Uncertainty is a term used in subtly different ways in a wide number of fields, including physics, philosophy, statistics, economics, finance, insurance, psychology, sociology, engineering, and information science. It applies to predictions of future events, to physical measurements already made, or to the unknown.
- If you aren’t in the moment, you are either looking forward to uncertainty, or back to pain and regret.
- There's no earthly way of knowing
Which direction we are going
There's no knowing where we're rowing
Or which way the river's flowing
Is it raining?
Is it snowing?
Is a hurricane a-blowing?
Not a speck of light is showing
So the danger must be growing
Are the fires of hell a-glowing?
Is the grisly reaper mowing?
Yes, the danger must be growing
'Cause the rowers keep on rowing
And they're certainly not showing
Any signs that they are slowing!
- From that point, my universe went on crumbling; new cracks appeared all the time. I could see that the pleasant securities of childhood, all of those warm little human emotions, all of those trivial aims and purposes that we allow to rule our lives, were an illusion. We were like sheep munching grass, unaware that the butcher's lorry is already on its way. I got used to living with a deep, underlying feeling of uncertainty that no one around me seemed to share. It was rather like living on death row.
- Colin Wilson in Alien Dawn, pp. 12-13 (1998)
Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations
- Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 826.
- Quis scit, an adjiciant hodiernæ crastina summæ
Tempora di superi?
- Omnia sunt hominum tenui pendentia filo:
Et subito casu, quæ valuere, ruunt.
I ever held worse than all certitude,
To know not what the worst ahead might be.
- Algernon Charles Swinburne, Marino Faliero, Act V.
- Dum in dubio est animus, paulo momento huc illuc impellitur.