Certainty Quotes

The great systems that inform the world about the truth and life invariably claim to be absolutely truthful and well-balanced. In reality they are quaking bridges built out of yearning.

From the house of unbeliefto true religionis a single breath;From the world of doubtto certaintyis a single breath;Enjoy this precious single breath,for the harvestof our whole livesis that same one breath.

Sometimes a woman is afraid to be without security or without certainty, for even a short time. She has more excuses than dogs have hairs. She must just simply dive in and stand not knowing what will happen next.

Courage is a certainty.

To better understand God we must first shatter our own idea of God - maybe even day after day. Maybe he's too great to stay compressed in the human mind. Maybe he splits it wide open; this is why pretentious intellectualism so often fails to comprehend the concept of God: it is only accepting of what it can explain while in the process finding higher sources offensive. What we may confidently assert is that faith is the opening that allows God, this unpredictable, unseen power, to travel in and out of the mind without all the pains of confusion.

The Greeks made Space the subject-matter of a science of supreme simplicity and certainty. Out of it grew, in the mind of classical antiquity, the idea of pure science. Geometry became one of the most powerful expressions of that sovereignty of the intellect that inspired the thought of those times. At a later epoch, when the intellectual despotism of the Church, which had been maintained through the Middle Ages, had crumbled, and a wave of scepticism threatened to sweep away all that had seemed most fixed, those who believed in Truth clung to Geometry as to a rock, and it was the highest ideal of every scientist to carry on his science 'more geometrico.

Having friends was weird . . . but in a good way.

To build refuges of my own making is to construct fortresses of sand at ocean’s edge, where the relentless tides of time will leave my most magnificently constructed walls as perfectly flat sand. And now that I am subject to the very tides that destroyed these walls of mine, I am left with the reality that my single and sole refuge can only be the God who created both tides and sand.

Knowledge is not the same as wisdom. You can know all the facts and still not be able to act wisely. But without knowledge, it is harder to be wise –– even if what wisdom tells us is that knowledge is very often provisional and that we cannot wait to have certainty about every fact before we act.

A world full of "certainties"All the plans, all the vanities.Where black covers the whiteSuited in "confidence"- the constant fight.A million roads I dream to takeOne destination, knowing not I turn where.A green veil covers for two years, some two decades.But the "plan" awaits, new roads to make.I pant, I struggle, I do my best While they say,"You are, dear, but so inadequate".

Luck is a favorable thing out of an uncertainty. No such thing as luck when everything's certain.

She knows her timing, always knows. The time to strike or the time to starve. Her eyes as a clock, she watches she waits she learns, and in the second she blinks, she changes her mind just like that.

Just because you feel lost doesn't mean that you're doing something wrong. Feeling certain that you are correct in every decision and situation is an addiction. If you think that the journey of self-discovery will bring you more solid facts and certainties about yourself and the world, you will be frustrated. The more you see, the more lost you will feel. That is natural. The more you discover of yourself, the more confused you will become. This is natural. The wiser you get, the more you will see that there are many paths walked by just as many people, and that just because yours is different from someone else's doesn't mean one of you is wrong. This is natural. Over time, you will develop humility, compassion, and a higher tolerance for confusion. If you allow the feeling of being lost to drive you into a search for absolute truths and correct answers, you may feel more secure when you get there, but in reality, you will be taking a step back. Allow yourself to be lost, and you will see so much more of the forest of your soul than if you beeline back for the trail. Explore. Get lost. Embrace the inevitability of confusion.

Whatever doubt might rise, he knew that he was right. But the rightness was an intellectual rightness and the doubt emotional.

Miracles are like murders. After the first one, each becomes easier than the last for, with each success, the miracle-worker's certainty in himself becomes stronger.

If art made you think, then this was Art. Staring at the ball, made of layers and layers of cloth, I wondered about the glass marble at its heart. What if you wanted to reach that marble? Make sure it was still whole?You'd have to remove the layers. You'd have to risk breaking the ball for a chance at freeing it. Fear, knowledge, certainty - you'd have to be willing to let them all go.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

There are no facts only interpretations.

Every time he tried to reconstruct the internal arguments that had led to his decision, they sounded feebler to him.

Get your facts first and then you can distort 'em as much as you please.

Uncertainty is the certainity of life!

It appears, from all this, that our eyes are uncertain. Two persons look at the same clock and there is a difference of two or three minutes in their reading of the time. One has a tendency to put back the hands, the other to advance them. Let us not too confidently try to play the part of the third person who wishes to set the first two aright; it may well happen that we are mistaken in turn. Besides, in our daily life, we have less need of certainty than of a certain approximation to certainty. Let us learn how to see, but without looking too closely at things and men: they look better from a distance.

My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.

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.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

What men want is not knowledge but certainty.

Mr. Welper, of the few certainties I've come across in life, one of them is that when a person says money is no object, the opposite is most likely true. Money is the only object—or will be.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition but certainty is.

Perhaps, it is better to be decided than undecided. But it is certainly the best to stay decidedly undecided.

