“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity.”
― Gilda Radner
“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night
“I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.”
― Woody Allen
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
...live in the question.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“The mistake is thinking that there can be an antidote to the uncertainty.”
― David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary
“Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
“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.”
― Richard P. Feynman
“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”
― Albert Einstein
“In these times I don't, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I don't want what I know and want what I don't know.”
― Marsilio Ficino, The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, Vol. 3
“Risk means 'shit happens' or 'good luck”
― Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident
“When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure.”
― Alice Hoffman
“When in doubt, be ridiculous.”
― Sherwood Smith, Firebirds: An Anthology of Original Fantasy and Science Fiction
“I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.”
― Richard P. Feynman
“Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain.
(Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)”
― Blaise Pascal, Pascal's Pensees
“But I have my life, I’m living it. It’s twisted, exhausting, uncertain, and full of guilt, but nonetheless, there’s something there.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, The Lake
“Nobody knows how things will turn out, that's why they go ahead and play the game...You give it your all and sometimes amazing things happen, but it's hardly ever what you expect.”
― Gennifer Choldenko, Al Capone Does My Shirts
“It (trying to keep the law) grants you the power to judge others and feel superior to them. You believe you are living to a higher standard than those you judge. Enforcing rules, especially in its more subtle expressions like responsibility and expectation, is a vain attempt to create certainly out of uncertainty. And contrary to what you might think, I have a great fondness for uncertainty. Rules cannot bring freedom; they only have the power to accuse. ”
― Wm. Paul Young, The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity
“Whether it is good or evil, whether life in itself is pain or pleasure, whether it is uncertain-that it may perhaps be this is not important-but the unity of the world, the coherence of all events, the embracing of the big and the small from the same stream, from the same law of cause, of becoming and dying.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
“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
“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
“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.”
― Mark Batterson, In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day: How to Survive and Thrive When Opportunity Roars
“Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.”
― Carl von Clausewitz
“Uncertainty is a quality to be cherished, therefore – if not for it, who would dare to undertake anything?”
― Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
“But nothing is solid and permanent. Our lives are raised on the shakiest foundations. You don't need to read history books to know that. You only have to know the history of your own life.”
― Ron Rash, One Foot in Eden
“Technology tends toward avoidance of risks by investors. Uncertainty is ruled out if possible. People generally prefer the predictable. Few recognize how destructive this can be, how it imposes severe limits on variability and thus makes whole populations fatally vulnerable to the shocking ways our universe can throw the dice.”
― Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune
“You don't know how to live. You live.”
― Marty Rubin
“Regardless of your faith, you can never escape uncertainty.”
― Shannon L. Alder
“Worry does not keep it from raining tomorrow, but it does keep it from being sunny today.”
― Shannon L. Alder
“Fear is caused by the uncertainty of the future. Sorrow is caused by the remembrance of the past. Try to keep your thoughts in the present, for the future we will never know and the past we may never understand.”
― Jeffrey Fry
“What word or expression do you most overuse? Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was 'perhaps.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
“We may not understand the pathways God lays out before us. We may not even like walking the journey. But even in failure, we can trust that He’ll do more than we expect.”
― Mary E. DeMuth, Everything: What You Give and What You Gain to Become Like Jesus
“I always liked the unknown. Ironically I familiarized myself with the uncertainty of life. Life can change in any minute of the day. God can turn anything around in a speck of a moment. I know for a fact that everything changes. Nothing stays the same. This too shall pass.”
― Happy Positivity
“Here I stand on the brink of war again, a citizen of no place, no time, no country but my own . . . and that a land lapped by no sea but blood, bordered only by the outlines of a face long-loved.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Written in My Own Heart's Blood
“I'm comfortable with the unknown -- that's the point of science. There are places out there, billions of places out there, that we know nothing about. And the fact that we know nothing about them excites me, and I want to go out and find out about them.
And that's what science is.
So I think if you’re not comfortable with the unknown, then it’s difficult to be a scientist… I don’t need an answer. I don’t need answers to everything. I want to have answers to find.”
― Brian Cox
“Satisfaction is a powerful sleep aid, and after the day I had yesterday, how could I not be content? Uncertainty has returned to my life, and I welcome the possibilities.”
― Doug Cooper, Outside In
“The more you go with the flow of life and surrender the outcome to God, and the less you seek constant clarity, the more you will find that fabulous things start to show up in your life.”
― Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass
“If I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it - keep going, keep going come what may.”
― Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
“...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, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
“That it's no good loving me because I'm never going to get married anyway and he'd just end up hating me later instead of sooner.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
“We react to fear when we are uncertain of the outcome, we respond to fear when we don't care about the outcome.”
