:Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
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“Every country has its myths, and one that successful Indians liked to indulge was a romance of instability and adaptation—the idea that their country’s rapid rise derived in part from the chaotic unpredictability of daily life. […] In India, a land of few safe assumptions, chronic uncertainty was said to have helped produce a nation of quick-witted, creative problem-solvers. Among the poor, there was no doubt that instability fostered ingenuity, but over time the lack of a link between effort and result could become debilitating.”

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Book:Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity
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“Possibility and uncertainty are intertwined. By embracing uncertainty, you let possibility be infinite. By keeping an open mind, and pushing yourself outside your comfort zone by being willing to try and fail, you create possibilities that are unforeseen.”

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Book:A Fraction Stronger: Finding Belief and Possibility in Life’s Impossible Moments
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“Embracing uncertainty is powerful in two ways: Firstly, it allows you to find acceptance. Secondly, embracing uncertainty broadens the horizon of possibility. Think about it in reverse: if we avoid uncertainty, we constrain the infinite nature of possibility.”

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Book:A Fraction Stronger: Finding Belief and Possibility in Life’s Impossible Moments
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“It is for your own good to love a dare-devil rather than a holy coward. A dare-devil is a unique devil, battling your fears, your pains, conquering your uncertainties, carrying you his arms, and flying out of the corrosive fire. The coward is a trickster serpent, which vanishes in your time of despair, and appears in time of equanimity.”

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Author:Michael Bassey Johnson
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“So the Dark did a simple thing," he said. "They showed the maker of the sword his own uncertainty and fear. Fear of having done the wrong thing--fear that having done this one great thing, he would never again be able to accomplish anything of great worth--fear of age, of insufficiency, of unmet promise. All such endless fears, that are the doom of people given the gift of making, and lie always somewhere in their minds.”

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Book:Silver on the Tree
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