What kind of husband would I be if I bet against my own marriage?'I smiled. 'The stupid kind. Didn't you listen to your dad when he told you not to bet against me?

Stop living the life with possibilities and probabilities, live the life with certainties.

[Mathematics] is security. Certainty. Truth. Beauty. Insight. Structure. Architecture. I see mathematics, the part of human knowledge that I call mathematics, as one thing—one great, glorious thing. Whether it is differential topology, or functional analysis, or homological algebra, it is all one thing. ... They are intimately interconnected, they are all facets of the same thing. That interconnection, that architecture, is secure truth and is beauty. That's what mathematics is to me.

In God's eyes, a man who teaches one truth and nothing else is more righteous than a man who teaches a million truths and one lie.

Deeply convinced of the reality of the divine will, he (Lincoln) had no patience at all with any who were perfectly sure they knew the details of the divine will.

Anyone who takes a decided line in certain matters, is sure to lead all the rest.

You are all you will ever have for certain .

It is a noble responsibility to not back down when you know that you know that you know that you are right.

Because you're always learning, the chief lesson remains: you still know nothing.

Like the body craves oxygen, the mind is desperate for certainty. It believes that without a safe foothold on reality, it will die.But the fascinating thing is that the illusion of certainty is exactly the opposite of safety because it hardens and narrows the vision to make everything fit its own scope. Then when new information arrives which would be its ally, the mind pushes it away in favor of the leaky life raft to which it clings, sinking all the while beneath the waves of change.In fact, the only antidote for this is to embrace 'I don’t know' so deeply that a powerful, dynamic safety emerges. This is like learning to surf so well that a tsunami wave shows up as a challenge to test our mastery.

I could see it all. The hand on the shoulder, then the hug. The mouths that find each other through the tears, the moment when guilt and the certainty that things must go no further gives way to lust and the certainty that they cannot stop.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

I know that I do not know, and uncertainty, certainly, is the cruelest of words.

My compulsive thoughts aren't even thoughts, they're absolute certainties and obeying them isn't a choice.

You’ve got to be sure of yourself beforeYou can ever win a prize.

Only by digging deep down to the core of our true self can we come to a place of inner certainty. Our underlying values and priorities are our personal navigational stars on life's journey—essential tools to chart a life course that embraces what matters most to us.

We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes. The perfection that the human mind has been able to give to astronomy affords but a feeble outline of such an intelligence.

I don’t know what to do,” he said. “No harm in that. I’ve never known what to do,” said Rincewind with hollow cheerfulness. “Been completely at a loss my whole life.” He hesitated. “I think it’s called being human, or something.

And I will wait for Jarod to work for me. For free, cause if it's paid, it's work and not love, unless, of course he loves to work, in which case he’ll surely love working for me, because I love people who love to do that to love to do that.

The South African artist William Kentridge speaks to this type of certainty: 'To say that one needs art, or politics, that incorporate ambiguity and contradiction is not to say that one then stops recognizing and condemning things as evil. However, it might stop one being so utterly convinced of the certainty of one's own solutions. There needs to be a strong understanding of fallibility and how the very act of certainty or authoritativeness can bring disasters.'The outcome of the current crisis is already determined.

A half truth like half a brick is always more forcible as an argument than a whole one. It carries better.

They say, "Look before you leap." So look. But do not look for too long. Do not look into the void of uncertainty trying to predict each and every possible outcome, to evaluate every possible mistake, to prevent each possible failure. Look for the opportunity to leap, and leap faster than your fear can grab you. Leap before you talk yourself out of it, before you convince yourself to set up a temporary camp that turns into a permanent delay on your journey into your own heart.

There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing.

In order for a god to be all-knowing, he must know even the fact of his own omniscience. But can he do this? He may know the totality of facts constituting the world; call this Y. But in order to know that he has mastered Y, he must also know that 'There are no facts unknown to me' — and this is beyond Y.It seems impossible that a god (or anyone) could ever be sure that nothing exists beyond his ken. It makes no sense to imagine [a god] arriving at this limit, peering beyond it (at what?), and satisfying himself no further facts exist. But without this certainty he cannot be sure of his own omniscience, and so does not know everything.A theist might argue that his god has created all the facts in existence. But an omniscient god would have to be sure of even this — that he is the sole creator, and that there are no facts unknown to him. And how could he come to this knowledge?

People too often tolerate uncertainty prior to taking action; worse, some people believe that omniscience or infallibility are prerequisites for being certain, so they conclude that certainty (and therefore knowledge) is never possible. To any person who proclaims that "you can never be certain of anything", ask them: "are you sure?" and watch what happens.

I am not accustomed to saying anything with certainty after only one or two observations.

I always make sure that the world will prove me right. It gives me the freedom to contradict myself.

The misconception of something being a certainty sometimes gets to me until I remember we can change most things consciously.

To believe with certainty we must begin with doubting.

I'll make a book on learning how to be a complete moron someday, and I'm sure no one will buy it, because everyone will have mastered that already by the time I gather enough moronism to process it into digestible upgrade instructions for your average village cyborg-idiot.

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. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure.