Certainty Quotes by Isaac Newton, Stanislaus I, C. S. Lewis, Hisham Matar, Floyd Skloot, Isaac Asimov and many others.
I shall not mingle conjectures with certainties.
To believe with certainty we must begin with doubting.
I am a product […of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them…. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.
When you’ve been living in hope for a long time as I have, suddenly you realize that certainty is far more desirable than hope.
I’ve forgotten what it’s like to remember. I’ve lost the mindless confidence that a moment, an idea, a thought will be there for me later, the bravado of breezing through experience in the certainty that it will become part of my self, part of my story.
Once you get it into your head that somebody is controlling events, you can interpret everything in that light and find no reasonable certainty anywhere.
The only certainties in life are death and taxes.
Step-parenting and being a step-sibling presents a lot of exciting opportunities. When families break up and re-form, there may be less order, less certainty, and a bit more trauma involved, but kids can end up having half-a-dozen parent figures.
Certainty is a closing of the mind. To create something new you must have doubt.
Where the quest for knowledge is relatively, and now almost absolutely, unrestrained, the public benefit will be great, especially where the certainty of the law ensures that knowledge is rewarded. This is exactly the combination that is the foundation of wealth-creation.
Be sure of the foundation of your life. Know why you live as you do. Be ready to give a reason for it. Do not, in such a matter as life, build an opinion or custom on what you guess is true. Make it a matter of certainty and science.
If men would only take the chances of doing right because it is right, instead of the immediate certainty of the advantage of doing wrong, how much happier would their lives be.
Science is the outcome of being prepared to live without certainty and therefore a mark of maturity. It embraces doubt and loose ends.
The true lesson of the Vietnam War is: certainty of purpose and ruthlessness of execution win wars.
A liberal knows that the only certainty in this life is change but believes that the change can be directed toward a constructive end.
I’m for open-mindedness and tolerance. I’m against any form of fanaticism, fundamentalism or zealotry, and this certainty of ‘We have the truth.’ The truth is far too large and complex. Nobody has the truth.
Of Virginia Woolf: The talent of this generation which is most certain of survival.
Through patience and certainty, leadership in the religion is obtained.
Gauss replied, when asked how soon he expected to reach certain mathematical conclusions, that he had them long ago, all he was worrying about was how to reach them!
Faith is a process of leaping into the abyss not on the basis of any certainty about where we shall land, but rather on the belief that we shall land.
Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul when hot for certainties in this our life!
Experience has instructed us that no skill in the science of government has yet been able to discriminate and define, with sufficient certainty, its three great provinces the legislative, executive, and judiciary; or even the privileges and powers of the different legislative branches.
It has become a certainty now that if you will only advertise sufficiently you may make a fortune by selling anything.
For more than three months, I had been president and primary owner of Spellman Investigations, and I can say with complete certainty that I had more power in this office as an underling. My title, it seemed, was purely decorative. I was captain of an unfashionable and sinking ship.
When prayer removes distrust and doubt and enters the field of mental certainty, it becomes faith; and the universe is built on faith.
When salvation is viewed as man’s program, it is left up to man as to whether he will let God do this or that, but when it is viewed as God’s program, there is a confidence and a certainty that no one whom God regenerates will be a carnal Christian.
People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power. The only thing we should respect in a person’s faith is his desire for a better life in this world; we need never have respected his certainty that one awaits him in the next.
You should have certainty in what you do. Anyone who has done anything in this world was hated. If you’re not hated, you’ve done nothing.
The occurrence of any event where the chances are beyond one in ten followed by 50 zeros is an event which we can state with certainty will never happen, no matter how much time is allotted and no matter how many conceivable opportunities could exist for the event to take place.
Life is ever evolving. The only certainty is change.
Theoretically, I grant you, there is no possibility of error in necessary reasoning. But to speak thus “theoretically,” is to uselanguage in a Pickwickian sense. In practice, and in fact, mathematics is not exempt from that liability to error that affects everything that man does.
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
You have to tailor yourself to everybody. Sometimes people need a firmer hand; some people you can have a laugh with, and they concentrate more. What they needed was more certainty about the future of the company.
Madness is not a consequence of uncertainty but of certainty.
One of my favorite things about what I do for a living is that there is no certainty that, at any hour of any day, I could get a phone call that could change everything. Good or bad. I never know.
The world is too big and too intricate to conform to our ideas of what it should be like… Just because we invent myths and theories to explain away the chaos we’re still going to live in a world that’s older and more complicated than we’ll ever understand.
The Public … demands certainties … But there are not certainties
Greatness after all, in spite of its name, appears to be not so much a certain size as a certain quality in human lives. It may be present in lives whose range is very small.
It is certain because it is impossible. -Certum est quia impossibile
Nothing is more painful to the human mind than, after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows and deprives the soul both of hope and fear.
What I envy most about you and everyone else heading back to school is the certainty of it all. You’ve got a prescribed set of requirements to guide you through the next few years. Focus your energy on the completion of those assignments and you’ll succeed. Guaranteed. Where’s my syllabus to guide me through life?
The old scientific ideal of episteme – of absolutely certain, demonstrable knowledge – has proved to be an idol. The demand for scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every scientific statement must remain tentative for ever.
Certainty is rarely if ever possible and we increase the likelihood of getting things wrong if we succumb to the hunger for it.
One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
I have lived in this world just long enough to look carefully the second time into things that I am most certain of the first time.
‘Faith’ and ‘trust’ are words that put the power in the hands of an outside force that we are meant to rely on – whether it is God or a person or the universe. Certainty puts the power back in our hands.
A fighter in his prime needs to stay active. A fighter, who doesn’t have certainty when he’s going to fight again, it’s hard for him to stay mentally ready.
This view [of the infinite], which I consider to be the sole correct one, is held by only a few. While possibly I am the very first in history to take this position so explicitly, with all of its logical consequences, I know for sure that I shall not be the last!
The truth that I know for sure is that I may have an opinion, but I do not know the truth, and the other thing I know for sure is that certainty is the root of all ignorance and the root of all evil.
We need to work together to support common-sense solutions to establish and maintain regulatory certainty and predictability for the mining industry and reduce excessive, duplicative, and expensive permitting delays.
When we deal with questions relating to principles of law and their applications, we do not suddenly rise into a stratosphere of icy certainty.
Biblical hope is not wishful thinking or an optimistic outlook; rather, it is a confident expectation based on the certainty of God’s Word that as He has anchored us in the past, so He will in the future.
If we base our belief systems on the humble assumption that the complexities of the world are ontologically beyond our understanding, then maybe our belief systems will make more sense and end up causing less suffering.
For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.
Madness is the result not of uncertainty but certainty.
The Resistance is a moral certainty, not a poetic one. The true poet never uses words in order to punish someone. His judgment belongs to a creative order; it is not formulated as a prophetic scripture.
Doubt is uncomfortable, certainty is ridiculous.
Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).
I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place.
Deciding under uncertainty is bad enough, but deciding under an illusion of certainty is catastrophic.
We must meet the uncertainties of this world with the certainty of the world to come.
The greatest weapon any warrior can carry into battle is absolute certainty of her eternal soul.
Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.
Perseverance is more than endurance. It is endurance combined with absolute assurance and certainty that what we are looking for is going to happen.
O Mother of God! If I place my confidence in thee, I shall be saved; if I am under thy protection, I have nothing to fear; for the fact of being thy client is a possession of a certainty of salvation which God grants only to those whom He intends to save.
We often call a certainty a hope, to bring it luck.
The underlying aim of practice . .is to create certainty through the development of high-quality listening.
Men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time.
The language of judicial decision is mainly the language of logic. And the logical method and form flatter that longing for certainty and for repose which is in every human mind. But certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.
One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.
In stamping photography with the patent of realism, society does nothing but confirm itself in the tautological certainty that an image of reality that conforms to its own representation of objectivity is truly objective.
Whatever Seattle says, the great chief at Washington can rely upon with as much certainty as he can upon the return of the sun or the seasons.
I imagine having that sixth sense, the certainty that what I’m looking for is within reach, even if it’s still hidden.
There’s no certainty to the next couple of years, but people are paying attention now. And I want to put out a record when people are paying attention, because that’s when it has the best chance of being heard.
The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.
So trust the process of your life unfolding, and know with certainty, through the peaks and valleys of your journey, that your soul rests safe and secure in the arms of God.
Maybe that’s what is means to be human . . . forever questioning our certainties.
Certainty, not data, is knowledge.
The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.
The whole point of art, aside from the aesthetic pleasure it yields, is that it provides a bridge to the past; that seductive land where we all find certainty and consolation. Nothing quite spans this gulf with such immediacy as the art of popular song.
My friends call me a ‘pace-setter.’ Sometimes I am impatient, I think, but you must be fast and flexible in business because uncertainty is the only certainty in life.
While not exactly disgruntled, he was far from feeling gruntled. He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.
Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.
It is only of life on Earth, however, that one can speak with any certainty. It seems to me that all life on Earth, the sum total of life upon the Earth, has purpose.
The attitude of mourning is a faithless attitude, an ignorant attitude. The more we know, the more fully we shall trust, for we shall feel with utter certainty that we and our dead are alike in the hands of perfect Power and perfect Wisdom, directed by perfect Love.
Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.
Do not expect to arrive at certainty in every subject which you pursue. There are a hundred things wherein we mortals. . . must be content with probability, where our best light and reasoning will reach no farther.
If you want to attract more investment, foreign investment, more talent, more business, I think having some level of certainty that the business environment respects, those who have been your partners for a long time, is important.
If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.
Fear comes from uncertainty. When we are absolutely certain, whether of our worth or worthlessness, we are almost impervious to fear. Thus a feeling of utter unworthiness can be a source of courage.
Could we have prevented in 100% certainty? I don’t think anything is that certain. However, we would have had a very, very good chance for preventing it.
Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That’s what writing is all about.
Pessimist by policy, optimist by temperament- it is possible to be both. How? By never taking an unnecessary chance and by minimizing the risks you can’t avoid. This permits you to play out the game untroubled by the certainty of the outcome.
The world of learning is so broad, and the human soul is so limited in power! We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us.
In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.
Investors don’t like uncertainty. The market is telling us that they need certainty, they need to see where the economy is heading. If the government is committed to continue the Open Door policy, they will need to come up with concrete policies and execution steps to increase confidence.
I really think that living is the process of going from complete certainty to complete ignorance.
To the last we have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished.
I have a certainty about eternity that is a wonderful thing, and I thank God for giving me that certainty. I do not fear death. I may fear a little bit about the process, but not death itself, because I think the moment that my spirit leaves this body, I will be in the presence of the Lord.
I have lived with magic and without magic, and I can tell you with certainty that a life with magic is better.
Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
To discover, or recover, the sense of religious certainty one must worship.
What is known for certain is dull.
The only result my father got for his money was the certainty that his son had laid faultlessly the foundation of a system of heavy drinking and could be always relied upon to make a break of at least twenty-five even with a bad cue.