― A. Dragonblood
“Was I a fool to believe in fate or in some destined illusionary path? I don't know. But we all need something to believe in.”
― John-Talmage Mathis, I Deal to Plunder - A ride through the boom town
“There's a thin line between an uncertain 'Yes' and a certain 'No' known as 'lame indecisiveness'.”
― Aniruddha Sastikar
“Only a few of us believe in reality of dreams and actuality of love; but we all devote ourselves to that uncertainty and hesitation.”
― M.F. Moonzajer
“Whatever her dream was, it rested somewhere in the most vague of directions.”
― Elizabeth Craft, Bass Ackwards and Belly Up
“The only thing I know for sure is how much I do not know.”
― Dean Koontz, Brother Odd
“In a world of increasing uncertainty, expect...”
― Gino Norris, Stress Diary Journal
“Of course, I don't know everything. Considering the infinite amount of knowledge that one could acquire in a virtually innumerable array of intellectual disciplines, it's probably more accurate to say that I don't know anything.”
― Dean Koontz, Brother Odd
“You cannot know" he said simply. "Very little is certain in this life, my lady.”
― Robin Maxwell, O, Juliet
“Lewis encourages his cancer-stricken and temporarily depressed wife that uncertainty rather than hopelessness is our cross.”
― C.S. Lewis
“Sometimes when persons say definitely it sounds actually less true.”
― Emma Donoghue, Room
“The most self-damaging words in the English language are: try, might, and if. These are words of uncertainty. Will you fail? That is possible. But continue doubting your abilities and you’ll never succeed.”
― Dannika Dark, Gravity
“The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.”
― Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety
“To try is to invite uncertainty. Where confidence goes, success usually follows.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman, Veterans of the Psychic Wars
“History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.”
― Ian Fleming, Casino Royale
“Having all the answers just means you've been asking boring questions.”
― Joey Comeau
“The uncertainty, the fear of the unknown was driving him, almost to the point of desperation. He felt as if he was going down a dark stairway, missing a step, hurtling into the unknown and having no idea where he would land.”
― Ken Puddicombe, Racing With The Rain
“My voice is born repeatedly in the fields of uncertainty.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
“I ran rather than walked, anxious to lose my way. All I wanted was to be unsure.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes
“When in doubt, throw doubt out and have a little faith....”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
“Every judgment teeters on the brink of error,” Leto explained. “To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.”
― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune
“Heralds don't sing about men who lived in orthodoxy or played it safe, they sing about men who lived an uncertain future and took enough risks to make your head spin.”
― Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
“Uncertainty is caused by a lack of knowledge. Hesitation is the product of fear.”
― Internet Archive
“Your future is uncertain, and I can tell you nothing that can help you. You are singular and dangerous, and so it is that you are sought by both the Dark and the Light.”
― Alison Croggon, The Naming
“When comparing 100 years of experience to 1, there is a way to close the gap. One must simply understand the choices that were taken, the roads that were walked, and that there are no guarantees to an unseen future.”
― Lionel Suggs
“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King
“Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.”
― Samuel Johnson, Works of Samuel Johnson
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
― Albert Einstein
“What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within the span of his little life by him who interests his heart in everything.”
― Laurence Sterne
“Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious...and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
― Walt Disney Company
“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”
― Plutarch
“Why is it that when one man builds a wall, the next man immediately needs to know what's on the other side?”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
“It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses. ”
― Colette
“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, and Selected Critical Prose
“The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.”
― William Arthur Ward
“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”
― Richard P. Feynman
“It's not a silly question if you can't answer it.”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World
“Somehow I can't believe that there are any heights that can't be scaled by a man who knows the secrets of making dreams come true. This special secret, it seems to me, can be summarized in four Cs. They are curiosity, confidence, courage, and constancy, and the greatest of all is confidence. When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionable.”
― Walt Disney Company
“I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt
“The knowledge of all things is possible”
― Leonardo da Vinci
“Life is an adventure of passion, risk, danger, laughter, beauty, love; a burning curiosity to go with the action to see what it is all about, to go search for a pattern of meaning, to burn one's bridges because you're never going to go back anyway, and to live to the end.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals
“Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.”
― Samuel Johnson, The Rambler
“Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence. And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear, and superstition. By the year 2050, when the conflict began, the world had fallen upon fearful, superstitious times.”
― Bernard Beckett, Genesis
“She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
“Thinkers aren't limited by what they know, because they can always increase what they know. Rather they're limited by what puzzles them, because there's no way to become curious about something that doesn't puzzle you.”
