Existential Uncertainty Quotes

I am blind and limited. I would be a fool think myself wise. And so, not knowing what the universe means, I can only try to be responsible with the knowledge, the strength, and the time given to me. I must be true to my heart.

It seems to be very hard for people to live with riddles or to let them live, although one would think that life is so full of riddles as it is that a few more things we cannot answer would make no difference. But perhaps it is just this that is so unendurable, that there are irrational things in our own psyche which upset the conscious mind in its illusory certainties by confronting it with the riddle of its existence.

We're just animals, creatures smart enough and unlucky enough to have figured out we're alive, and we're going to die without ever knowing any purpose. We can pretend all we want and we can wish all we want, but that basic existential fact remains—we can't know.

She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.

We cannot prove that there is no God, but we can safely conclude the He is very, very improbable indeed.

I do know that there are some things that exist in this world that you just can't prove. That could be the case with God or whoever might be up there, but I don't follow any one religion.

Man no longer lives in the beginning--he has lost the beginning. Now he finds he is in the middle, knowing neither the end nor the beginning, and yet knowing that he is in the middle, coming from the beginning and going towards the end. He sees that his life is determined by these two facets, of which he knows only that he does not know them

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

I do not know who I am tonight.

Art is why I get up in the morning but my definition ends there. You know I don't think its fair that I'm living for something I can't even define.

If there's another world, he lives in bliss; if there is none, he made the best of this.

You can't put your finger on who I am. I can't put my finger on who I am.

Now anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity. It is the fruit of unanswered questions. But questions cannot go unanswered unless they first be asked.

Why do we argue? Life's so fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing.

If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.

I think my whole identity is formed around not knowing where I'm from. It might even be that I find comfort in that confusion.

What I am, I don't know. I am the simulacrum of myself.

The time has come for writers, especially those who are artists, to admit that in this world one cannot make anything out, just as Socrates once admitted it, just as Voltaire admitted it.

I felt in my bones that this universe does not explain itself.

For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it (life), whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to 'glorify God and enjoy him forever.'

At least I know I'm bewildered about the really fundamental and important facts of the universe.

Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65]

Know one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

Real danger is nothing more than just living. Of course, living is merely the chaos of existence, but more than that it's a crazy mixed-up business of dismantling existence instant by instant to the point where the original chaos is restored, and taking strength from the uncertainty and the fear that chaos brings to re-create existence instant by instant. You won't find another job as dangerous as that. There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.