Zealots: Wild eyed persons afflicted with incurable certainty about the workings of the world, a certainty that can lead to violence when the world doesn’t fit.
People prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty
HURRICANE, n. An atmospheric demonstration once very common but now generally abandoned for the tornado and cyclone. The hurricane is still in popular use in the West Indies and is preferred by certain old- fashioned sea-captains.
And for mathematical science, he that doubts their certainty hath need of a dose of hellebore.
Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos.
The creation is the Bible of the Deist. He there reads, in the handwriting of the Creator himself, the certainty of His existence and the immutability of His power, and all other Bibles and Testaments are to him forgeries.
Somewhere in the back of my brain there exists this certainty: The body is no more than a costume, and can be changed at will. That the changing of bodies, like costumes, would make me into a different character, a character who might, finally, be alright.
From this bestial view that the human mind consists of only sense certainty, pleasure and pain, Locke developed an equally bestial theory of the nation. Man originally existed in a State of Nature of complete liberty.
The present is the only reality and the only certainty.
All that passes for knowledge can be arranged in a hierarchy of degrees of certainty, with arithmetic and the facts of perception at the top.
How is it that one rails against that which is nearly a certainty?
Poetry exists partly to undermine the certainties of an accepted intellectual system, by opening a fissure of awareness at which the reality of the unconquered world may enter.
I have throughout been curious about how much we can be said to know and with what degree of certainty or doubtfulness.
So when they don’t have certainty, they go the other way. In Ohio, we have given them certainty and things have been improved. But if we can get a Romney presidency, they are going to get much better.
The Palestinians are the only nation in the world that feels with certainty that today is better than what the days ahead will hold. Tomorrow always heralds a worse situation.
There is only one thing about which I am certain, and this is that there is very little about which one can be certain
We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.
That which is true must always remain true, though the applications may change greatly from generation to generation. It is the absence of such fundamental certainties, no doubt, that leads men into continual search for a satisfying religion, or that drives them away from their old religion.
And yet we knew, for a certainty, that when first emissaries of Earth went walking among the planets, Earth’s other sons would be dreaming not about such expeditions but about a piece of bread.
Turn yourself inside out. Live with absolute certainty that you have the power to create anything that you desire-anything!-because the power you need is the power of the Universe flowing through you.
Our discussions of the economy may sometimes ring in the ears of the public with more certainty than is appropriate.
Unless you have courage, a courage that keeps you going,
always going, no matter what happens, there is no
certainty of success. It is really an endurance race.
always going, no matter what happens, there is no
certainty of success. It is really an endurance race.
In our heart, in the heart of each of you, let there be always the joyous certainty that the Lord is near, that he does not abandon us, that he is near to us, and that he surrounds us with his love.
These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light – the soul’s certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.
Most human things are full of conflict and ambivalence, not ease and simplicity. The world has grown increasingly fundamentalist, and the parameters of discussion have become narrowed. People, when they’re fearful, are vulnerable to certainty in rhetoric.
We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.
The truth is you cannot decrease the severity and certainty of sentences without increasing crime. It’s simply impossible.
In the [John F.] Kennedy case, I believe the absence of a conspiracy can be proved to a virtual certainty.
When we are not sure, we are alive.
…while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.
After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.
The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.
A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.
Self-help must precede help from others. Even for making certain of help from heaven, one has to help oneself.
If you look around the world and I can tell you right now that the majority of the planet is focused on certainty and significance. And those two absolutely guarantee unhappiness. Because if you’re driven by significance, it doesn’t matter what you achieve, it’s never enough.
We are often less grieved at disappointments than at ourselves for having said much concerning the certainty of our expectations.
The very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past.
Mississippi is an imperfect state, and I can predict with certainty that I will reflect that imperfection. Mississippians also strive for excellence, and I swear to reflect that as well.
Certainty sees things in restrictive, protective, aggressive ways, and thus isn’t seeing at all.
The difference between religion and science is the difference between thoughtless certainty and thoughtful doubt.
We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, but struggling against the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.
We come to recognize that playfulness, as a philosophical stance, can be very serious indeed; and moreover, that it possesses an unfailing capacity to arouse ridicule and hostility in those among us who crave certainty, reverence, and restraint.
The joy of all mysteries is the certainty which comes from their contemplation, that there are many doors yet for the soul to open on her upward and inward way.
Nobody knows the future with certainty. We can, however, identify ongoing patterns of change.
We’ve created a multitrillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets – and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near certainty that those tickets will not win. Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan.
We had been hopelessly labouring to plough waste lands; to make nationality grow in a place full of the certainty of God… Among the tribes our creed could be only like the desert grass – a beautiful swift seeming of spring; which, after a day’s heat, fell dusty.
This kind of certainty comes but just once in a lifetime!
We may not be able to get certainty, but we can get probability, and half a loaf is better than no bread.
Learning emerges from discovery, not directives; reflection, not rules; possibilities, not prescriptions; diversity, not dogma; creativity and curiosity, not conformity and certainty; and meaning, not mandates.
Adventure upon all the tickets in the lottery, and you lose for certain; and the greater the number of your tickets the nearer your approach to this certainty.
He had found the band of jackals he needed. But as Jack McCall rode through the center of town, he experienced the terrifying certainty that a man faces when he’s about to make his own name famous. He lacked both a hero’s calm and a coward’s resolve to survive at any price.
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
The most distinctive characteristic which differentiates mathematics from the various branches of empirical science, and which accounts for its fame as the queen of the sciences, is no doubt the peculiar certainty and necessity of its results.
The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.
Indecision is fatal. It is better to make a wrong decision than build up a habit of indecision. If you’re wallowing in indecision, you certainty can’t act – and action is the basis of success
A writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine.
Nothing will deter crime but the certainty of punishment.
The only certainty is death.
To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.
One certainty when you travel is the moment you arrive in a foreign country, the American dollar will fall like a stone.
Certainty regarding your career aged 15 is very unusual.
But teleological considerations can lead no further than to a belief and a hope. They do not give certainty.
No great deed, private or public, has ever been undertaken in a bliss of certainty.
There are many levels of life which we cannot see and know, yet which certainly exist. There is a larger world, vast enough to include immortality…. Our spiritual natures belong to this larger world … If death is apparently an outward fact, immortality is an inner certainty.
What has always surprised me when I walk into a bookstore is the number of books that you can find that are written with certainty. The authors tell some story as though it’s true, but they don’t have any evidence that it is true!
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.
To find the length of an object, we have to perform certain physical operations. The concept of length is therefore fixed when the operations by which length is measured are fixed that is, the concept of length involves as much as and nothing more than the set of operations by which length is determined.
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong.
We must ensure that more binding, durable, and enforceable fiscal rules go hand-in-hand with funding certainty for countries pursuing sound and sustainable economic policies. We need to keep pushing forward towards a comprehensive solution to the challenges of the eurozone.
People who ask confidently get more than those who are hesitant and uncertain. When you’ve figured out what you want to ask for, do it with certainty, boldness and confidence. Don’t be shy or feel intimidated by the experience. You may face some unexpected criticism, but be prepared for it with confidence.
I’m going to end a life that I thought could contain every kind of greatness but that in fact consisted only of my incapacity to really want to be great. Whenever I arrived at a certainty, I remembered that those with the greatest certainties are lunatics.
I never imagined it wouldn’t work out for me. I had that absolute certainty in myself that has seen me through, I think, and my parents were absolutely behind me all the way.
Was this normalcy-predictable patterns, the certainty of doing the same thing everyday? Because if so, normalcy was about to make me freak out and start screaming.
Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.
What has once been settled by a precedent will not be unsettled overnight, for certainty and uniformity are gains not lightly sacrificed. Above all is this true when honest men have shaped their conduct on the faith of the pronouncement.
Without sounding overly pompous about it, I don’t really trust certainty in anything, actually. Especially as I get older. Except love. I’m certain of love, I guess.
Doubt is nothing but a trivial agitation on the surface of the soul, while deep down there is a calm certainty.
Ideas which have been developed simultaneously or in immediate succession in the same mind mutually reproduce each other, and do this with greater ease in the direction of the original succession and with a certainty proportional to the frequency with which they were together
The only certainty we have is that those who are certain of a way to arrive at worldly salvation, are committed enough to organize around this, and seek power to enforce it, will invariably descend into a bloody totalitarian fascism.
A chuck under the chin is worth two kisses.
What a dusty answer gets the soul When hot for certainties in this our life!
If the biblical story is true, the kind of certainty proper to a human begin will be one which rests on the fidelity of God, not upon the competence of the human knower.В It will be a kind of certainty which is inseparable from gratitude and trust
Give us that calm certainty of truth, that nearness to Thee, that conviction of the reality of the life to come, which we shall need to bear us through the troubles of this.
He who does not understand the supreme certainty of mathematics is wallowing in confusion.
Certainty becomes you.
Startups have finite time and resources to find product/market fit before they run out of money. Therefore startups trade off certainty for speed, adopting ‘good enough decision making’ and iterating and pivoting as they fail, learn, and discover their business model.
If you develop the absolute sense of certainty that powerful beliefs provide, then you can get yourself to accomplish virtually anything, including those things that other people are certain are impossible.
While the crash only took place six months ago, I am convinced we have now passed the worst, and with continued unity of effort, we shall rapidly recover. There is one certainty of the future of a people of the resources, intelligence and character of the people of the United States – that is, prosperity.
“I see it, but I don’t believe it.”
Without question it may be said of Vancouver that her position, geographically, is Imperial to a degree, that her possibilities are enormous, and that with but a feeble stretch of the imagination those possibilities might wisely be deemed certainties.
For investor confidence, it is important that there is certainty about the future of Ireland in E.U.
I can’t keep from fooling around with our irrefutable certainties. It is, for example, a pleasure knowingly to mix up two and three dimensionalities, flat and spatial, and to make fun of gravity.
There are few things reason can discover with so much certainty and ease as its own insufficiency.
I have made a long enough descent into the void to speak with certainty. There is nothing but beauty–and beauty has only one perfect expression, Poetry. All the rest is a lie.
If one has the answers to all the questions – that is the proof that God is not with him. It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself. The great leaders of the people of God, like Moses, have always left room for doubt. You must leave room for the Lord, not for our certainties; we must be humble.
It is not that there are no certainties, it is that it is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties.
The Divine intellect indeed knows infinitely more propositions [than we can ever know]. But with regard to those few which the human intellect does understand, I believe that its knowledge equals the Divine in objective certainty.
Dog rescue remains a gamble, of course. For all the good will, hard work, and noble motivation, nobody can really predict with certainty how a traumatized, dislocated dog will respond in a new environment.
We delight in one knowable thing, which comprehends all that is knowable; in one apprehensible, which draws together all that can be apprehended; in a single being that includes all, above all in the one which is itself the all.
The fatal hour of this ancient game is approaching. In its modern form this game will soon die a drawing death – the inevitable victory of certainty and mechanization will leave its stamp on the fate of chess.