― Daniel Quinn, My Ishmael
“there is no reason why anyone should understand how it works… and of course no reason why anyone should care … unless you are curious, in which case I love you, for curiosity about the world and all its corners is a beautiful thing.”
― Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles
“It's daring to be curious about the unknown, to dream big dreams, to live outside prescribed boxes, to take risks, and above all, daring to investigate the way we live until we discover the deepest treasured purpose of why we are here.”
― Luci Swindoll, I Married Adventure
“His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“There are young men and women up and down the land who happily (or unhappily) tell anyone who will listen that they don’t have an academic turn of mind, or that they aren’t lucky enough to have been blessed with a good memory, and yet can recite hundreds of pop lyrics and reel off any amount of information about footballers. Why? Because they are interested in those things. They are curious. If you are hungry for food, you are prepared to hunt high and low for it. If you are hungry for information it is the same. Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.”
― Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles
“The love of knowledge is a kind of madness.”
― C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
“I had discovered that learning something, no matter how complex, wasn't hard when I had a reason to want to know it.”
― Homer Hickam, Rocket Boys
“I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.”
― Charles Baudelaire
“The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of the mind for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.”
― Anatole France
“Her grandmother had once told her that one of life's best lessons was not being afraid to look foolish -- to just ask the question.”
― Melissa Senate
“Misfortunes make us wise”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers Afield
“Children, be curious. Nothing is worse (I know it) than when curiosity stops. Nothing is more repressive than the repression of curiosity. Curiosity begets love. It weds us to the world. It's part of our perverse, madcap love for this impossible planet we inhabit. People die when curiosity goes. People have to find out, people have to know.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland
“Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly. ”
― Arnold Edinborough
“People say: idle curiosity. The one thing that curiosity cannot be is idle.”
― Leo Rosten
“I think I benefited from being equal parts ambitious and curious. And of the two, curiosity has served me best.”
― Michael J. Fox
“The ability to retain a child's view of the world with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare - and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
“Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting, perhaps even appalling, but it can just as well be viewed as almost unbearably exciting. We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
“Children are notoriously curious about everything, everything except... the things people want them to know. It then remains for us to refrain from forcing any kind of knowledge upon them, and they will be curious about everything.”
― Floyd Dell
Delicious Ambiguity.”
― Gilda Radner
“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night
“I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.”
― Woody Allen
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
...live in the question.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“The mistake is thinking that there can be an antidote to the uncertainty.”
― David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary
“Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
“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.”
― Richard P. Feynman
“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”
― Albert Einstein
“In these times I don't, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I don't want what I know and want what I don't know.”
― Marsilio Ficino, The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, Vol. 3
“Risk means 'shit happens' or 'good luck”
― Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident
“When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure.”
― Alice Hoffman
“When in doubt, be ridiculous.”
― Sherwood Smith, Firebirds: An Anthology of Original Fantasy and Science Fiction
“I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.”
― Richard P. Feynman
“Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain.
(Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)”
― Blaise Pascal, Pascal's Pensees
“But I have my life, I’m living it. It’s twisted, exhausting, uncertain, and full of guilt, but nonetheless, there’s something there.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, The Lake
“Nobody knows how things will turn out, that's why they go ahead and play the game...You give it your all and sometimes amazing things happen, but it's hardly ever what you expect.”
― Gennifer Choldenko, Al Capone Does My Shirts
“It (trying to keep the law) grants you the power to judge others and feel superior to them. You believe you are living to a higher standard than those you judge. Enforcing rules, especially in its more subtle expressions like responsibility and expectation, is a vain attempt to create certainly out of uncertainty. And contrary to what you might think, I have a great fondness for uncertainty. Rules cannot bring freedom; they only have the power to accuse. ”
― Wm. Paul Young, The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity
“Whether it is good or evil, whether life in itself is pain or pleasure, whether it is uncertain-that it may perhaps be this is not important-but the unity of the world, the coherence of all events, the embracing of the big and the small from the same stream, from the same law of cause, of becoming and dying.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
“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
“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
“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.”
― Mark Batterson, In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day: How to Survive and Thrive When Opportunity Roars
“Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.”
― Carl von Clausewitz
“Uncertainty is a quality to be cherished, therefore – if not for it, who would dare to undertake anything?”
― Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
“But nothing is solid and permanent. Our lives are raised on the shakiest foundations. You don't need to read history books to know that. You only have to know the history of your own life.”
