Uncertainty Quotes - Page 29

• Our true history is scarcely ever deciphered by others. The chief part of the drama is a monologue, or rather an intimate debate between God, our conscience, and ourselves. Tears, grieves, depressions, disappointments, irritations, good and evil thoughts, decisions, uncertainties, deliberations --all these belong to our secret, and are almost all incommunicable and intransmissible, even when we try to speak of them, and even when we write them down.

  Henri Frederic Amiel

  Disappointment, Drama, Writing

  9 Copy quote

• It is infinitely safer to know that the man at the top has his doubts, as you and I have ours, yet has the courage to move ahead in spite of these doubts.

  Rollo May

  Moving, Men, Doubt

  5 Copy quote

• This is always the problem with building heroes. To keep them pure, we must build them stupid. The world is built on compromise and uncertainty, and such a place is too complex for heroes to flourish.

  Bernard Beckett

  Stupid, Hero, World

  "Genesis". Book by Bernard Beckett, 2006.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• This superficial blurring has something to do with the incapacity I have just mentioned. I can make no statement about reality clearer than my own relationship to reality; and this has a great deal to do with imprecision, uncertainty, transience, incompleteness, or whatever. But this doesn't explain the pictures. At best it explains what led to their being painted.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Reality, Technique

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  Horatius Bonar

  Running, Fighting, Men

  22 Copy quote

• Stimulus spending, permanent bailouts, government takeovers, and federal mandates have all failed our nation. America's employers are afraid to invest in an economy racked with uncertainty over what Washington's next set of rules, regulations, mandates, and tax hikes will look like.

  Geoff Davis

  America, Government, Regulation

  4 Copy quote

• Investors should be cautiously positioned as the global economy and markets face major uncertainties. The downgrade will be a further headwind to growth and job creation in the U.S.

  Mohamed El-Erian

  Jobs, Growth, Faces

  " China Weighs in on S&P Downgrade, Says U.S. Should Live Within its Means [Slideshow]" by Laura Matthews, www.ibtimes.com. August 6, 2011.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• One of the things that has been very difficult in Libya is the sense of uncertainty - the sense that they haven't actually finished the revolution, that there was still a great deal of uncertainty. That uncertainty has made Libya harder for business in terms of oil and other things as well.

  Fareed Zakaria

  Business, Oil, Revolution

  4 Copy quote

• Physicists often quote from T. H. White's epic novel The Once and Future King, where a society of ants declares, "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." In other words, if there isn't a basic principle of physics forbidding time travel, then time travel is necessarily a physical possibility. (The reason for this is the uncertainty principle. Unless something is forbidden, quantum effects and fluctuations will eventually make it possible if we wait long enough. Thus, unless there is a law forbidding it, it will eventually occur.)

  Michio Kaku

  Kings, Science, Epic

  11 Copy quote

• Life's most precious gift is uncertainty.

  Yoshida Kenko

  Inspirational, Precious Gifts

  11 Copy quote

• It's only in uncertainty that we're naked and alive.

  Peter Gabriel

  Naked, Alive, Adages

  Song: That Voice Again, Album: So

  57 Copy quote

  Show source

• Although economists have studied the sensitivity of import and export volumes to changes in the exchange rate, there is still much uncertainty about just how much the dollar must change to bring about any given reduction in our trade deficit.

  Martin Feldstein

  Dollars, Reduction, Given

  7 Copy quote

• The world economy today is recovering slowly, and there are still some destabilising factors and uncertainties. The underlying impact of the international financial crisis is far from over.

  Hu Jintao

  Impact, Economy Today, World

  4 Copy quote

• Now, since our condition accommodates things to itself, and transforms them according to itself, we no longer know things in their reality; for nothing comes to us that is not altered and falsified by our Senses. When the compass, the square, and the rule are untrue, all the calculations drawn from them, all the buildings erected by their measure, are of necessity also defective and out of plumb. The uncertainty of our senses renders uncertain everything that they produce.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Philosophy, Reality, Squares

  8 Copy quote

• Seeing that the Senses cannot decide our dispute, being themselves full of uncertainty, we must have recourse to Reason; there is no reason but must be built upon another reason: so here we are retreating backwards to infinity.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Philosophy, Medicine, Psychology

  Michel de Montaigne (1946). “The essays”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• To allow all U.S. workers to put part of their earnings into private investment accounts would definitely erode the Social Security system and cause uncertainty for new investors.

  Grace Napolitano

  Security Systems, Causes, Erode

  7 Copy quote

• I shall devote all my efforts to bring light into the immense obscurity that today reigns in Analysis. It so lacks any plan or system, that one is really astonished that there are so many people who devote themselves to it - and, still worse, it is absolutely devoid of any rigor.

  Niels Henrik Abel

  Light, People, Effort

  35 Copy quote

• The new painters do not propose, any more than did their predecessors, to be geometers. But it may be said that geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer. Today, scholars no longer limit themselves to the three dimensions of Euclid. The painters have been lead quite naturally, one might say by intuition, to preoccupy themselves with the new possibilities of spatial measurement which, in the language of the modern studios, are designated by the term fourth dimension.

  Guillaume Apollinaire

  Art, Intuition, Today

  8 Copy quote

• Our account does not rob the mathematicians of their science... In point of fact they do not need the infinite and do not use it.

  Aristotle

  Doe, Needs, Use

  Aristotle (2016). “Physics”, p.82, Aristotle

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The line has magnitude in one way, the plane in two ways, and the solid in three ways, and beyond these there is no other magnitude because the three are all.

  Aristotle

  Two, Three, Ontology

  "On the Heavens". Treatise by Aristotle (Book 1), 350 BC.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's a fact that children with cancer have higher cure rates than adults with cancer, and I wonder if the reason is their natural, unthinking bravery... Adults know too much about failure; they're more cynical and resigned and fearful.

  Lance Armstrong

  Children, Cancer, Bravery

  4 Copy quote

• You can't. Do you hear me? You think you've figured something out? You run over here so pleased with yourself because you changed your mind. Now you're certain. You're so... sloppy. You don't know anything. The book, the math, the dates, the writing, all that stuff you decided with your buddies, it's just evidence. It doesn't finish the job. It doesn't prove anything.

  David Auburn

  Running, Jobs, Book

  12 Copy quote

• The actual infinite arises in three contexts: first when it is realized in the most complete form, in a fully independent otherworldly being, in Deo, where I call it the Absolute Infinite or simply Absolute; second when it occurs in the contingent, created world; third when the mind grasps it in abstracto as a mathematical magnitude, number or order type.

  Georg Cantor

  Independent, Order, Numbers

  "Mind Tools: The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality". Book by Rudy Rucker, 1987.

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• How many pizzas are consumed each year in the United States? How many words have you spoken in your life? How many different peoples names appear in the New York Times each year? How many watermelons would fit inside the U.S. Capital building? What is the volume of all the human blood in the world?

  John Allen Paulos

  New York, Blood, Years

  5 Copy quote

• Mystery is an inescapable ingredient of mathematics. Mathematics is full of unanswered questions, which far outnumber known theorems and results. It's the nature of mathematics to pose more problems than it can solve. Indeed, mathematics itself may be built on small islands of truth comprising the pieces of mathematics that can be validated by relatively short proofs. All else is speculation.

  Ivars Peterson

  Islands, Ontology, May

  4 Copy quote