I have teken refuge in the doctrine that advises one not to seek tranquility in certainty but in permanently suspended judgement.
I think this lack of a center has something to do with the loss of certainties that Christianity had to offer
I believe that the day one stops being spiritual, one ends up being religious. I live by the adage that the only certainty in life is death. We should, therefore, learn to live for the day and be content.
My love for you, Lord, is not an uncertain feeling, but a matter of concious certainty. With your word you pierced my heart, and I loved you. But heaven and earth and everything in them on all sides tell me to love you.
That would be the death of anyone – to recognize false hopes with a certainty. One mustn’t know that. If it is offered, refuse!
A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree or certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world suffers.
I am one of a rare breed of true politicians who definitely say what they may or may not mean with absolute certainty.
To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.
Inspiration has become this word that people tend to talk about as something from the outside. The truth is that… it is inside, like a burning fire: it is the feeling of certainty that your life has a meaning and you’ll do something important.
As a painter today you have to work without that essential platform. But if one does not deceive oneself and accepts this lack of certainty, other things may come into play.
My only complaint with ‘Dickie’ Bird is that he requires a degree of certainty that is almost neurotic; like the man who has to keep going to the front door to make certain that he’s locked it.
I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.
Our account does not rob the mathematicians of their science… In point of fact they do not need the infinite and do not use it.
The past and the future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, one’s dreams would have no meaning.
Certain brief sentences are peerless in their ability to give one the feeling that nothing remains to be said.
A science only advances with certainty, when the plan of inquiry and the object of our researches have been clearly defined; otherwise a small number of truths are loosely laid hold of, without their connexion being perceived, and numerous errors, without being enabled to detect their fallacy.
It’s true that you can’t take an individual rain droplet and say where it’s come from or where it’s going to end up. But you can say with pretty good certainty whether it will be cloudy tomorrow.
American businesses are looking for are certainty and executive orders don’t really get them that.
I don’t apologize for my behavior anymore. Whatever I do or don’t do shouldn’t matter. Moral certainty is dangerous. Moral certainty is what makes people go to war unnecessarily and illegally. Morality, as any halfway intelligent human being would tell you, is a very subjective thing.
The only thing that anyone can diagnose, with any certainty, by looking at a fat person, is their own level of stereotype and prejudice toward fat people.
The statistics of life out there and the statistics of intelligent beings and advanced civilization is a certainty, the way I look at it. that It has not been accepted, because we’ve been in an anthropocentric era.
Certainty is the mother of quiet and repose, and uncertainty the cause of variance and contentions.
Your imagination is ten times more potent than your willpower. Unleashed, it provides a sense of certainty and tenacious vision that goes far beyond any limitation of the past.
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth – and truth rewarded me.
Nothing happens carelessly. We’re not brought into the world without reason, even though we may never understand the reason. An infant that lives an hour, that dies before it can lay eyes on those who made it, even that soul did not live without purpose: this is my sudden certainty.
It has been said, and perhaps with truth, that the conclusions of Political Economy partake more of the certainty of the stricter sciences than those of most of the other branches of human knowledge.
Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated.
His quiet certainty made the ground beneath my feet feel solid. Like someday everything might actually be okay.
The only certainties that don’t break down are those acquired in prayer.
Belief in a Divine mission is one of the many forms of certainty that have afflicted the human race.
The faith towards God in Christ must be sure and steadfast, that it may solace and make glad the conscience, and put it to rest. When a man has this certainty, he has overcome the serpent; but if he be doubtful of the doctrine, it is for him very dangerous to dispute with the devil.
A bird in hand is a certainty. But a bird in the bush may sing.
Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made
True believers of Scientology seem to know with utmost certainty that they have found the answer to the deepest riddles of all time – they may or may not be right, but that kind of self-belief is very appealing.
Certainty is a cruel mindset.
Confusion is the welcome mat at the door of creativity.
Certain flaws are necessary for the whole. It would seem strange if old friends lacked certain quirks.
It took me less than half a lifetime to realize that regret is one of the few guaranteed certainties. Sooner or later everything is touched by it, despite our naive and senseless hope that just this time we will be spared its cold hand on our heart.
Businesses need certainty, to see clearly the rules of engagement for investing in South Africa.
There is no certainty of what will or won’t be in our lives. All we have is this moment. The last is gone, the next isn’t here yet.
It is a certainty that Herbalife is a pyramid scheme. We believe it’s harming a population of low-income, principally Hispanic people in the U.S. to benefit a handful of super wealthy people at the top of the pyramid.
No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.
I love you,” he said. “You’re more dear to my heart than I ever knew anyone else can be. And I’ve made you cry; and there I’ll stop.” She was crying, but not because of his words. It was because of a certainty she refused to consider while she sat before him.
Place 5 percent to 10 percent of your total assets in gold bullion and selected gold and silver coins. No one knows with certainty whether the coming depression will be inflationary or deflationary.
When I consider this carefully, I find not a single property which with certainty separates the waking state from the dream. How can you be certain that your whole life is not a dream?
To be positive is to be mistaken at the top of one’s voice.
All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.
Usually, I chalk Democratic dreams of a blue Texas to the same sort of thinking that brought us the inevitability of the coalition of the ascendant and 100% certainty that Donald Trump was going to lose.
Infinite possibility in all things is a certainty. That pretty much covers theology and philosophy for me.
We are not certain, we are never certain. If we were we could reach some conclusions, and we could, at last, make others take us seriously.
In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.
In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.
Heaven grants the human being who has learned to live alone a deep measure of such rewards that verily would one hesitate to sacrifice such proved satisfactions, such rare unending possibilities of contentment for anything less than certainty more certain still.
Doubt is important because it suggests progress. Total certainty can mean there’s no assessment of things. Doubt, if you don’t panic, can allow newness to come in and challenge something that’s an established mode.
We have to be mindful that there is the certainty that terrorists will attempt to launch multiple attacks against their enemy, which is us and our allies.
I think this lack of a center has something to do with the loss of certainties that Christianity had to offer.
I don’t know anything with certainty, but seeing the stars makes me dream.
Only trust in God can transform doubts into certainty, evil into good, night into radiant dawn.
Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.
I think I developed a culture of healthy skepticism of claims of certainty on any side of the aisle. A sort of boldness in using economics no matter where it leads you in political circles, you know, rather than worrying about being left-wing or right-wing or biased or this or that.
Faith does not rely on knowing anything with certainty. It requires only the courage to accept that whatever happens is for the highest good.
She’d always known he loved her, it had been the one certainty above all others that had never changed, but she had never said the words aloud and she had never meant them quite this way before. She had said it to him, and she hardly knew what she had meant. They were terrifying words, words to encompass a world.
Certainty in politics is never a given.
The slicing technique from Flatland still remains one of the most powerful tools for dealing with aggregates in higher dimensions.
Certitude is not the test of certainty.
One must treat theory-in-use as both a psychological certainty and an intellectual hypothesis.
La volupteВ В unique et supre”В me de l’amour g|”t dans la certitude de faire le mal. The unique, supreme pleasure of love consists in the certainty of doing evil.
There’s something about the lack of certainty with a documentary, which is exhausting if you do three in a row. It’s nerve-wracking.
Christian hypocrites who pretend to hate life and love death. He may talk about the soul-what he is after is the girl Love means suffering-those who love drag a chain with them. To her it was not a belief but a certainty Trifling incident gains importance when undue emphasis is laid.
Every area of trouble gives out a ray of hope; and the one unchangeable certainty is that nothing is certain or unchangeable.
“Et Tu, Babe” was born out of my absolute certainty that a writer’s life was solitary and insular, and I was happy with that. I love reading and writing, it’s my whole life.
Do not lose hope; St. Joseph also experienced moments of difficulty, but he never lost faith and was able to overcome them, in the certainty that God never abandons us.
Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well.
Farmers and ranchers need long-term certainty about who they will be able to sell to and under what terms.
This process of election affords a moral certainty that the office of President will seldom fall to the lot of any many who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.
The only unchangable certainty in life is that nothing is unchangable or certain.
People fear leaving their safe harbor of the known and venturing off into the unknown. Human beings crave certainty – even when it limits them.
The is always much to be said for not attempting more than you can do and for making a certainty of what you try. But this principle, like others in life and war, has it exceptions.
[An artist] will sooner and with more certainty, establish the character of skeletons, than the most learned anatomist, whose eye has not been accustomed to seize on every peculiarity.
No disorders have employed so many quacks, as those that have no cure; and no sciences have exercised so many quills, as those that have no certainty.
I imagine God to be like my father. My father was always the voice of certainty in my life. Certainty in the wisdom, certainty in the path, certainty always in God. For me God is certainty in everything. Certainty that everything is good and everything is God.
The world is certainty a sudden place.
Absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error. . . .
It is said to await certainty is to await eternity.
The government will not support a nine-week work year. That I can say with certainty.
When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way.
Certainty is an unrealistic and unattainable ideal
Certainty always produces questions, uncertainty statements. It is a balancing law of nature.
The press and the public like certainty and affirmation of popular biases. But real science thrives on the capacity for doubt.
The sun meets not the springing bud that stretches towards him with half the certainty that God, the source of all good, communicates himself to the soul that longs to partake of him.
The hope we have in Christ is an absolute certainty. We can be sure that the place Christ is preparing for us will be ready when we arrive, because with Him nothing is left to chance. Everything He promised He will deliver.
Heaven is angered by my arrogance; my proof [of the four-color theorem] is also defective.
Error is certainty’s constant companion. Error is the corollary of evidence. And anything said about truth may equally well be said about error: the delusion will be no greater.
I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
The Holy Ghost is not a Sceptic, and He has not inscribed in our hearts uncertain opinions, but, rather, affirmations of the strongest sorts.
Everything good is costly, and the development of the personality is one of the most costly of all things. It will cost you your innocence, your illusions, your certainty. (10)
When you become a mother, it’s your mission in life to protect your child. I therefore can’t imagine what a hell it must be crossing the sea with a crying child on your lap without any certainty of making it to the other side alive.
Doubt is not a very agreeable status, but certainty is a ridiculous one.
Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.
The cubism of Braque or Picasso, the dissonant compositions of Schoenberg or Stravinsky, the free-flowing and often erotic choreography of Isadora Duncan and Nijinsky – these were acts of rebellion against the certainties and traditions of the old world.
Religion seems to have always offered us that false duality … the silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.
A first fact should surprise us, or rather would surprise us if we were not used to it. How does it happen there are people who do not understand mathematics? If mathematics invokes only the rules of logic, such as are accepted by all normal minds…how does it come about that so many persons are here refractory?
All men have a feeling, that they would rather you told them a civil lie than give them a point blank refusal…. If you make a promise, the thing is still uncertain, depends on a future day, and concerns but few people; but if you refuse you alienate people to a certainty and at once, and many people too.
Our nation’s Social Security Trust Fund is depleting at an alarming rate, and failure to implement immediate reforms endangers the ability of Americans to plan for their retirement with the options and certainty they deserve.
If there is one certainty in soccer, it is this: The quickest road to becoming a winning soccer team is to have a great goalkeeper.
When we seem to have won or lost in terms of certainties, we must, as literature teachers in the classroom, remember such warnings — let literature teach us that there are no certainties, that the process is open, and that it may be altogether salutary that it is so.
Innumeracy and pseudoscience are often associated, in part because of the ease with which mathematical certainty can be invoked, to bludgeon the innumerate into a dumb acquiescence.
Good applied science in medicine, as in physics, requires a high degree of certainty about the basic facts at hand, and especially about their meaning, and we have not yet reached this point for most of medicine.
It matters little what form of prayer we adopt or how many words we use. What matters is the faith which lays hold on God, knowing that He knows our needs before we even ask Him. That is what gives Christian prayer its boundless confidence and its joyous certainty.
A barrell full of certainties won’t roll very far.
It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.
Just because someone seems to have more certainty, doesn’t mean they’re right.
It is not certainty which is creative, but the uncertainty we are pledged to in our works.
When the human mind exists in the light of reason and no more than reason, we may say with absolute certainty that Man and all that made him will be in that instant gone.
I learned long ago that loss is not only probable but inevitable. I know what it means to lose everything, to let go of one life and find another. And now I feel, with a strange, deep certainty, that it must be my lot in life to be taught that lesson over and over again.
When man thinks in self-conscious submission to the voluntary revelation of the self-sufficient God, he has therewith the only possible ground of certainty for his knowledge.
Safety and certainty in oil lie in variety, and variety alone.
Once upon a time, growing up male gave little boys a sense of certainty about the natural order of things. We had short hair, wore pants, and played baseball. Girls had long hair, wore skirts, and, no matter how hard they tried, always threw a baseball just like a girl.
We have lost certainty and predictability in the regulatory and tax climate in America, and this is why we’re recovering so slowly.
Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum — “I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;” as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.
Mississippi farmers and ranchers continually deal with factors that can mean disaster, which is why they look for certainty and flexibility in farm programs.
Fireside happiness, to hours of ease Blest with that charm, the certainty to please.
Most people are great at absorbing information.В Guerrilla marketing is needed because it gives small businesses a delightfully unfair advantage: certainty in an uncertain world, economy in a high-priced world, simplicity in a complicated world, marketing awareness in a clueless world.
Whenever a man is known to seek promotion by intrigue, by temporizing, or by resorting to the haunts of vulgarity and vice for support, it may be inferred, with moral certainty, that he is not a man of real respectability, nor is he entitled to public confidence.
With the only certainty in our daily existence being change, and a rate of change growing always faster in a kind of technological leapfrog game, speed helps people think they are catching up.
I don’t really think I am interested in the macabre, but I am curious about death. That’s normal… The only certainty in life is that we’re all going to die. It would be unnatural not to think about death once in a while.
Writing has to have a great deal of certainty and self-assurance, but it’s not arrogant.
There has to be certainty and there has to be clarity. There can’t be ambiguity, .. This has to be certain, clear in all respects from all the parties so nobody is in any doubt about what the future holds.
No one can forecast the economy with certainty.
No wind serves him who addresses his voyage to no certain port.
Psychological man may be going nowhere, but he aims to achieve a certain speed and certainty in going. Like his predecessor, the man of the market economy, he understands morality as that which is conducive to increased activity. The important thing is to keep going.
I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life. God is in everyone’s life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else – God is in this person’s life. You can – you must – try to seek God in every human life.
Hope is not a feeling of certainty that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have a meaning.
Our aim as scientists is objective truth; more truth, more interesting truth, more intelligible truth. We cannot reasonably aim at certainty. Once we realize that human knowledge is fallible, we realize also that we can never be completely certain that we have not made a mistake.
Religion gives you a sense of certainty. It makes you feel that you have the right answers to really big questions and that you’ve grasped the truth.
she acquired the certainty of the expansion of time by depth of emotion, range and infinite multiplicity of experience.
God, how I ricochet between certainties and doubts.
To some people, the impossible is impossible. One fine day, they wake up in the morning knowing that they will never hold the moon in their hands, and with the certainty, perfect peace descends on them.
When two people meet, as long as there is any form of rapport maintained, the person with the most certainty will eventually influence ther other person.
In philosophical terms, the opposite of rationalism is not irrationalism but empiricism, that is, a willingness to form beliefs on the basis of experience rather than from a priori deduction. Empirical evidence never yields the dogmatic certainty that accompanies logical deduction.
We call infinite that thing whose limits we have not perceived, and so by that word we do not signify what we understand about a thing, but rather what we do not understand.
Certainty is the most vivid condition of ignorance and the most necessay condition for knowledge.
One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry.
I don’t judge my effectiveness by how many words I say. I think liberals often see nuances in things… Conservatives tend to see things in black and white. It gives them an air of certainty and conviction that might make them more comfortable to watch.
What makes friendship indissolute and what doubles its charms is a feeling we find lacking in love: I mean certitude.
The only certainty is that we never know what tomorrow holds. We live for today, life is short, so let’s enjoy it together while we can.
We demand of our political life greater certainty and greater perfection than we demand of our personal life.
Truth is the hardest substance in the world to pin down. But the one certainty is the awesome penalty exacted sooner or later from a society whose reporters stop trying.
There is a science of getting rich, and it is an exact science, like algebra or arithmetic. There are certain laws which govern the process of acquiring riches, and once these laws are learned and obeyed by anyone, that person will get rich with mathematical certainty.
Mystery is gone to the certainty of technological principles. So the real terror, the real aggression against life comes in the form of the pursuit of our technological happiness.
God is rich in mercy. I know this wealth of his with the certainty of experience, I have touched it.
both doubt and certainty are as contagious as the common cold
Neither the true nor the false roots are always real; sometimes they are imaginary; that is, while we can always imagine as many roots for each equation as I have assigned, yet there is not always a definite quantity corresponding to each root we have imagined.
Uncertainty would be the only certainty there’s, and realizing how to stay with insecurity could be the only protection
The certainty that she would find what it was she sought just slipped away, until one night she knew there was nothing, no one waiting for her. That no matter how far she walked, how carefully she searched, how much she wanted to find the person she was looking for, she was alone” – The Forgotten Garden
If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.
The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.
Fundamentalists believe that we don’t believe in anything. In their view of the world, they are in possession of absolute certainties, while we are descending into decadence. We will be able to triumph over terrorism not by waging war on it, but through a conscious, fearless way of life.
Poetry allows me to write about what I don’t know, whereas journalism demands a higher level of certainty to be worthy of being written.
Mathematics is purely hypothetical: it produces nothing but conditional propositions.
I have no talent for certainty.
You know nothing about Hope, that immortal, delicious maiden forever courted forever propitious, whom fools have called deceitful, as if it were Hope that carried the cup of disappointment, whereas it is her deadly enemy, Certainty, whom she only es
Certainty, and the innovation that thrives in a climate of certainty, are key to progress.
Sometimes we have the absolute certainty there’s something inside us that’s so hideous and monstrous that if we ever search it out we won’t be able to stand looking at it. But it’s when we’re willing to come face to face with that demon that we face the angel.
Phases of the creative process: Preparation-gathering impressions Incubation-letting go of certainties Immersion/Illumination-creative intervention/risk Revision-conscious structuring and editing of creative material.
Look at the chaos of European history. Europeans cannot believe in certainty. But Americans believe in certainty. Americans think this can go on like this forever. Just as it is. No change.
If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, there’s still a 30% chance we’re going to get it wrong.
Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
I am walking like a bewitched corpse, with the certainty of being eaten by the infinite, of being annulled by the only existing Absurd.
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
In the absence of certainty, instinct is all you can follow.
The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainty that America, with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is highest in the world, will last as long as…the frog?
A bird in the hand is a certainty, but a bird in the bush may sing.
People, chained by monotony, afraid to think, clinging to certainties… they live like ants.
The certainty with which Cameron informed MPs and Shadow ministers of the specifics of a Labour offer that never actually existed suggests a degree of flexibility with the truth.
The British political system and the whole clapped out Westminster architecture, and the language that we use about politics, it’s completely unsustainable. You either decide to be part of that transition to do something different. Or you cling to old certainties.
Science does not give us absolute and final certainty. It only gives us assurance within the limits of our mental abilities and the prevailing state of scientific thought.
The literal resurrection of every soul who has lived and died on earth is a certainty, and surely one should make careful preparation for this event. A glorious resurrection should be the goal of every man and woman, for resurrection will be a reality.
Terrorism is based on two major pillars: One is injustice, and the other is a certainty of attitude, the notion that their version of the story is the correct one.
Men educated in [the critical habit of thought]are slow to believe. They can hold things as possible or probable in all degrees, without certainty and without pain.
Sometimes I think death is a greater awareness than life. Life gives us the illusion of immortality, whereas death gives us the certainty of immortality
I think that feeling that if one believed absolutely in any cause, then one must have the confidence, the self-certainty, to go through with that particular course of action.
Know with certainty that there is a God, and that there exists a world beyond this one – the world of souls.
… the body, normally, is never in question: our bodies are beyond question, or perhaps beneath question – they are simply, unquestionably, there. This unquestionability of the body, is, for Wittgenstein, the start and basis of all knowledge and certainty.
The rise of populist parties such as the Five Star Movement in Italy and the Front National in France are rocking the political certainties of the last decades. And that also affects the economy.
To believe with certainty, we must begin with doubting.
One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.
I will go on quietly and slowly, but I will go on firmly, and with a certainty of success.
Can success change the human mechanism so completely between one dawn and another? Can it make one feel taller, more alive, handsomer, uncommonly gifted and indomitably secure with the certainty that this is the way life will always be? It can and it does!
Not all is certainty in our world, Karigan. If it were there’d be no opportunity for faith; and then it would be a very dull existence.
And it would be a spare life he would be certain to lead as a schoolteacher in some urban location. But he had a serenity that came with the choice of the life he wanted to live. And this serenity and certainty I have seen only among those who have the armour of books close by.
It is part of our nature to survive. Faith is an instinctive response to aspects of existence that we cannot explain by any other means – be it the moral void we perceive in the universe, the certainty of death, the mystery of the origin of things, the meaning of our own lives or the absence of meaning.
The main thing that endears the United Nations to member governments, and so enables it to survive, is its proven capacity to fail… You can safely appeal to the UN in the comfortable certainty that it will let you down.
Scientists do not believe in fundamental and absolute certainties. For the scientist, certainty is never an end, but a search; not the ordering of certainty, but its exploration. For the scientist, certainty represents the highest degree of probability.
… no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.
Whenever you’re at a poker table – and you’re betting all of your chips – you’re worried, you’re scared. Is it the right play? Have I thought through all the angles? That’s what stinks about life and business in general. If I had to calculate 100% certainty on every deal I did, I literally would do zero deals.
All great discoveries…are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents.
Doubt is long-winded. Certainty is brief.
There was no way to know that certainty would one day become a luxury, too.
