Best 310 quotes in «certainty quotes» category

Do not be afraid of love or the course it will take. There is no certainty in life. Choose love first and choose love last and it will give you more than you ever give it.

Doubter wants proof which contributes nothing to her faith.

Every great dream, meet an opposing views. The certainty within our spirit made the dream reality.

Every judgment teeters on the brink of error,” Leto explained. “To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

Find everything you are certain about. With everything else, be certain that you are uncertain.

Fairy tales end happily ever after because children crave certainly and resolution; they need to know how things turn out. But if my experiences in the past three months have shown me anything, it's that I am comfortable living with more questions than answers. My own story will always be a work in progress.

Fanaticism can often be a normalized phenomenon, and the unwritten recipe suggests that it starts and ends with absolute certainty. If you are always certain about everything, you might just live in an echo chamber, or there might be a lack of ideological diversity among your sources and friends. Only, there is no size limit to this echo chamber as long as there is consensus: and the bigger the chamber the more solidified the fanaticism, and the more solidified the fanaticism the more the outlier will be seen the liar and the fanatic.

He was afraid of certainty.

For everyone nowadays knows, absolutely certain, that nothing will ever happen to me. Others die, I go on.

From whomsoever one hears anything, it is wisdom to understand the true import of it.

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

He who asserts belief with absolute certainty knows nothing of faith and makes himself into a fool. He who is wise, upon realizing they have done this, recants and searches themselves for further enlightenment.

Have you ever loved something so much that you never had to even think about whether you did or not? That's how I love him.

He did not want to be young again -- that time had had particular and transcendent horrors -- but the thought of being any older filled him with panic. He could not imagine finding tranquility of soul in old age; if he could only be allowed to mark time for a while all might yet be well, one might suddenly achieve equilibrium, certainty, serenity. There would still be possibilities. Hopes.

Hope is certainty of the desired want.

I am not certain whether I ever believed in the City of the Immortals; I think the task of finding it was enough for me.

How do you ever hold on to anybody?

I believe that we do not know anything for certain, but everything probably.

Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science — by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans — teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us.

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.

I don’t know whether there are numbers. And you?

If anyone doesn't agree with you, the truth is on your side.

If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics.

If the opposite of certainty is doubt, humility must lie somewhere between the two,

If there was no imperative, it was not love.

If they're friends, then they've got your back . . . whether you're there or not. Friends won't "forget" about you.

If you build the faith to trust a friend as God, then your heart can never be broken.

If you do not know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, then you don't know where you're going. And if you don't know where you're going, you're probably going wrong.

I imagine that the intelligent people are the ones so intelligent that they don't even need or want to look 'intelligent' anymore.

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

I know with unqualified certainty that I want to die. But I also know with equivalent certainty that I won't do anything about it. That I will only remain here and wait for death to indulge me.

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.

I'm a girl." When Deryn opened her eyes, the lady boffin was staring at her with no change of expression. "Indeed," she said. Deryn's mouth feel open. "You mean you...Did you barking know?" "I had no idea at all. But I make it a policy never to appear surprised." Dr. Barlow sighed, staring out the window. "Though on this occasion, it is proving rather more demanding than usual. A girl, you say? And you're quite certain?

I'm comfortable with the unknown -- that's the point of science. There are places out there, billions of places out there, that we know nothing about. And the fact that we know nothing about them excites me, and I want to go out and find out about them. And that's what science is. So I think if you’re not comfortable with the unknown, then it’s difficult to be a scientist… I don’t need an answer. I don’t need answers to everything. I want to have answers to find.

I mean that if you are not absolutely sure of a thing, it is so difficult to commit yourself to a definite course of action.

In a race between danger and indecision, the difference between life and death comes down to confidence. Faith in our abilities, certainty in ourselves and the trust we put in others.

In some cases, I am able to respect what so many call bigots. Such people have a more solid foundation for drawing their lines when it comes to the security of their ways and quite possibly the security of mankind. They rely on something that has worked to get man this far without placing ideals blindly driven by emotion first; they have a sure line and they say, 'No.' That, in a sense, is something I find to be highly respectable.

Insurance companies sell what might happen tomorrow. Historians sell what certainly happened yesterday.

In the Congress of the United States, Cromwell had known a good many men who were possessed of absolute certainty, and this he feared so much that he felt the only real and enduring evil on the face of the earth was unbending certainty, unshakable orthodoxy.

In the presence of Esch, values have hidden their faces. Order, loyalty, sacrifice—he cherishes all these words, but exactly what do they represent? Sacrifice for what? Demand what sort of order? He doesn't know. If a value has lost its concrete content, what is left of it? A mere empty form; an imperative that goes unheeded and, all the more furious, demands to be heard and obeyed. The less Esch knows what he wants, the more furiously he wants it. Esch: the fanaticism of the era with no God. Because all values have hidden their faces, anything can be considered a value. Justice, order—Esch seeks them now in the trade union struggle, then in religion; today in police power, tomorrow in the mirage of America, where he dreams of emigrating. He could be a terrorist or a repentant terrorist turning in his comrades, or a party militant or a cult member a kamikaze prepared to sacrifice his life. All the passions rampaging through the bloody history of our time are taken up, unmasked, and terrifyingly displayed in Esch's modest adventure.

I remember laughing at that moment, and I remember my son frowning at me in puzzlement. What I remember best of all, though, was the sudden certainty that the gods were with me, that they would fight for me, that my sword would be their sword. ‘We’re going to win,’ I told my son. I felt as if Odin or Thor had touched me. I had never felt more alive and never felt more certain. I knew there would be no more mistakes and that this was no dream. I had come to Bebbanburg and Bebbanburg would be mine.

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.

The compulsive quest for certainty, as we find with Luther, is not the expression of genuine faith but is rooted in the need to conquer the unbearable doubt. Luther's solution is one which we find present in many individuals today, who do not think in theological terms: namely to find certainty by elimination of the isolated individual self, by becoming an instrument in the hands of an overwhelmingly strong power outside of the individual. For Luther this power was God and in unqualified submission he sought certainty. But although he thus succeeded in silencing his doubts to some extent, they never really disappeared; up to his last day he had attacks of doubt which he had to conquer by renewed efforts toward submission.

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

It is better to explore a gainful uncertainty than to sit in a painful certainty.

It's okay to be honest about not knowing rather than spreading falsehood. While it is often said that honesty is the best policy, silence is the second best policy.

It's not vague,' Anna said. 'I'm certain of it. Just as when you're certain you did have a dream...you knew you dreamed...but you can't remember any of the details.

Looking up at the stars and smoking in silence.

Make an enemy of certainty and befriend doubt. When you can change your mind, you can change anything.

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.