― Ron Rash, One Foot in Eden
“Technology tends toward avoidance of risks by investors. Uncertainty is ruled out if possible. People generally prefer the predictable. Few recognize how destructive this can be, how it imposes severe limits on variability and thus makes whole populations fatally vulnerable to the shocking ways our universe can throw the dice.”
― Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune
“You don't know how to live. You live.”
― Marty Rubin
“Regardless of your faith, you can never escape uncertainty.”
― Shannon L. Alder
“Worry does not keep it from raining tomorrow, but it does keep it from being sunny today.”
― Shannon L. Alder
“Fear is caused by the uncertainty of the future. Sorrow is caused by the remembrance of the past. Try to keep your thoughts in the present, for the future we will never know and the past we may never understand.”
― Jeffrey Fry
“What word or expression do you most overuse? Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was 'perhaps.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
“We may not understand the pathways God lays out before us. We may not even like walking the journey. But even in failure, we can trust that He’ll do more than we expect.”
― Mary E. DeMuth, Everything: What You Give and What You Gain to Become Like Jesus
“I always liked the unknown. Ironically I familiarized myself with the uncertainty of life. Life can change in any minute of the day. God can turn anything around in a speck of a moment. I know for a fact that everything changes. Nothing stays the same. This too shall pass.”
― Happy Positivity
“Here I stand on the brink of war again, a citizen of no place, no time, no country but my own . . . and that a land lapped by no sea but blood, bordered only by the outlines of a face long-loved.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Written in My Own Heart's Blood
“I'm comfortable with the unknown -- that's the point of science. There are places out there, billions of places out there, that we know nothing about. And the fact that we know nothing about them excites me, and I want to go out and find out about them.
And that's what science is.
So I think if you’re not comfortable with the unknown, then it’s difficult to be a scientist… I don’t need an answer. I don’t need answers to everything. I want to have answers to find.”
― Brian Cox
“Satisfaction is a powerful sleep aid, and after the day I had yesterday, how could I not be content? Uncertainty has returned to my life, and I welcome the possibilities.”
― Doug Cooper, Outside In
“The more you go with the flow of life and surrender the outcome to God, and the less you seek constant clarity, the more you will find that fabulous things start to show up in your life.”
― Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass
“If I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it - keep going, keep going come what may.”
― Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
“...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, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
“That it's no good loving me because I'm never going to get married anyway and he'd just end up hating me later instead of sooner.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
“We react to fear when we are uncertain of the outcome, we respond to fear when we don't care about the outcome.”
― A. Dragonblood
“Was I a fool to believe in fate or in some destined illusionary path? I don't know. But we all need something to believe in.”
― John-Talmage Mathis, I Deal to Plunder - A ride through the boom town
“There's a thin line between an uncertain 'Yes' and a certain 'No' known as 'lame indecisiveness'.”
― Aniruddha Sastikar
“Only a few of us believe in reality of dreams and actuality of love; but we all devote ourselves to that uncertainty and hesitation.”
― M.F. Moonzajer
“Whatever her dream was, it rested somewhere in the most vague of directions.”
― Elizabeth Craft, Bass Ackwards and Belly Up
“The only thing I know for sure is how much I do not know.”
― Dean Koontz, Brother Odd
“In a world of increasing uncertainty, expect...”
― Gino Norris, Stress Diary Journal
“Of course, I don't know everything. Considering the infinite amount of knowledge that one could acquire in a virtually innumerable array of intellectual disciplines, it's probably more accurate to say that I don't know anything.”
― Dean Koontz, Brother Odd
“You cannot know" he said simply. "Very little is certain in this life, my lady.”
― Robin Maxwell, O, Juliet
“Lewis encourages his cancer-stricken and temporarily depressed wife that uncertainty rather than hopelessness is our cross.”
― C.S. Lewis
“Sometimes when persons say definitely it sounds actually less true.”
― Emma Donoghue, Room
“The most self-damaging words in the English language are: try, might, and if. These are words of uncertainty. Will you fail? That is possible. But continue doubting your abilities and you’ll never succeed.”
― Dannika Dark, Gravity
“The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.”
― Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety
“To try is to invite uncertainty. Where confidence goes, success usually follows.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman, Veterans of the Psychic Wars
“History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.”
― Ian Fleming, Casino Royale
“Having all the answers just means you've been asking boring questions.”
― Joey Comeau
“The uncertainty, the fear of the unknown was driving him, almost to the point of desperation. He felt as if he was going down a dark stairway, missing a step, hurtling into the unknown and having no idea where he would land.”