Certainty ends inquiry.
There is a long history of how DNA sequencing can bring certainty to people’s lives.
The only certainty about following the crowd is that you will all get there together.
My opinion of mankind is founded upon the mournful fact that, so far as I can see, they find within themselves the means of believing in a thousand times as much as there is to believe in.
Love isn’t just about feeling sure of the other person, knowing what he would give up for you. It’s knowing with certainty what you are willing to surrender for his sake. Make no mistake; each partner gives up something. Individual dreams are surrendered for a shared one.
Our certainty that angels right now witness how we are walking through life should mightily influence the decisions we make. God is watching, and His angels are interested spectators too.
Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?
Certainty is the mother of repose, and therefore the common law aims at certainty.
I have moved from certainty to doubt, from devotion to rebellion.
Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.
A lot of people hear me attacking their certainty. I don’t have any interest in doing that. I’m interested in penetrating the meaning of certainty.
Arithmetic is where the content lies, and not logic; but logic prompts certainty, and not arithmetic.
Knowledge breeds doubt, not certainty,
And the more we know the more uncertain we become.
And the more we know the more uncertain we become.
Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.
Absolute certainty is not something I strive for anymore. I’ve learned the hard way that destiny usually looks upon our most strident convictions with amusement, or perhaps even pity.
Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all.
It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth.
The need for certainty is the greatest disease the Mind faces
In my 40-plus years as a venture capitalist, I have come to appreciate the certainty a healthy economy provides for businesses both large and small.
We do not worry about being respected in towns through which we pass. But if we are going to remain in one for a certain time, we do worry. How long does this time have to be?
What can we say with certainty?
The unique and supreme voluptuousness of love lies in the certainty of committing evil. And men and women know from birth that in evil is found all sensual delight.
The Clean Energy Jobs legislation will provide predictability and certainty for large carbon emitters.
The only certainty is uncertainty
History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
The universe only gives you what you can handle, so trust that whatever is happening to you is exactly what you need. Just trust. Have certainty!
The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding.
It’s a fact that children with cancer have higher cure rates than adults with cancer, and I wonder if the reason is their natural, unthinking bravery… Adults know too much about failure; they’re more cynical and resigned and fearful.
Brexit and Trump are a generational revenge. This may partly be against millennial certainty and superiority, and, indeed, ageism; and it may be a natural part of population dynamics – not only are more people getting far older than ever before, but they are older for longer than they are young.
There is a certain blend of courage, integrity, character and principle which has no satisfactory dictionary name but has been called different things at different times in different countries. Our American name for it is “guts.”
Certainty is no guarantor of correctness.
A common fallacy in much of the adverse criticism to which science is subjected today is that it claims certainty, infallibility and complete emotional objectivity. It would be more nearly true to say that it is based upon wonder, adventure and hope.
If your knowledge of fire has been turned to certainty by words alone, then seek to be cooked by the fire itself. Don’t abide in borrowed certainty. There is no real certainty until you burn; if you wish for this, sit down in the fire.
We see it [the as-yet unseen, probable new planet, Neptune] as Columbus saw America from the coast of Spain. Its movements have been felt, trembling along the far-reaching line of our analysis with a certainty hardly inferior to that of ocular demonstration.
When we stop running up huge budget deficits and start acting responsibly in Washington, we will provide small-business owners with the certainty they need to put Americans back to work.
Had I been chosen President again, I am certain I could not have lived another year.
I can predict with some sense of certainty how life will feel in a month. I can with the same logic remember with the same element of reality or truth what life was like a month ago. All perspectives on the past are entirely relative.
Persuasion is achieved by the speaker’s personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible. We believe good men more fully and more readily than others: this is true generally whatever the question is, and absolutely true where exact certainty is impossible and opinions are divided.
The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
One thing I have realised is that there are no certainties. Anything can happen anytime.
It was one thing, after all, to know his feelings for Amanda hadn’t changed; it was another thing entirely to face the future with the certainty that they never would.
This was my voice, but perfectly wise, calm and compassionate. This was what my voice would sound like if I’d only ever experienced love and certainty in my life. How can I describe the warmth of affection in that voice, as it gave me the answer that would forever seal my faith in the divine?
There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty.
The only certainty is that nothing is certain.
While all the future, for thy purer soul,
With “sober certainties” of love is blest.
With “sober certainties” of love is blest.
The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity
Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom.
The problem with certainty is that sometimes it can sound cold and heartless, although it is the most compassionate and supportive answer.
I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.
The work of woman is not to lessen the severity or the certainty of the penalty for the violation of the moral law, but to prevent this violation by the removal of the causes which lead to it.
For the oppressed peoples and classes, for the peoples and workers who have taken control of their destiny, Marxism is a shining path, a sun of hope and certainty that never sets, a sun that is always at its zenith.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Knowing the precies answers is not as crucial as the certainty that the answers do, in fact, exist.
Audiences aren’t going to get rid of me. One thing I can say, with absolute certainty, is that my shows will still be performed when I’m dead, buried and forgotten. They’re going to absolutely outlive me, which is a wonderful thing to think about.
Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.
The older I get, the less I know. By that I mean the less I am sure of. I view people with strong opinions on the big stuff with distrust. I don’t think we should have certain certainties on faith and politics; I think we should be open-minded.
We admit, in geometry, not only infinite magnitudes, that is to say, magnitudes greater than any assignable magnitude, but infinite magnitudes infinitely greater, the one than the other. This astonishes our dimension of brains, which is only about six inches long, five broad, and six in depth, in the largest heads.
Death, in its certainty, is exacting its due respect and repose before it takes my hand.
To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. ‘Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after you.
[Heraclitus had] the highest form of pride [stemming] from a certainty of belief in the truth as grasped by himself alone. He brings this form, by its excessive development, into a sublime pathos by involuntary identification of himself with his truth.
For me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle.
In a world of moral certainty, the unthinkable becomes permissible.
The man who saves time by galloping loses it by missing his way; the shepherd who hurries his flock to get them home spends the night on the mountain looking for the lost; economy does not consist in haste, but in certainty.
To go on and on about your soul is to miss the whole point of life. I could say that with more certainty if I knew the whole point of life.
Peoples of the entire world need to hear these words. Their conscience needs to grow in the certainty that Someone exists who holds in His Hands the destiny of this passing world… And this Someone is Love- Love that became Man, Love crucified and risen, Love unceasingly present among men. It is Eucharistic Love.
Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream.
Nothing so strongly impels a man to regard the interest of his constituents, as the certainty of returning to the general mass of the people, from whence he was taken, where he must participate in their burdens.
U.S. intelligence services routinely use collection methods against foreigners that foreseeably – with certainty – ingest high volumes of U.S. communications as well.
I believe any decline would lock in a Fed increase with some certainty.
Can you imagine 4,000 years passing, and you’re not even a memory? Think about it, friends. It’s not just a possibility. It is a certainty.
I would say that without any doubt he’s the killer – the law says beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty which I – there’s no question that he was the killer of President Kennedy.
Claiming certainty without corroborating evidence is stupid.
Living by faith isn’t living with certainty. It’s trusting God in spite of unanswered questions and unresolved doubts.
There are two modes of knowledge: through argument and through experience. Argument brings conclusions and compels us to concede them, but it does not cause certainty nor remove doubts that the mind may rest in truth, unless this is provided by experience.
An expectation was there, mixed in with so many other emotions – excitement, resignation, hesitation, confusion, fear – that would well up then wither on the vine. You’re optimistic one moment, only to be racked the next by the certainty that it will all fall to pieces. And in the end it does.
The certainties of one age are the problems of the next.
That which draws us by its mystical force; what every created thing, even the very stones, feels with absolute certainty as the center of its being… is the force of love. Christians call this “eternal blessedness.” It is a necessity of man for growth and joy.
Moral certainty is never more than probability.
Crimes are more effectually prevented by the certainty than the severity of punishment
Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.
I’m suspicious of too much certainty in the pursuit of understanding just because I think people are limited in their understanding.
Certainty a strange Ferris wheel of a statement!
We have enacted many economic reforms but also others that have an impact on the overall investment climate. For instance, I launched a very important constitutional reform on judicial certainty that completely restarted the whole of the courts system in Ukraine.
If we get total certainty, we get … bored out of our minds. So, God, in Her infinite wisdom, gave us a second human need, which is uncertainty. We need variety. We need surprise.
Every time an article is written about me or any of my contemporaries who’s had the fortune and discipline to look good at a certain age, I am struck by the tone of astonishment, and the certainty that something is being done secretively to beat the devil.
It has been pointed out already that no knowledge of probabilities, less in degree than certainty, helps us to know what conclusions are true, and that there is no direct relation between the truth of a proposition and its probability. Probability begins and ends with probability.
He seemed so certain about everything, didn’t he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman’s head. He wasn’t even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man.
it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime
The disciples are drawn to the high altars with magnetic certainty, knowing that a great Presence hovers over the ranges … You were within the portals of the temple … to enter the wilderness and seek, in the primal patterns of nature, a magical union with beauty.
It is wise to be sure, but otherwise to be too sure.
The traditional thinking has been that the stock market likes certainty.
It is a good thing to proceed in order and to establish propositions. This is the way to gain ground and to progress with certainty.
Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; riches take wings; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.
A testimony is a conviction, a quiet inward certainty of the reality of the living God, of the divinity of His Beloved Son, of the restoration of Their work in this time. It demands that we do what He has asked us to do.
Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things.
The one certainty in tiger tracks is: follow them long enough and you will eventually arrive at a tiger, unless the tiger arrives at you first.
The more you observe life in relation to yourself the more you will see the fact that you are hardly ever correct when you think about something in the future. The future exists only in imagination; and that is why, no matter how hard you try to imagine it, you will not be able to predict the future with total certainty.
To be human : to strive in the face of the certainty of failure.
I dedicate this novel to Gala, who was constantly by my side while I was writing it, who was the good fairy of my equilibrium, who banished the salamanders of my doubts and strengthened the lions of certainties.
A compassionate willingess is required – as is the courage to live before the fact, before the understanding, before any rational support or certainty, to live the moment to its natural peak and conclusion, and to accept with dignity whatever joy, grief, misfortune, or unexpectedness occurs.
I think it’s very important to distinguish between objectivity – which tends to be open, flexible, skeptical of its own certainty and open to new information – and objectivism – which thinks, “No, we know it all, we’ve got it, so real thinking and learning can come to an end.”
The only certainty about writing and trying to be a writer is that it has to be done, not dreamed of or planned and never written, or talked about (the ego eventually falls apart like a soaked sponge), but simply written; it’s a dreadful, awful fact that writing is like any other work.
The certainty of a God giving meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds.
I don’t have Gandalf the White’s certainty about everything.
If we have not found heaven within, it is a certainty we will not find it without.
Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty.
It is well known that the central problem of the whole of modern mathematics is the study of transcendental functions defined by differential equations.
Things always change when someone you love dies. You just can’t prepare youself for those changes no matter what you do in advance. The only thing that’s a certainty in always wondering who’s going to be next.
