#certain

You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded ↗

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

#uncertainty #attitude

Was it a doubt - a fear - a wandering uncertainty seeking rest, but finding none - so tear-blinded were its eyes - Mr. Thornton, instead of being shocked, seemed to have through that very stage of thought himself, and could suggest where the exact ray of light was to be found, which should make the dark places plain. Man of action as he was, busy in the world's great battle, there was a deeper religion binding him to God in his heart, in spite of his strong willfulness, through all his mistakes, than Mr. Hale ever dreamed. ↗

— Elizabeth Gaskell

#men-of-action #uncertainty #business

My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#death #falling #featureless #labyrinth #nothing

Every time he tried to reconstruct the internal arguments that had led to his decision, they sounded feebler to him. ↗

— J.K. Rowling

#decisions #doubts #death

If the opposite of certainty is doubt, humility must lie somewhere between the two, ↗

— Ron Suskind

#doubt #humility #education

And in life, at least her new life, chances were the best she could hope for. They were like her rocks. Imperfect and surprising and maybe better in the long run than certainties. Chances, she thought, WERE life. ↗

— Veronica Rossi

#chances #life #life

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

#life #siddhartha #uncertainty #unity #life

If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal. ↗

— Terry Eagleton

#dogmatism #life #life

The great systems that inform the world about the truth and life invariably claim to be absolutely truthful and well-balanced. In reality they are quaking bridges built out of yearning. ↗

— Peter Høeg

#belief #bridges #certainty #fear #life

And of course I didn't know who would marry me now that I'd been where I had been. I didn't know at all. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#uncertainty #marriage