#uncertain

A threatened nation can react to uncertain dangers solely through administrative channels, to the truly embarrassing situation of perhaps overreacting. ↗

— Jurgen Habermas

#channels #dangers #embarrassing #nation #perhaps

What was I supposed to do then I wondered. Was there even a supposed-to for this kind of situation? A situation when when I looked at my receding past everything seemed retrospectively marked by an extreme order and predictability yet all moments since seemed to obey, and promised to continue obeying, their own set of stochastic, undisclosed, and undiscoverable laws. Where I was fully aware of the pitfalls and folly of a finely-tuned narcissism but still the known universe seemed to bend and bend inexorably inward and towards me where it awaited my next move, supremely ready to react accordingly. And how I knew that decisions I would soon make or defer would have near-Sophoclean import and yet nonetheless it all seemed oddly irrelevant. ↗

— Sergio De La Pava

#future #life #past #retrospective #uncertainly

Love's Course A boatman crossing Yura Strait Has lost his rudder, and the boat Is drifting with uncertain fate, Like love's course, indeterminate. ↗

— Sone no Yoshitada

#uncertainty #love

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

#others #self-doubt #uncertainty #value #self-determination

The person who fights monsters should make sure that in the process, he does not become a monster himself. Because when you stare down at an abyss, the abyss stares back at you. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#fight #identification #self-realization #uncertainly #self-realization

When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure. ↗

— Alice Hoffman

#uncertainty #weather #love

The road is not certain, and the end of the journey cannot be seen. ↗

— John Speed

#india

I have always believed that astrophysics should be the extrapolation of laboratory physics, that we must begin from the present universe and work our way backward to progressively more remote and uncertain epochs. ↗

— Hannes Alfven

#backward #begin #believed #epochs #i

Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves. ↗

— Willa Cather

#another man #arrogance #commonplace #conceit #dark

You don't raise taxes in times of such uncertainty. ↗

— Jason Chaffetz

#such #taxes #times #uncertainty #you