Quotes About Certainty

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.

Climate Change is a national security issue. We found that climate instability will lead to instability in geopolitics and impact American military operations around the world. People are saying they want to be perfectly convinced about climate science projections. But speaking as a soldier, we never have 100 percent certainty. If you wait until you have 100 percent certainty, something bad is going to happen on the battlefield.

The quest for precision is analogous to the quest for certainty and both - precision and certainty are impossible to attain.

The significant contribution of empiricism was not the eradication of certainty, but the eradication of infallibility as a criterion of certainty. And this shift from infallibilism to fallibilism has profound consequences not only for toleration, but also for the subordination of faith to reason and theology to philosophy.

We move from the illusion of certainty, to the certainty of illusion

Educators must resist the quest for certainty. If there were certainty there would be no scientific advancement. So it is with morals and patriotism.

Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless. It demonstrates the endless multiplicity of aspects; it takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view.

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.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

One of the few certainties in life is that persons of certainty should certainly be avoided.

We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.

No one can forecast the economy with 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.

I, retired in prayer, will always be with you, and together we will move ahead with the Lord in certainty. The Lord is victorious.

Knowing the precies answers is not as crucial as the certainty that the answers do, in fact, exist.

The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer. Centuries ago, when some people suspended their search for absolute truth and began instead to ask how things worked, modern science was born. Curiously, it was by abandoning the search for absolute truth that science began to make progress, opening the material universe to human exploration.

Antisappointment. Anticipation colliding head-on with the certainty of its own doom.

Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other than their own.

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.

I'm through with Tolstoy. He has ceased to exist for me.... If I eat a bowl of soup and like it, I know by that fact alone and with absolute certainty that Tolstoy will find it bad, and vice versa.

As its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we cant predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe. Poised between intransigent scepticism and uncritical credulity, it is par excellence the literature of the open mind.

If I was gay, there’d be no closet. You’d never see the closet I came out of. Why? I would have burned it for kindling by the time I was twelve! Because I know, with all certainty in my mind, there’s nothing wrong with being gay and you know it! And there’s nothing wrong with being into chicks if you’re a girl. And there’s nothing wrong with being into all of it…. How awesome would it be to be bisexual? To just walk into a room and go ‘MMMM, ALRIGHT!!!!’

Love must neither beg nor demand. Love must be strong enough to find certainty within itself. It then cease to be moved and becomes the mover.

For any culture which is primarily concerned with meaning, the study of death - the only certainty that life holds for us - must be central, for an understanding of death is the key to liberation in life.

I then began to study arithmetical questions without any great apparent result, and without suspecting that they could have the least connexion with my previous researches. Disgusted at my want of success, I went away to spend a few days at the seaside, and thought of entirely different things. One day, as I was walking on the cliff, the idea came to me, again with the same characteristics of conciseness, suddenness, and immediate certainty, that arithmetical transformations of indefinite ternary quadratic forms are identical with those of non-Euclidian geometry.

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.

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.

I speak "with absolute certainty" only so far as my own personal belief is concerned. Those who have not the same warrant for their belief as I have, would be very credulous and foolish to accept it on blind faith. Nor does the writer believe any more than her correspondent and his friends in any "authority" let alone "divine revelation"!

The remarkable thing is that it is the crowded life that is most easily remembered. A life full of turns, achievements, disappointments, surprises, and crises is a life full of landmarks. The empty life has even its few details blurred, and cannot be remembered with certainty.

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.

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.

The only certainty is death.

Uncertainty is wondrous, and.. certainty, were it to be real, would be moral death.

There are no means of attaining faith and certainty except through the Qur'an.

In the name of certainty, the greatest crimes have been committed against humanity.

When you meditate you feel joy, harmony, peace, stillness, ecstasy, laughter, certainty, courage, strength, awareness and immortality. In the beginning you will feel these things vaguely, a distant knocking at your castle door.

It is some fundamental certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something which is not to be sought, is not to be found, and perhaps, also, is not to be lost. The noble soul has reverence for itself.

The problem with certainty is that it is static; it can do little but endlessly reassert itself. Uncertainty, by contrast, is full of unknowns, possibilities, and risks.

Change is the investor's only certainty.

Doubt always coexists with faith, for in the presence of certainty who would need faith at all?

I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.

Historians constantly rewrite history, reinterpreting (reorganizing) the records of the past. So, too, when the brain's coherent responses become part of a memory, they are organized anew as part of the structure of consciousness. What makes them memories is that they become part of that structure and thus form part of the sense of self; my sense of self derives from a certainty that my experiences refer back to me, the individual who is having them. Hence the sense of the past, of history, of memory, is in part the creation of the self.

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?

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]

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.

There should be a word for that brief period just after waking when the mind is full of warm pink nothing. You lie there entirely empty of thought, except for a growing suspicion that heading towards you, like a sockful of damp sand in a nocturnal alleyway, are all the recollections you'd really rather do without, and which amount to the fact that the only mitigating factor in your horrible future is the certainty that it will be quite short.

From all our observations we may collect with certainty, that misery is the lot of man, but cannot discover in what particular condition it will find most alleviations.

We often call a certainty a hope, to bring it luck.