― Ken Puddicombe, Racing With The Rain
“My voice is born repeatedly in the fields of uncertainty.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
“I ran rather than walked, anxious to lose my way. All I wanted was to be unsure.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes
“When in doubt, throw doubt out and have a little faith....”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
“Every judgment teeters on the brink of error,” Leto explained. “To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.”
― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune
“Heralds don't sing about men who lived in orthodoxy or played it safe, they sing about men who lived an uncertain future and took enough risks to make your head spin.”
― Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
“Uncertainty is caused by a lack of knowledge. Hesitation is the product of fear.”
― Internet Archive
“Your future is uncertain, and I can tell you nothing that can help you. You are singular and dangerous, and so it is that you are sought by both the Dark and the Light.”
― Alison Croggon, The Naming
“When comparing 100 years of experience to 1, there is a way to close the gap. One must simply understand the choices that were taken, the roads that were walked, and that there are no guarantees to an unseen future.”
― Lionel Suggs
“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King
“Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.”
― Samuel Johnson, Works of Samuel Johnson
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
― Albert Einstein
“What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within the span of his little life by him who interests his heart in everything.”
― Laurence Sterne
“Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious...and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
― Walt Disney Company
“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”
― Plutarch
“Why is it that when one man builds a wall, the next man immediately needs to know what's on the other side?”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
“It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses. ”
― Colette
“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, and Selected Critical Prose
“The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.”
― William Arthur Ward
“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”
― Richard P. Feynman
“It's not a silly question if you can't answer it.”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World
“Somehow I can't believe that there are any heights that can't be scaled by a man who knows the secrets of making dreams come true. This special secret, it seems to me, can be summarized in four Cs. They are curiosity, confidence, courage, and constancy, and the greatest of all is confidence. When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionable.”
― Walt Disney Company
“I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt
“The knowledge of all things is possible”
― Leonardo da Vinci
“Life is an adventure of passion, risk, danger, laughter, beauty, love; a burning curiosity to go with the action to see what it is all about, to go search for a pattern of meaning, to burn one's bridges because you're never going to go back anyway, and to live to the end.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals
“Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.”
― Samuel Johnson, The Rambler
“Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence. And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear, and superstition. By the year 2050, when the conflict began, the world had fallen upon fearful, superstitious times.”
― Bernard Beckett, Genesis
“She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
“Thinkers aren't limited by what they know, because they can always increase what they know. Rather they're limited by what puzzles them, because there's no way to become curious about something that doesn't puzzle you.”
― Daniel Quinn, My Ishmael
“there is no reason why anyone should understand how it works… and of course no reason why anyone should care … unless you are curious, in which case I love you, for curiosity about the world and all its corners is a beautiful thing.”
― Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles
“It's daring to be curious about the unknown, to dream big dreams, to live outside prescribed boxes, to take risks, and above all, daring to investigate the way we live until we discover the deepest treasured purpose of why we are here.”
― Luci Swindoll, I Married Adventure
“His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“There are young men and women up and down the land who happily (or unhappily) tell anyone who will listen that they don’t have an academic turn of mind, or that they aren’t lucky enough to have been blessed with a good memory, and yet can recite hundreds of pop lyrics and reel off any amount of information about footballers. Why? Because they are interested in those things. They are curious. If you are hungry for food, you are prepared to hunt high and low for it. If you are hungry for information it is the same. Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.”
― Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles
“The love of knowledge is a kind of madness.”
― C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
“I had discovered that learning something, no matter how complex, wasn't hard when I had a reason to want to know it.”
― Homer Hickam, Rocket Boys
“I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.”
― Charles Baudelaire
“The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of the mind for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.”
― Anatole France
“Her grandmother had once told her that one of life's best lessons was not being afraid to look foolish -- to just ask the question.”
― Melissa Senate
“Misfortunes make us wise”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers Afield
“Children, be curious. Nothing is worse (I know it) than when curiosity stops. Nothing is more repressive than the repression of curiosity. Curiosity begets love. It weds us to the world. It's part of our perverse, madcap love for this impossible planet we inhabit. People die when curiosity goes. People have to find out, people have to know.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland
“Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly. ”
― Arnold Edinborough
“People say: idle curiosity. The one thing that curiosity cannot be is idle.”
― Leo Rosten
“I think I benefited from being equal parts ambitious and curious. And of the two, curiosity has served me best.”
― Michael J. Fox
“The ability to retain a child's view of the world with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare - and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
“Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting, perhaps even appalling, but it can just as well be viewed as almost unbearably exciting. We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
“Children are notoriously curious about everything, everything except... the things people want them to know. It then remains for us to refrain from forcing any kind of knowledge upon them, and they will be curious about everything.”
― Floyd Dell
