The beginning of wisdom is the discovery that there exist contradictions of permanent tension with which it is necessary to live and that it is above all not necessary to seek to resolve.

The correct lesson to learn from surprises is that the world is surprising. Not that we should use past surprises to predict future surprises, but that surprise itself is the permanent condition. The error is assuming that because something hasn't happened, it can't.

The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. If you take your children for a picnic on a doubtful day, they will not enjoy themselves unless they are certain it will be fine.

Risk means more things can happen than will happen. The gap between those two things is where most investment mistakes are made — not from bad analysis, but from assuming the future is narrower than it actually is.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. It is indifferent to our need for certainty, and it is precisely this indifference that makes the pursuit of understanding so urgent.

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, in so far as it stands ready against the accidental and the unforeseen, and is not apt to fall.

It is a truth very certain that, when it is not in our power to determine what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable; and even if we cannot discover which of the alternatives is the more probable, we must nevertheless choose one of them.

We know accurately only when we know little; with knowledge doubt increases.

The longing for certainty and repose is in every human mind. But certainty is generally illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

The demand of the human intellect is for a world in which something is permanently true. Science gives us a world in which everything is provisionally true — which is not at all the same thing.

The truth is that we never know for certain about anything. The degree of assurance we feel about any proposition is not a measure of its truth, but a measure of our familiarity with the evidence bearing on it.

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. But stranger still is the fact that it does — partially, provisionally, and always at the cost of uprooting what we thought we already knew.

Risk means more things can happen than will happen. The dangerous investor is not the one who doesn't know what will happen, but the one who doesn't know what he doesn't know.

The true paradox of human existence is that we are condemned to be free; we are forced to choose, and yet there is no certain ground on which to base our choices.

The human mind is like a flashlight in the dark. It illuminates a small circle of the world around us, but beyond that circle lies an infinite darkness that we can never fully penetrate.

We do not know what we may be able to do until we try, and we can never be certain beforehand that an experience is worth having until we have had it.

The difference between a wise decision and a foolish one is often not apparent until years later. What matters is having a systematic way to think about decisions, not the outcome of any single one.

The investor of today does not profit from yesterday's growth. It is the always-uncertain future growth upon which the investor must capitalize, and it is those who will profit who must pay the delicate task of correctly appraising such uncertain future.