Don’t try and understand this with your mind. There will be no absolute knowing, no certainty in these thoughts and philosophies and ideas.
The fear of infinity is a form of myopia that destroys the possibility of seeing the actual infinite, even though it in its highest form has created and sustains us, and in its secondary transfinite forms occurs all around us and even inhabits our minds.
She thought of what it would be like to grow up without the one certainty that every baby deseved – when I’m hurt or cold or scared, someone will come and care for me – and how that absence could warp you so that you’d lash out at the people you loved, driving them away when all you wanted to do was pull them closer.
I can UNDERSTAND pessimism, but I don’t BELIEVE in it. It’s not simply a matter of faith, but of historical EVIDENCE. Not overwhelming evidence, just enough to give HOPE, because for hope we don’t need certainty, only POSSIBILITY.
Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.
So called pleasures, when they go beyond a certain limit, are but punishments.
When I was learning by myself, despite my parents, despite my teachers, despite society, when I was fighting for building my life as a young wire walker at age 16, I didn’t have feelings, I had certainties.
What men really want is not knowledge but certainty.
In this quest to seek and find God in all things, there is still an area of uncertainty. There must be. If a person says that he met God with total certainty and is not touched by a margin of uncertainty, then this is not good.
We do know, with absolute certainty, thatВ Saddam Hussein is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon.
Since we don’t know with any certainty what specific aptitudes today’s students will need tomorrow, we need to ensure they have the critical thinking and problem-solving abilities that extend beyond any one technology or program.
The lack of faith is not doubt. It is certainty.
There are very few certainties that touch us all in this mortal experience, but one of the absolutes is that we will experience hardship and stress at some point.
Setting regulatory certainty is very important for bitcoin. I’m opposed to the regulations, but the bitcoin businesses need to know the rules of the game in order to move ahead.
The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.
All writers – all beings – are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force…All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land.
Few Christians understand the concept of eternal rewards, even thought the Lord dedicated a great deal of His precious time on earth to teaching about them. The one certainty is that our position in the Lord’s kingdom will be inversely proportional to how we indulge ourselves in this lifetime.
It is the certainty that you are about to recover, that brings results, not the hope.
Powerful men in particular suffer from the delusion that human beings have no memories. I would go so far as to say that the distinguishing trait of powerful men is the psychotic certainty that people forget acts of infamy as easily as their parents birth
There is a certain hidden mediocrity in those who are stationed above us in life, an ability to take liberties in their pursuit of pleasures and diversions, without injuring the honor and respect we owe to them.
Happiness is above all things the calm, glad certainty of innocence.
About the only certainty, other than uncertainty, in fly fishing is that a fly won’t catch fish if it stays in its box.
One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
Only years of practice will teach you the mysteries and bold certainty of a real gardener, who treads at random, yet tramples on nothing.
Action based on hope just felt better than the paralysis of certainty.
Incompetence is certainty in the absence of expertise. Overconfidence is certainty in the presence of expertise.
I’m opposed to censure, .. Whether or not one will be permitted, it’s under discussion. It isn’t ruled out, but it’s not a dead-bang certainty either.
Calculus works by making visible the infinitesimally small.
The character of the faith that allows us to be transformed by suffering and darkness is not doubt-free certainty; rather, it is tenacious obedience.
It is to be feared that those who emigrate to New South Wales, generally anticipate too great facility in their future operations and certainty of success in conducting them; but they should recollect that competency cannot be obtained without labour.
There are many paths to enlightenment. Some of us who have expanded to a degree of illumination have thereafter preached the dogmatic certainty of one particular path. But enlightenment doesn’t care how you get there. And if you aren’t going to be thinking about it in paradise, then don’t worry about it now.
Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one. This is a virtual certainty because even in the vacuum matter is one; and if we don’t see this, it’s because we are blinding ourselves to it.
If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.
He who has heard the same thing told by 12,000 eye-witnesses has only 12,000 probabilities, which are equal to one strong probability, which is far from certain.
All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgements of probabilities, and not on certainties.
Step by step a powerful and enterprising race has driven them back from the Atlantic to the West until at last there is scarcely a spot of ground upon which the Indians have any certainty of maintaining a permanent abode.
There are no solved problems; there are only problems that are more or less solved.
I am not a mathematician, but I was aware that for centuries, mathematics was considered the queen of the sciences because it claimed certainty. It was grounded on some fundamental certainties – axioms – that led to others.
The greatest certainty in life is death. The greatest uncertainty is the time.
But no one can predict of a certainty what will happen. And none of it will change how I intend to spend the rest of my life. I will live it on my terms. And you… you can have all of me or nothing. I won’t be an invalid any longer. Not even if it means losing you.
Today we know with certainty that segregation is dead. The only question remaining is how costly will be the funeral.
Science is not the affirmation of a set of beliefs but a process of inquiry aimed at building a testable body of knowledge constantly open to rejection or confirmation. In science, knowledge is fluid and certainty fleeting. That is at the heart of its limitations. It is also its greatest strength.
Everything had been based on a kind of certainty, a sense of man at the center of things, a sense of order and hierarchy. And suddenly, almost simultaneously, extraordinary discoveries are made.
Certainty is missing the point entirely.
Certainty is the enemy of mankind. If you’re certain about everything, you have the Inquisition, you have Nazis and you have – that certainty is something to be guarded about.
Is there any evidence to the contrary? I don’t need certainty in order to act on a well-founded suspicion.
Just like moons and suns, With certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I’ll rise.
If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.
If there’s one crime for which there has to be a certainty of punishment, it is gun violence.
The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.
It is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty.
If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives.
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.
Why do people resist [engines, bridges, and cities] so? They are symbols and products of the imagination, which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we would not have the wherewithal to challenge certainty, and we could never rise above ourselves.
You were my hope during my days of loneliness, my anxiety during moments of doubt, my certainty during moments of faith.
As for the accusation of intellectual pride, surely the boot is on the other foot. Atheists don’t claim to know anything with certainty — it’s the believers who know it all.
[Friedrich] Nietzsche said something marvellous, he said “Madness is not a consequence of uncertainty but of certainty”, and this is fanaticism.
The core of science is not a mathematical modeling–it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.
Change is the investor’s only certainty.
He recognized with absolute certainty the empty fragility of even the noblest theorizings as compared with the definitive plenitude of the smallest fact grasped in its total, concrete reality.
Americans need access to affordable, reliable health insurance. They want President Trump to take responsibility and work to ensure their continued access to their insurance – creating certainty and affordability, not confusion and chaos.
Some people get certainty by working harder and saying I’m going to master something. Some people get certainty by lowering their expectations, going ‘it will never work. And they lose their dreams, but they get their needs. The needs are not like goals. They’re not like belief systems that are built into you.
I count it as a certainty that in paradise, everyone naps.
I know with certainty, that [an honest man] is not to put his hand into the fire, and hold it there, till it be consumed: And thisevent, I think I can foretell with the same assurance, as that, if he throw himself out at the window, and meet with no obstruction, he will not remain a moment suspended in the air.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
People who have never run even a modest little business assert with great certainty and indignation that heads of multinational corporations are paid much more than they are worth. People who know nothing about medicine and nothing about economics unhesi.
History is everything in gardening: With a site, weather, a particular plant. It solves mysteries. And it’s why, when others say, “You can’t do that!” you can know with deepest certainty that you can.
The Bush tax cuts, they ought to be made permanent in my mind so there is certainty out there.
There is a call to spiritual perseverance. A call not to hang on and do nothing, but to work deliberately, knowing with certainty that God will never be defeated.
And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.
There is no such thing as permanence at all. Everything is constantly changing. Everything is in a flux. Because you cannot face the impermanence of all relationships, you invent sentiments, romance, and dramatic emotions to give them certainty. Therefore you are always in conflict.
We are not certain, we are never certain. If we were we could reach some conclusions, and we could, at last, make others take us seriously.
Computer science teaches and nurtures the type of thinking that 21st century citizens will need to address 21st century issues. We cannot know with any certainty what those challenges will be, but we can arm our students with the tools needed to address them.
I’m a scientist, not a theologian. I don’t know if there is a God or not. Religion requires certainty. Revere and respect Gaia. Have trust in Gaia. But not faith.
People who need certainty are unlikely to make good entrepreneurs.
The reason that ego and love are not compatible comes down to this: you cannot take your ego into the unknown, where love wants to lead. If you follow love, your life will become uncertain, and the ego craves certainty.
I can say with absolute certainty that I will run for one of two offices: my state Senate seat or for the governor. I’m still trying to decide, but I do think people are ready for a change from the partisan, very fractured leadership we have in Texas.
In my paper the fact the XY was not equal to YX was very disagreeable to me. I felt this was the only point of difficulty in the whole scheme…and I was not able to solve it.
I am sustained by the certainty that life has meaning…as does death.
The world now has a new kind of hero, one who listens more than speaks, who preaches in riddles not in certainties, a leader who doesn’t show his face, who says his mask is really a mirror. And in the Zapatistas, we have not one dream of a revolution, but a dreaming revolution.
People have a need for certainty – and that need for certainty is in every human being, certainty that you can avoid pain, certainty that you can at least be comfortable. It’s a survival instinct.
There is nothing more certain and unchanging than uncertainty and change.
There are lots of reasons why a woman stays with a man, even when she’s given up on changing him and can predict with certainty the shape that the rest of her life with him is going to take.
Strokes carry a message whether you will it or not. The stroke is just like the artist at the time he makes it. All the certainties, all the uncertainties, all the bigness of his spirit and the littlenesses are in it.
That which most concerns and worries you – your survival – is the only certainty you have.
Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.
No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.
As a businessman, I know that businesses need certainty.
To counter the avoidance of intellectual challenge and responsibility, we must reduce the domination of certainty in education.
Statistics were magic like this: they could tell you with near-certainty that a thing would occur, without a hint of when or where.
Hope is called the anchor of the soul because it gives stability to the Christian life. But hope is not simply a ‘wish’ I wish that such-and-such would take place rather, it is that which latches on to the certainty of the promises of the future that God has made.
Certainty is the mark of the commonsense life-gracious uncertainty is the mark of the spiritual life.
I do believe that there is a conflict between science and religion … the spirit or attitude toward the facts is different in religion from what it is in science. The uncertainty that is necessary in order to appreciate nature is not easily correlated with the feeling of certainty in faith.
I did not imitate the skeptics who doubt only for doubting’s sake, and pretend to be always undecided; on the contrary, my whole intention was to arrive at a certainty, and to dig away the drift and the sand until I reached the rock or the clay beneath.
Those who are enamoured of practice without science are like a pilot who goes into a ship without rudder or compass and never has any certainty of where he is going. Practice should always be based upon a sound knowledge of theory.
There is always a pleasure in unravelling a mystery, in catching at the gossamer clue which will guide to certainty.
Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.
Jealousy is bred in doubts. When those doubts change into certainties, then the passion either ceases or turns absolute madness.
