Words of the Wise
Miles Davis
Jazz trumpeter, bandleader, pioneer of cool jazz and fusion
"Do not fear mistakes. There are none."
Marianne Williamson
Author, spiritual teacher
"Something very beautiful happens to people when their world has fallen apart: a humility, a nobility, a higher intelligence emerges at just the point when our knees hit the floor."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Risk theorist, author of Antifragile
"Learn to fail with pride and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error by mastering the error part."
Leonard Cohen
Poet, songwriter, novelist
"Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."
Ilya Prigogine
Nobel laureate, Thermodynamics
"We grow in direct proportion to the amount of chaos we can sustain and dissipate."
Pema Chödrön
Buddhist nun, author of When Things Fall Apart
"Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know."
Albert Camus
Novelist, philosopher, Nobel laureate
"In the middle of winter, I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer."
R. Buckminster Fuller
Architect, systems theorist, inventor of the geodesic dome
"You can never learn less; you can only learn more. The reason I know so much is because I have made so many mistakes."
Samuel Beckett
Playwright, novelist, Nobel laureate
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
The Complex Game
"The real secret of life is to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now, and instead of calling it work, realize it is play."
"Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun."
Michel Foucault
"The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end."
G.K. Chesterton
"The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground."
Jawaharlal Nehru
"Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will."
Joseph Brodsky
"Life is a game with many rules but no referee."
Ashleigh Brilliant
"Life is the only game in which the object of the game is to learn the rules."
M.C. Escher"My momma always said, 'Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get'"
The Value of Uncertainty
Socrates (470-399 BCE)
Greek Philosopher
"I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not fancy I do."
Confucius (551-479 BCE)
Chinese Philosopher
"To know that one knows what one knows, and to know that one doesn't know what one doesn't know, there lies true wisdom."
Laozi (6th century BCE)
Daoist Sage
"The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name."
Lakota Tradition (Deep Time)
Indigenous North American Spirituality
"Wakȟáŋ is mysterious. It is mysterious because it is incomprehensible to the limited minds of mere humans. Wakȟáŋ is sacred because it is so mysterious."
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (c. 700 BCE)
Hindu Sacred Text
"Now, therefore, the description of Brahman: 'Not this, not this' (Neti, Neti); for there is no other and more appropriate description than this 'Not this.'"
Yajnavalkya (Ancient India)
Vedic Sage, Hindu Tradition
"The Divine is not this and it is not that. Thus, the Divine is not real as we are real, nor is it unreal. The divine is not living in the sense humans live, nor is it dead."
Zen Koan Tradition (Origins in Tang Dynasty China)
Buddhist Practice
"What is the sound of one hand clapping?"
Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-395 CE)
Christian Mystic, Eastern Orthodox
"The true knowledge and vision of God consists in this—in seeing that He is invisible, because what we seek lies beyond all knowledge, being wholly separated by the darkness of incomprehensibility."
Pseudo-Dionysius (5th-6th century CE)
Christian Mystic
"The Divine exceeds all discourse and knowledge. The most truthful speech concerning God is silence—after exhausting what may be affirmed or denied."
Maimonides (1138-1204)
Jewish Philosopher, Kabbalah
"We cannot say what God is, only what God is not. True wisdom lies in recognizing the limits of what can be known."
Rumi (1207-1273)
Sufi Mystic, Islamic Tradition
"Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition."
Rumi
Sufi Mystic, Islamic Tradition
"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about."
Ibn Arabi (1165-1240)
Sufi Master, Islamic Tradition
"Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter. Let your soul be capable of embracing all forms of belief."
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
Christian Theologian, Catholicism
"The highest knowledge we can have of God in this life is to know that God is above all that we can think concerning Him."
N. Scott Momaday (b. 1934)
Kiowa Author, Native American Spirituality
"The sacred is not a discipline. It is a dimension beyond the ordinary and beyond the mechanics of analysis. The mind does not comprehend it; it is at last to be recognized and acknowledged in the heart and soul."
Aboriginal Teaching (Deep Time)
Australian Indigenous Spirituality
"The Dreaming is a complex of meanings—a concept best understood not as time, but as the eternal now wherein all knowledge and ancestors exist simultaneously."
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Irish Writer and Philosopher
"The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If I ever had to choose between certainty and romance, I would choose romance."
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
British Philosopher
"The demand for certainty is natural to humans but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."
Bertrand Russell
British Philosopher
"Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales. To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy can do."
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
Austrian-British Philosopher
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
German Philosopher
"The essence of technology is by no means anything technological. The fundamental danger of technology is not in machines themselves but in the illusion that certainty is achievable through technical mastery."
Michael Polanyi (1891-1976)
Hungarian-British Philosopher
"We know more than we can tell. The process of formalizing all knowledge is misleading. It misrepresents all knowing by modeling it on the kind of knowing that is least significant."
Michael Polanyi
Hungarian-British Philosopher
"I may hold firmly to what I believe to be true, even though I know that it may conceivably be false. This is the essence of intellectual courage."
Karl Popper (1902-1994)
Austrian-British Philosopher of Science
"Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite. True science consists not in seeking to attain certainty, but in learning how to live with uncertainty."
John Cage (1912-1992)
American Composer
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones. The unknown is where all possibility lives."
Nathan Lopes Cardozo (b. 1946)
Rabbi, Progressive Judaism
"Faith means striving for faith. It is never an arrival. It does not arise out of logical deduction, but out of uncertainty, which is its natural breeding ground. Certainty is the enemy of faith."
Richard Dawkins (b. 1941)
British Evolutionary Biologist
"I don't know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there. But the beauty of science is that it doesn't ask for faith; it asks for evidence, which means it welcomes uncertainty."
David Deutsch (b. 1953)
British Physicist and Philosopher
"Obviously I can't be sure of anything. But I don't want to be. I can think of nothing more boring than to attain the state of being perfectly secure in one's beliefs. All progress depends on the willingness to be uncertain."
Brian Eno (b. 1948)
British Musician and Artist
"The most important thing you can do in the creative process is to not know what you're doing. Cultivate not just a tolerance for ambiguity, but an active love of it. Make uncertainty your friend."
David Bowie (1947-2016)
British Musician and Artist
"If you feel safe in the area you're working in, you're not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you're capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don't feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you're just about in the right place to do something exciting."
W. Brian Arthur (b. 1945)
Economist and Complexity Theorist
"In a complicated world, the need is not for more certainty, but for more comfort with uncertainty. The systems we build must be designed not for control, but for adaptation."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960)
Lebanese-American Scholar and Complexity Thinker
"The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history. We are better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. The future is fundamentally uncertain, and that is a blessing, not a curse."
Robert Axelrod (b. 1943)
Political Scientist, Evolutionary Game Theorist
"In evolutionary tournaments of the Prisoner's Dilemma, the winning strategy was always 'nice'—never the first to defect. Strategies based on retaliation and aggression were systematically outcompeted by those based on cooperation and forgiveness. In the long run, it is the mild who inherit the earth."
Robert Trivers (b. 1943)
Evolutionary Biologist
"Across species and across human history, those who balance cooperation with strategic uncertainty consistently outperform the aggressively certain. The meek, in evolutionary terms, are those who understand that survival depends not on domination, but on adaptive flexibility and reciprocal trust."
Edward O. Wilson (1929-2021)
Biologist and Naturalist
"The human story is one in which the cooperative and prosocial traits have been favored by selection—not because they make us 'nice,' but because uncertainty demands collaboration. The aggressive and certain are evolutionary dead ends; it is the tentative and cooperative who build civilizations."
Dorothy Gale (1939)
The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum
"I don't think there's anything in that black bag for me. If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with."
Gandalf
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. The road goes ever on, and we cannot know where it leads."
Claudia Winkleman (2022)
Host, The Traitors UK
"The whole point of this game is that you can't be certain. The moment you think you know, you're probably wrong. Trust your instincts, but know they might betray you. That's what makes it glorious."
Millie Bobby Brown (b. 2004)
Actress, Stranger Things
"The best parts of Eleven's journey are when she doesn't know what's happening, when she's scared and uncertain. That's when she's most real, most powerful. Certainty would make her boring."
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