Quotes About Certainty

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.

To say that one need 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 Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out, there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930's, it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it - the ascent of man against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty.

The propositions of mathematics have, therefore, the same unquestionable certainty which is typical of such propositions as "All bachelors are unmarried," but they also share the complete lack of empirical content which is associated with that certainty: The propositions of mathematics are devoid of all factual content; they convey no information whatever on any empirical subject matter.

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.

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

Deep down in everyone was sorrow and certainty.

Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated.

The American people want us to stop spending. And so let's just give them some certainty. Let's extend the tax - the existing tax cuts. And then let's give some more tax breaks to small businesses and large. And then maybe the American people will have some confidence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. People love the president because he's certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don't seem to exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?

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.

This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.

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.

I think that certainty is a closed door, It's the end of the conversation. Doubt is an open door.

...while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.

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.

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.

It seems to me that self confidence and the ability to stand one's ground are essential if we want to succeed in life. I am not talking of stupid self-assurance but of an awareness of our inner potential, a certainty that we can always correct our behavior, improve ourselves, enrich ourselves, and that things are never hopeless

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.

It's true that a dangerous combination of certainty and ignorance often shows up around sex and consent on campus. People on all sides of the issue have such strong feelings about it that they're blinded to the facts.

"What is the meaning of life?" This question has no answer except in the history of how it came to be asked. There is no answer because words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself. 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.

When we started, I was delivering meals to people in Atlanta. We were a direct-care organization. And it was - people needed meals, they needed transport, they needed medication, they needed buddy systems. They had a death sentence. There was AZT, and that was just prolonging the agony, basically. Now people, of course, if they are on antiretrovirals, they face a lifetime of health, basically. I mean, it doesn't - it's I would say in the 99 percent certainty bracket that if you are on that medication, you will have a healthy life.

“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.

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.

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.

A woman's guess is much more accurate than a man's certainty.

Can you predict the future with absolute certainty? Your answer must be no. You have two options: You can either decide to accept yourself as an imperfect human being with limited knowledge and realize that you will at times make mistakes, or you can hate yourself for it.

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.

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"!

He who does not understand the supreme certainty of mathematics is wallowing in confusion.

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.

There was the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.

The greatest weapon any warrior can carry into battle is absolute certainty of her eternal soul.

An election marks the end of the affair; it puts paid to the seduction of the many by the few. Pretty words, fulsome promises. We wind up married, but to whom, to what? We cannot always predict with certainty the future leader from the winning candidate. Some men grow in the job; others are diminished by its demands and its grandeur.

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.

Certainty abolishes hope, and robs us of renewal.

[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.

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.

When he thought of her, it rather amazed him, that he had let that girl with her violin go. Now, of course, he saw that her self-effacing proposal was quite irrelevant. 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. Love and patience- if only he had had them both at once- would surely have seen them both through.

A reasonable probability is the only certainty.

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.

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.

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.