Uncertainty Quotes - Page 17

• Keeping your mind open in the face of uncertainty is the single most powerful secret of unleashing your creative potential.

  Michael J. Gelb

  Powerful, Creativity, Creative

  Michael J. Gelb (2009). “How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day”, p.179, Dell

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• If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.

  Hazel Henderson

  Change, Spiritual, Optimistic

  Hazel Henderson (1988). “The Politics of the Solar Age: Alternatives to Economics”, Knowledge Systems

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• Strokes carry a message whether you will it or not. The stroke is just like the artist at the time he makes it. All the certainties, all the uncertainties, all the bigness of his spirit and the littlenesses are in it.

  Robert Henri

  Artist, Messages, Spirit

  Robert Henri (1960). “The art spirit”, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

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• Career is the stringing together of opportunities and jobs. Mix in public opinion and past regrets. Add a dash of future panic and a whole lot of financial uncertainty. Career is something that fools you into thinking you are in control and then takes pleasure in reminding you that you aren't. Career is the thing that will not fill you up and will never make you truly whole.

  Amy Poehler

  Jobs, Regret, Past

  Amy Poehler (2014). “Yes Please”, p.169, Pan Macmillan

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• What the Fed is really trying to say is that it doesn't know what it is going to do next. And if the markets abhor anything, it is uncertainty. Expect bond and stock market volatility to increase from here until the inflation outlook solidifies.

  Scott Anderson

  Trying, Next, Volatility

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• It brings spiritual warfare and suffering for the priest as he identifies with those who suffer, and shares the frustrations, anger, and incomprehensibility of that suffering in what it does to those who suffer. The priest shares in these struggles of his suffering people, the uncertainties it brings, the sense of divine abandonment it induces, and the loneliness caused.

  Arthur Middleton

  Spiritual, Loneliness, Struggle

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• It is not certainty which is creative, but the uncertainty we are pledged to in our works.

  Edmond Jabes

  Creativity, Creative, Certainty

  Edmond Jabès (1977). “The Book of Questions: The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book”, Wesleyan

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• Dogmatism spreads its roots in the fertile soil of uncertainty.

  Walter Darby Bannard

  Roots, Religion, Soil

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• The world of learning is so broad, and the human soul is so limited in power! We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us.

  Maria Mitchell

  Soul, Nerves, World

  Maria Mitchell (1896). “Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals”

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• To some degree we all live with uncertainty. We have no control over the future. Yet we carry on, we persevere, because, I guess, it's the way we're made.

  Karen Thompson Walker

  Degrees, Way, Persevere

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• I think the time is coming for struggle and uncertainty. It comes into every serious and beautiful life. I knew all along that it had to come.

  Paula Modersohn-Becker

  Beautiful, Struggle, Thinking

  Paula Modersohn-Becker, Günter Busch, Liselotte von Reinken, Arthur S. Wensinger, Carole Clew Hoey (1998). “Paula Modersohn-Becker, the Letters and Journals”, p.182, Northwestern University Press

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• In teaching there can be too much emphasis on certainty and a proper appreciation of uncertainty is to be encouraged.

  Dennis Lindley

  Appreciation, Teaching, Too Much

  "Understanding Uncertainty". Book by Dennis Lindley (Chapter 6 "Bayes Rule", p. 81), 2006.

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• It is not surprising that in talking about uncertainty we should lean heavily on facts, just as the court of law does when interrogating witnesses. Facts form a sort of bedrock on which we can build the shifting sands of uncertainty.

  Dennis Lindley

  Talking, Law, Doe

  "Understanding Uncertainty". Book by Dennis Lindley (Chapter 2 "Stylistic Questions", p. 19), 2006.

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• Whatever way uncertainty is approached, probability is the only sound way to think about it.

  Dennis Lindley

  Thinking, Sound, Way

  "Understanding Uncertainty". Book by Dennis Lindley (Chapter 5 "The Rules of Probability", p. 71), 2006.

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• The books [and games] that give us the most pleasure combine uncertainty and satisfaction, tension and release.

  Peter Turchi

  Book, Games, Giving

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• Entrepreneurs are great at dealing with uncertainty and also very good at minimizing risk. That's the classic great entrepreneur.

  Mohnish Pabrai

  Entrepreneur, Risk, Classic

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• I think a good writer is a mix of confidence (sure that what they're writing is going to appeal to their readers) and uncertainty (what if all these words are crap?). If you're too confident, you get an attitude that seeps through into your writing, affecting the characters and the story. If you're too uncertain, you'll never finish anything.

  Charles de Lint

  Attitude, Writing, Character

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• To be a super-trader, you'll need an edge to overcome the laws of probability and the uncertainty of the marketplace. That edge comes from information flow, the ability to correct your habits in terms of the market's characteristics, and being able to take risks, cut losses, expand your information network, ferret out ideas, and take recommendations.

  Ari Kiev

  Cutting, Loss, Information Flow

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• Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeosis epoch from all earlier ones.

  Karl Marx

  Agitation, Bourgeoisie, Communist Manifesto

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (1973). “Karl Marx on Society and Social Change: With Selections by Friedrich Engels”, p.76, University of Chicago Press

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• Tension is anticipation and uncertainty. Every art has to have it.

  Rex Brandt

  Art, Anticipation, Tension

  Rex Brandt (1984). “Seeing with a painter's eye”

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• The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t.

  Jonathan Gottschall

  Meaningful, Lying, Mind

  Jonathan Gottschall (2012). “The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human”, p.103, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Eating at a new, highly recommended restaurant is like a Very Important Blind Date, a contract with uncertainty you enter into with great expectation battling the cynicism of experience. You sit waiting, wondering about the upcoming moments of revelation. Somewhere in the back of your head is the dour warning that disappointment is inevitable but you don't really believe it or you wouldn't be there. The best eaters are always optimists.

  Stuart Stevens

  Disappointment, Believe, Food

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• There is no doubt that truth is to falsehood as light is to darkness; and so excellent a thing is truth that even when it touches humble and lowly matters, it still incomparably exceeds the uncertainty and falsehood in which great and elevated discourses are clothed; because even if falsehood be the fifth element of our minds, notwithstanding this, truth is the supreme nourishment of the higher intellects.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Truth, Humble, Light

  Leonardo da Vinci (2017). “Thoughts on art and life”, p.18, Youcanprint

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• The new "ambiguity" means, in a way adjudged favorable to literary, poetic, intellectually and psychologically well-devised and praiseworthily executed linguistic performance, uncertainty of meaning, or difficulty for the interpreter in identifying just what the meaning in question is: it means the old meanings of ambiguity with a difference. It means uncertainty of meaning (of a word or combination of words) purposefully incorporated in a literary composition for the attainment of the utmost possible variety of meaning-play compressible within the verbal limits of the composition.

  Laura Riding

  Mean, Play, Differences

  "On Ambiguity". "Rational Meaning and Supplementary Essays". Book by Laura Riding and Schuyler B. Jackson, edited by William Harmon, 1997.

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• What we fear is what we do not know. When something is cloaked by the darkness of uncertainty, it's a mystery. Allowing light to penetrate that darkness makes everything clear.

  Aleatha Romig

  Light, Darkness, Mystery

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