Premature certainty is the enemy of the truth.
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]
It’s strange, isn’t it, how the idea of belonging to someone can sound so great? It can be comforting, the way it makes things decided. We like the thought of being held, until it’s too tight. We like that certainty, until it means there’s no way out. And we like being his, until we realize we’re not ours anymore.
I do not believe anything very certainly, but everything very probably.
Such sober certainty of waking bliss.
The scientist believes in proof without certainty.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
I have a mathematical certainty that the future will confirm my assertion that aerial warfare will be the most important element in future wars, and that in consequence not only will the importance of the Independent Air Force rapidly increase, but the importance of the army and navy will decrease in proportion.
The only reality I can possibly know is the world as I perceive it at this moment. The only reality you can possibly know is the world as you see it at this moment. And the only certainty is that those perceived realities are different. There are as many “real worlds” as there are people!
Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.
We need a transitional Brexit deal that provides maximum certainty and stability. Labour will deliver it.
Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security
Feed and strengthen your body. Fear is physical. When you lift weights or go for a sprint, that energy flows back into your body and restores you to certainty.
Rather than a universe of static certainty, at the most fundamental level of matter, the world and its relationships were uncertain and unpredictable, a state of pure potential of infinite possibility.
You have to test your hypothesis against other theories. Certainty in the face of complex situations is very dangerous.
You want to know yourself. For this keep steadily in the focus of consciousness, the only clue you have: your certainty of being. Be with it, play with it, ponder over it, delve deeply into it, till the shell of ignorance breaks open and you emerge into the realm of reality.
Even the stoics agree that certainty is very hard to come at; that our assent is worth little, for where is infallibility to be found?
We never have 100 percent certainty. We never have it. If you wait until you have 100 percent certainty, something bad is going to happen on the battlefield.
Education must be based on the certainty that faults cannot be atoned for or blotted out, but must always have their consequences. At the same time, there is the other certainty that, through progressive evolution, by slow adaptation to the conditions of environment, they may be transformed.
In reality, both religion and science are expressions of man’s uncertainty. Perhaps the paradox is that certainty, whether it be in science or religion, is dangerous.
Although my knowledge grows more and more, nevertheless I do not for that reason believe that it can ever be actually infinite, since it can never reach a point so high that it will be unable to attain any greater increase.
How to put this feeling, this certainty, into something as limited as words?
Existential anxiety of doubt drives the person toward the creation of certitude of systems of meaning, which are supported by tradition and authority. Neurotic anxiety builds a narrow castle of certitude which can be defended with the utmost certainty.
The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice.
In order to improve the condition of mankind all men must be given the certainty of security through the exchange of safeguards, the assurance of prosperity through an exchange of resources, the reality of freedom through the free movement of information, persons and ideas.
One of the few certainties in life is that persons of certainty should certainly be avoided.
If you want to save capitalism there is only one type of argument that you should adopt, the only one that has ever won in any moral issue: the argument from self-esteem. Check your premises, convince yourself of the rightness of your cause, then fight for capitalism with full, moral certainty.
CREDIT supposes specific and permanent funds for the punctual payment of interest, with a moral certainty of a final redemption of the principal.
To achieve policy stability and certainty, we need to establish a meaningful price on carbon and cut the billions of dollars spent each year on fossil-fuel subsidies, along with well-structured financial tools and rules.
I found it peculiar that those who wanted to take military action could – with 100 per cent certainty – know that the weapons existed and turn out to have zero knowledge of where they were.
I used to fast during Ramadan because I admired the people fasting around me. What made me convert was that I had that certainty that Islam was for me. I felt this relationship with God, and that enlightened my life. I had that conviction in my heart that that was my religion.
Even when the universe made it quite clear to me that I was mistaken in my certainties … I did not break. The shattering of my sureties did not shatter me.
We can bear up under everything, if we have only the certainty that the monster Hitler with his insatiable bloodletting and plundering will have committed soon his last shameful deed.
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.
Fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves.
The increased abstraction in mathematics that took place during the early part of this century was paralleled by a similar trend in the arts. In both cases, the increased level of abstraction demands greater effort on the part of anyone who wants to understand the work.
I will repeat a technique until it is mastered, no matter when that will be. One certainty though: it will be.
Proof that a given condition always precedes or accompanies a phenomenon does not warrant concluding with certainty that a given condition is the immediate cause of that phenomenon. It must still be established that when this condition is removed, the phenomen will no longer appear.
You can safely appeal to the United Nations in the comfortable certainty that it will let you down.
That tide of insecurity would come in and out over the years, sometimes stranding me for a while but occasionally lifting me just beyond what I thought I could acomplish. Either way, it would wash over the same bedrock certainty: ultimately, I know myself.
Spending a weekend with Hitler would have been boring in the extreme, although you would have had a greater certainty in coming back alive.
People always tell me with absolute certainty that they don’t trust themselves.
Not doubt, certainty is what drives one insane.
A good proof is one that makes us wiser.
Given the ease with which health infuses life with meaning and purpose, it is shocking how swiftly illness steals away those certainties… Time unused and only endured still vanishes, as if time itself is starving, and each day is swallowed whole, leaving no crumbs, no memory, no trace at all.
We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty.
Your one certainty in life, your power as a human being, is that you have a choice in every situation about what you do next and about how you take what has happened to you.
The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.
In a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live.
The intellectual who no longer feels attached to anything is not satisfied with opinion merely; he wants certainty, he wants a system. The revolution provides him with his opium.
Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect; they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.
Marie Houzelle is a master of the first-personВ narrative. In Tita she has created a strange, utterly originalВ child whose deadpan certainties are a beguiling invitation toВ readers of all ages.
The neurotic has problems; the psychotic has solutions.
Malice, in its false witness, promotes its tale with so cunning a confusion, so mingles truths with falsehoods, surmises with certainties, causes of no moment with matters capital, that the accused can absolutely neither grant nor deny, plead innocen.
‘Et Tu, Babe’ was born out of my absolute certainty that a writer’s life was solitary and insular, and I was happy with that. I love reading and writing; it’s my whole life.
The certainty that life cannot be long, and the probability that it will be much shorter than nature allows, ought to awaken every man to the active prosecution of whatever he is desirous to perform.
Many persons entertain a prejudice against mathematical language, arising out of a confusion between the ideas of a mathematical science and an exact science. …in reality, there is no such thing as an exact science.
…in a time lacking in truth and certainty and filled with anguish and despair, no woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart.
Although we may trust God’s promises for life after death and the certainty of a heavenly home, we must still face the reality of death.
Sentimental assertions are always a form of detachment; they confront the acute, terrible awareness of individual pain, the sharp particularity of loss or the fierce individuality of passion with the dulling universal certainty of platitude.
In an economy where the only certainty is uncertainty, the one sure source of lasting competitive advantage is knowledge.
Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still
There is a certain imperiousness, in the manner of speaking and in actions, which makes itself felt everywhere, and soon wins attention and respect. This commanding quality is useful in all affairs, and even for obtaining what we ask for.
A person who knows all the answers, has an opinion on everything, has a certainty backed up by rational argument, has very little possibility of further progress. Such a person is unlikely to walk away from a discussion with anything more than a reaffirmation of how right he or she has been all along.
My God, how badly one calculates in this world! … Let us leave off calculating on anything but death — it is the only certainty.
Those who condemn the supreme certainty of mathematics feed on confusion, and can never silence the contradictions of the sophistical sciences which lead to eternal quackery.
The emotionally mature individual should completely accept the fact that we live in a world of probability and chance, where there are not, nor probably ever will be, any absolute certainties, and should realize that it is not at all horrible, indeed—such a probabilistic, uncertain world.
He’d gone to Louddon’s fortress to take Madelyne captive. His plan was revenge; an eye for an eye. And that had been reason enough. Until she’d warmed his feet. Everything had changed at that moment. Duncan had known with a certainty he couldn’t deny that they were henceforth bound together. He could never let her go.
Do not shorten the morning by getting up late; look upon it as the quintessence of life, as to a certain extent sacred.
Study nothing except in the knowledge that you already knew it. Worship nothing except in adoration of your true self. And fear nothing except in the certainty that you are your enemy’s begetter and its only hope of healing.
Overcoming one of my limiting beliefs, “girls are not as strong as men, therefore we cannot attempt the same physical challenges.” I can tell you, with all certainty, this is not true. I have accomplished things on skis no one thought were physically possible for females.
There is no certainty; there is only adventure.
The judgements about the severity of the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of a mass destruction – WMD – were presented with a certainty that was not justified.
Let’s make sure that there is certainty during uncertain times in our economy.
OK, so this pack – tax package includes about 50 tax breaks. None of them are new. They were all existing tax breaks. What this did was make them permanent. It gives some certainty for people when they’re filing taxes that they don’t have to wonder if Congress is going to renew them year after year.
As soon as one point alone is removed from the sphere of dogmatic certainty, the discussion will not simply result in a new and better formulation which will have greater consistency but may easily lead to endless debates and general confusion.
We can say with certainty – or 90% probability – that the new industries that are about to be born will have nothing to do with information.
Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh?
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
If you see certainty in that which is uncertain, you are bound to suffer
A man can reach into anything and turn it to his cause. It’s not want, or desire, just certainty. Only be assured that whatever you reach into will reach into you in turn.
While the FAST Act is a significant bipartisan accomplishment that provides much-needed funding certainty, this modest increase in funding is hardly the bold, forward-thinking plan our country needs to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure and create a 21st-century transportation system.
Our need for certainty in an endeavor as uncertain as raising children makes explicit ‘how-to-parent’ strategies both seductive and dangerous.
One of the odd things about being a writer is that you never reach a point of certainty, a point of mastery where you can say, Right. Now I understand how this is done.
In their leaders, advisers, and experts, people much prefer overconfidence, total certainty, to any kind of doubt.
If you develop the absolute sense of certainty that powerful beliefs provide, then you can get yourself to accomplish virtually anything, including those things that other people are certain are impossible.
Every single person who is a member of our party deserves to have certainty. They deserve to know that my attention and focus is where it belongs.
All of us carry around countless bags of dusty old knickknacks dated from childhood: collected resentments, long list of wounds of greater or lesser significance, glorified memories, absolute certainties that later turn out to be wrong. Humans are emotional pack rats. These bags define us.
New York is at once cosmopolitan and parochial, a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world’s great cities – in its self-congratulation a kind of San Francisco of the East.
Certainty is usually a sign of pathology.
It was in the best interests of Zavala and other counties that we move forward with a farm bill and provide certainty to ranchers, farmers, food banks, and other providers.
Benjamin Franklin said there were only two things certain in life: death and taxes. But I’d like to add a third certainty: trash. And while some in this room might want to discuss reducing taxes, I want to talk about reducing trash.
[Donald Trump] is talking a lot about redoing trade and that’s the area that is getting globalists nervous. Number one, they want certainty. They do not want to see a disruption in trade. He’s promising to rip up NAFTA, redo NAFTA. He’s not going to do the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the TPP trade with Asia.
We must always remember that all medical interventions have risk, and very little can be asserted with 100 percent certainty.
Joy adapts and changes, but it always endures,
even as a flicker of light born of our personal certainty that,
when everything is said and done, we are infinitely loved.
even as a flicker of light born of our personal certainty that,
when everything is said and done, we are infinitely loved.
We have to provide more visibility, more certainty to the investors and reduce the cost of failure.
One thing, however, I know with certainty: violence, or the direct threat of violence, of the kind we have seen in the past few days, is totally unjustified as a response to any published word or image.
The statistics of life out there and the statistics of intelligent beings and advanced civilization is a certainty, the way I look at it. It has not been accepted, because we’ve been in an anthropocentric era.
Human life is proverbially uncertain; few things are more certain than the solvency of a life-insurance company.
…it is absurd to try to confine our knowledge and belief to matters which are conclusively established by sound deductive arguments. The demand for certainty will inevitably be disappointed, leaving skepticism in command of almost every issue.
Tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.
The inherent preferences of organizations are clarity, certainty and perfection. The inherent nature of human relationships involves ambiguity, uncertainty, and imperfection. How one honors, balances, and integrates the needs of both is the real trick of feedback.
Uncertainty is wondrous, and.. certainty, were it to be real, would be moral death.
I think it’s the tendency to want to create gods and monotheistic absolutes and absolute certainties that is the continual temptation in human thought – that’s the great danger. Every time we create a god, we diminish humanity.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
The only time a dead certainty applies is in a dream world.
An aphorism is an extreme synthesis of thesis and antithesis, theory and practice, it’s a mixture of intuition and observation, hypothesis and illusions of certainty and probability, history and stupidity.
What makes you so certain?” “But I am not certain,” I told him. “Nothing is certain. You want certainty?” “Yes!” “Then you want death.
If you’re invested in security and certainty, you are on the wrong planet.
We are talking about capital-intensive enterprises, so market certainty is the key. Investors and entrepreneurs have to know that there will be a guaranteed U.S. renewable energy market in which they can compete. Otherwise, they will create the next generation of green companies and green jobs in Asia, not here.
The certainty of death and the uncertainty of the hour of death is a source of grief throughout our life.
Certainty is the enemy of change.
Vast ills have followed a belief in certainty.
There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is impossible.
He had thought more than other men, and in matters of the intellect he had that calm objectivity, that certainty of thought and knowledge, such as only really intellectual men have, who have no axe to grind, who never wish to shine, or to talk others down, or to appear always in the right.
Don’t give us your doubts, gives us your certainties, for we have doubts enough of our own.
Statistically it’s a certainty there are hugely advanced civilizations, intelligences, life forms out there. I believe they’re so advanced they’re even doing interstellar travel. I believe it’s possible they even came here.
I want to speak, show, see, and hear outrageously astute questions and comments. I want to be on the sides of pleasure and laughter and to disrupt the dour certainties of pictures, property, and power.
The world is a divine dream, from which we may presently awake to the glories and certainties of day.
When we find our core certainty within, then we no longer look for certainty outside.
The unfathomable nature of the ever-changing world ceases
to be a source of anxiety and instead is a source of joy and adventure.
The unfathomable nature of the ever-changing world ceases
to be a source of anxiety and instead is a source of joy and adventure.
In our instinctive attachments, our fear of change, and our wish for certainty and permanence, we may undercut the impermanence which is our greatest strength, our most fundamental identity. Without impermanence, there is no process. The nature of life is change. All hope is based on process.
The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.
We cannot live on probabilities. The faith in which we can live bravely and die in peace must be a certainty, so far as it professes to be a faith at all, or it is nothing.
That was my gift . . . having the ability to put certain guys together that would create a chemistry and then letting them go; letting them play what they knew, and above it.
Whether gods exist or not, there is no way to get absolute certainty about ethics. Without absolute certainty, what do we do? We do the best we can.
I am devilishly afraid, that’s certain; but … I’ll sing, that I may seem valiant.
Doubting things go ill often hurts more
Than to be sure they do; for certainties
Either are past remedies, or, timely knowing,
The remedy then born.
Than to be sure they do; for certainties
Either are past remedies, or, timely knowing,
The remedy then born.
The whole social structure is now tumbling down, dethroning its God, undermining all its certainties. All this, wonderfully enough, is being done in the name of the health, wealth, and happiness of all mankind.
Nobody knows anything…… Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.
An enlightened man had but one duty – to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led.
Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
The point here is … to be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
VIRTUES, n.pl. Certain abstentions.
I feel, sometimes, as the renaissance man must have felt in finding new riches at every point and in the certainty that unexplored areas of knowledge and experience await at every turn.
The more I see, the less I know.
Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.
Throughout his remarkable business and government career, Robert Rubin, now 65, has both worked exhaustively at reaching well-founded conclusions and rejected the idea that anything – and he means anything – can be a ‘provable certainty.’
All speech should be presumed to be protected by the Constitution, and a heavy burden should be placed on those who would censor to demonstrate with relative certainty that the speech at issue, if not censored, would lead to irremediable and immediate serious harm.
I’m sure one of the frustrations of being a Western enthusiast of Japanese food and culture is you’re confronted every day with the absolute certainty that you will die ignorant.
Moral certainty, clear standards, and a commitment to spiritual ideals will set you apart in a world that searches for meaning.
Not only can no one predict the future, we don’t understand the present – and there isn’t even any certainty about the past.
Those willing to trade freedom for certainty are certain to find the cure worse than the ailment.
We find that the statements of science are not of what is true and what is not true, but statements of what is known with different degrees of certainty: “It is very much more likely that so and so is true than that it is not true”.
Isn’t it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity.
Doubt always coexists with faith, for in the presence of certainty who would need faith at all?
On September 11, people were shaken, but they quickly calmed down. There was a flash of awareness, which lasted a few fractions of a second. People could feel that something was happening. Then a blanket of silence covered up the crack in our certainty of safety.
This may be the very nature of love, a passion as fickle as the sea, full of certainty when the object of desire is absent, yet dubious when confronted again with the lover’s presence.
I avoid writing about sex out of a certainty that no matter how grown up and matter-of-fact I might try to be, there is a snickering yet nun-terrorized 12-year-old-boy inside me who would at some point be certain to grab the reins in his hairy palms.
How many pizzas are consumed each year in the United States? How many words have you spoken in your life? How many different peoples names appear in the New York Times each year? How many watermelons would fit inside the U.S. Capital building? What is the volume of all the human blood in the world?
There are two options for any society: total prohibition as in a totalitarian state, or total license. Both avoid the ardours of decision. Both have the attraction of certainty. The difficult option is to decide where the line should be drawn and this, surely, is the responsiblity of any civilized and democratic country.
If you are messing around all day and then scream for certainty, you’re not going to get it. If you spend energy and do the work and develop that certainty, you’ll get to where you need to be, even if you don’t know exactly where that is.
One very important difference between color and monochromatic photography is this: in black and white you suggest; in color you state. Much can be implied by suggestion, but statement demands certainty… absolute certainty.
I am about to die. It is September 11, and every cell in my body is acutely aware of my looming demise. The certainty of it. The inevitability. Not years from now, not weeks nor days. Moments.
But just as much as it is easy to find the differential [derivative] of a given quantity, so it is difficult to find the integral of a given differential. Moreover, sometimes we cannot say with certainty whether the integral of a given quantity can be found or not.
Although I was first drawn to math and science by the certainty they promised, today I find the unanswered questions and the unexpected connections at least as attractive.
Certainty is not biologically possible. We must learn (and teach our children) to tolerate the unpleasantness of uncertainty. Science has given us the language and tools of probabilities. We have methods for analyzing and ranking opinion according to their likelihood of correctness. That is enough.
He stared at her, knowing with certainty that he was falling in love. He pulled her close and kissed her beneath a blanket of stars, wondering how on earth he’d been lucky enough to find her.
I remembered standing in the middle of the street in front of The Crooked Bookshelf, filled with the certainty of a future. I had heard the wolves howling behind the house and remembered how glad I had been to be human.
Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made.
I have devoted my life to uncertainty. Certainty is the death of wisdom, thought, creativity.
I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what.
People who ask confidently get more than those who are hesitant and uncertain. When you’ve figured out what you want to ask for, do it with certainty, boldness and confidence.
Speculation and the exploration of ideas beyond what we know with certainty are what lead to progress.
No human investigation can claim to be scientific if it doesn’t pass the test of mathematical proof.
Almost all religions provide opportunities for human beings to convince themselves of their own righteousness, to speak in the name of God, and even to go to war on God’s behalf. This ‘blasphemy of certainty’ is also rife among secularists who in their case have not God but science or the proletariat on their side.
Two men with a camera, thoughtfully observing the visual cacophony of one major thoroughfare and the complicated interplay of its history, its present, and the certainty of change, have laid the groundwork for a dialogue and a vision that reaches farther than human eyes can see.
The first indication that we are killing our dreams is lack of time.
The second indication of the death of our dreams is certainty.
The third indication that our dreams are dead is peace.
The second indication of the death of our dreams is certainty.
The third indication that our dreams are dead is peace.
Conviction is a force multiplier. If you want something, claim it in your gut. The universe itself responds to your inner certainty.
He was expressing his certainty that my appeal would be granted, but I was carrying the burden of a sin from which I had to free myself. According to him, human justice was nothing and divine justice was everything. I pointed out it was the former that had condemned me.
Guilt can make you doubt yourself at the very moment when you need to proceed with certainty.
Thrones, dominations, principalities know now with a terrible certainty that mere force of arms has no power which compares with that living word of the crucified Nazarene, that bears with it Eternal Life, and directs the duty of a world of men whom he can lead, but who bend no knee to power.
What I most wanted even at that early age, was to capture and hold the truth, with the certainty and love that it brings.
Few things look as unstable as the rock-solid certainties of previous ages.
Without absolute certainty, what do we do? We do the best we can. Injustice is happening now; suffering is happening now. We have choices to make now. To insist on absolute certainty before starting to apply ethics to life decisions is a way of choosing to be amoral.
American democracy faces a massive challenge. I don’t think it is a certainty that we’re headed toward Putin’s Russia, as some commentariat does. But people need to mobilize and build up small-d democratic institutions to prepare against that eventuality.
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 demand a dogmatic answer as to whether it will be fine or wet, and be disappointed in you when you cannot be sure.
Experiment is the sole source of truth. It alone can teach us something new; it alone can give us certainty.
The integrated automotive group of Volkswagen and Porsche is a certainty.
Dialogue starts with the willingness to challenge our own thinking, to recognize that any certainty we have is, at best, a hypothesis about the world.
If we are to reach certainty and true autonomy of realization, we need to be willing to be heretics. What’s more, we need to become universal heretics, not believing anything that we do not know from direct experience, beyond stories, beyond hearsay, and even beyond the mind.
To be uncertain is to beВ uncomfortable, but to be certain is to be ridiculous.
