Popular quotes about Certainty! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 19
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.
Jacob BronowskiWhile the dogmatist is harmful, the sceptic is useless ...; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or of ignorance. Knowledge is not so precise a concept as is commonly thought. Instead of saying 'I know this', we ought to say 'I more or less know something more or less like this'. ... Knowledge in practical affairs has not the certainty or the precision of arithmetic.
Bertrand RussellIn practice, some come to see easily, some with difficulty. But whatever the case, never mind. Difficult or easy, the Buddha said not to be heedless. Just that--don't be heedless. Why? Because life is not certain. Wherever we start to think that things are certain, uncertainty is lurking right there. Heedlessness is just holding things as certain. It is grasping at certainty where there is no certainty and looking for truth in things that are not true. Be careful! They are likely to bite you sometime in the future!
Ajahn ChahYou do not mean by mystery what a Catholic does. You mean an interesting uncertainty: the uncertainty ceasing interest ceases also.... But a Catholic by mystery means an incomprehensible certainty: without certainty, without formulation there is no interest;... the clearer the formulation the greater the interest.
Gerard Manley HopkinsThe 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.
Conor Cruise O'BrienThere 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.
Manly HallThe rocket that goes up next March will not only lift a payload, it will launch what I believe will ultimately be the most significant commercial space facility in the country, ... This launch will be a brilliant signal flare that will let the nation and the world know New Mexico's spaceport is open for business. We can now say with certainty that the dream of this spaceport launching a new era in New Mexico's aerospace industry will become reality.
Bill RichardsonAnother thing very injurious to the child is the tying and cutting of the navel string too soon, which should always be left till the child has not only repeatedly breathed but till all pulsation in the cord ceases. As otherwise the child is much weaker than it ought to be, a part of the blood being left in the placenta which ought to have been in the child and at the same time the placenta does not so naturally collapse, and withdraw itself from the sides of the uterus, and is not therefore removed with so much safety and certainty.
Erasmus DarwinJealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.
Francois de La RochefoucauldWe are often less grieved at disappointments than at ourselves for having said much concerning the certainty of our expectations.
Norm MacDonaldDoubt is nothing but a trivial agitation on the surface of the soul, while deep down there is a calm certainty.
Francois MauriacI 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.
Stephane MallarmeOK, 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.
Susan DavisWe 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".
Richard P. FeynmanOne of the few certainties in life is that persons of certainty should certainly be avoided.
Willy RussellThat would be the death of anyone - to recognize false hopes with a certainty. One mustn't know that. If it is offered, refuse!
Jesse BallWhenever a man believes that he has the exact truth from God, there is in that man no spirit of compromise. He has not the modesty born of the imperfections of human nature; he has the arrogance of theological certainty and the tyranny born of ignorant assurance. Believing himself to be the slave of God, he imitates his master, and of all tyrants the worst is a slave in power.
Robert Green IngersollThe good gardener knows with absolute certainty that if he does his part, if he gives the labour, the love, and every aid that his knowledge of his craft, experience of the conditions of his place, and exercise of his personal wit can work together to suggest, that so surely will God give the increase. Then with the honestly-earned success comes the consciousness of encouragement to renewed effort, and, as it were, an echo of the gracious words, 'Well done my good and faithful servant'.
Gertrude JekyllFacts 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?
Stephen ColbertWe have to deal with this new type of threat in a way we havenโt yet defined. . . . With a low-probability, high-impact event like this . . . If thereโs a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.
Dick CheneySooner 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
Bruce CattonWe all return. It is this certainty that gives meaning to life and it does not make the slightest difference whether or not in a later incarnation we remember the former life. What counts is not the individual and his comfort, but the great aspiration to the perfect and the pure which goes on in each incarnation.
Gustav MahlerThe fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty.
Franz KafkaAudiences 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.
Cameron MackintoshI don't believe anything. I only know some things to a greater degree of certainty than others.
John RymanBiblical 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.
David WilkersonIf I was gay, thereโd be no closet. Youโd 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, thereโs nothing wrong with being gay and you know it! And thereโs nothing wrong with being into chicks if youโre a girl. And thereโs nothing wrong with being into all of itโฆ. How awesome would it be to be bisexual? To just walk into a room and go โMMMM, ALRIGHT!!!!โ
Henry RollinsWhat unnerves so many liberals about talk radio? Simple: It's the unapologetic nature of the conversation, the unwavering sense of certainty. Where's the nuance? The shades of gray? We all know truth is a fragile butterfly dancing in and out of shadow and light, and these guys act as though truth is a rhino charging across a sunlit veldt.
James LileksWho is so brave and so noble that they could hurl themselves at infinity without any question, with complete trust and complete certainty that that infinity will destroy them forever?
Frederick LenzIt'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.
Vanessa Grigoriadis"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.
Julian JaynesTo 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.
Bertrand RussellDialogue starts with the willingness to challenge our own thinking, to recognize that any certainty we have is, at best, a hypothesis about the world.
Peter SengeIf I were twenty or thirty years younger, I would start afresh in this field with the certainty of accomplishing much. But I should have to learn from the bottom up, forgetting the theatre entirely and concentrating on the special medium of this new art. My mistake, and that of many others, lay in employing "theatrical" techniques despite every effort to avoid them. Here is something quite, quite fresh, a penetrating form of visual poetry, an untried exponent of the human soul. Alas, I am too old for it!
Eleanora DuseThere 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.
P. D. JamesWe are born into a vast room whose walls consist of a thousand doors of possibility. Each door is flung open to the world outside, and the room is filled with light and noise. We close some of the doors deliberately, sometimes with fear, sometimes with calm certainty. Others seem to close by themselves, some so quietly that we do not even notice.
Terry TeachoutI am a product of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic...In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. 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.
C. S. LewisThere 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.
Curt MegaThe underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us.
Barack ObamaThe underlying aim of practice . .is to create certainty through the development of high-quality listening.
Howard SnellAlmost 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.
Stephen ProtheroThere was the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.
Tim O'BrienIf you are seeking for security, certainty, your eyes will become closed. And you will be less and less surprised and you will lose the capacity to wonder. Once you lose the capacity to wonder, you have lost religion. Religion is the opening of your wondering heart. Religion is a receptivity for the mysterious that surrounds us. Don't seek security; don't seek advice on how to live your life.
Rajneesh