Top 100 Quotes About Certainties
#1. The point here is ... to be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
David Foster Wallace
#2. if philosophy develops in the right ways, it might help ease the conflicts between rival dogmatic certainties. But, even if this hope is right, philosophy will never be a quick fix. Its influence is slow, the result of patient questioning and discussion.
Jonathan Glover
#3. I'm going to end a life that I thought could contain every kind of greatness but that in fact consisted only of my incapacity to really want to be great. Whenever I arrived at a certainty, I remembered that those with the greatest certainties are lunatics.
Fernando Pessoa
#4. But I understand your doubts. They're what make you a great man, not your certainties.
Louise Penny
#5. What if the choice isn't between certainties, between this faith and that, but between faith and doubt? Between renouncing the mystery and embracing it?
R. Scott Bakker
#6. Deep down, most humans prefer living out their lives surrounded by comfortable certainties, guided by warm myths and metaphors, knowing that they'll understand their children, and their children will understand them.
David Brin
#7. All predictions are wrong, that's one of the few certainties granted to mankind.
Milan Kundera
#8. Men wanted certainties, not more causes for doubt, and since the discoveries of science perplexed them with strange theories about the earth on which they walked and the bodies they inhabited, they turned with all the more zeal to the firm assurances of religion. Never
C. V. Wedgewood
#9. Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.
Paul Auster
#10. Jealousy is bred in doubts. When those doubts change into certainties, then the passion either ceases or turns absolute madness.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#11. I pray for bravery and guts, for honesty and discernment. I know you have a lot to lose - we all do when we lay down our certainties and our black-and-white thinking.
Sarah Bessey
#12. Doubting things go ill often hurts more
Than to be sure they do; for certainties
Either are past remedies, or, timely knowing,
The remedy then born.
William Shakespeare
#13. Our best built certainties are but sand-houses and subject to damage from any wind of doubt that blows
Mark Twain
#14. Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul when hot for certainties in this our life!
George Meredith
#15. All of us carry around countless bags of dusty old knickknacks dated from childhood: collected resentments, long list of wounds of greater or lesser significance, glorified memories, absolute certainties that later turn out to be wrong. Humans are emotional pack rats. These bags define us.
Marya Hornbacher
#16. For me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle.
Pico Iyer
#17. God's heart calls to our hearts, inviting us to come out of ourselves, to forsake our human certainties, to trust in him and, by following his example, to make ourselves a gift of unbounded love.
Pope Benedict XVI
#18. I dedicate this novel to Gala, who was constantly by my side while I was writing it, who was the good fairy of my equilibrium, who banished the salamanders of my doubts and strengthened the lions of certainties ...
Salvador Dali
#19. The idea that the law should punish what is rude; that government should protect our tender sensibilities from those who would - quite often with shallow motivations but sometimes with deeper and more serious complaints - challenge our national certainties and rituals, should alarm and anger us.
Nick Harkaway
#20. You have to run risks. There are no certainties in war. There is a precipice on either side of you - a precipice of caution and a precipice of over-daring.
Winston Churchill
#21. Without question it may be said of Vancouver that her position, geographically, is Imperial to a degree, that her possibilities are enormous, and that with but a feeble stretch of the imagination those possibilities might wisely be deemed certainties.
Homer
#22. The emotionally mature individual should completely accept the fact that we live in a world of probability and chance, where there are not, nor probably ever will be, any absolute certainties, and should realize that it is not at all horrible, indeed - such a probabilistic, uncertain world.
Albert Ellis
#23. Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they're never really certainties.
Murray Gell-Mann
#24. We want to have certainties and no doubts
results and no experiments
without even seeing that certainties can arise only through doubt and results only through experiment.
C. G. Jung
#25. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.
Milan Kundera
#26. A barrell full of certainties won't roll very far.
Gerd De Ley
#27. So they stood upon the shores of Faith and felt the old dogmas and certainties ebbing away rapidly under their feet and between their toes, sapping the foundations upon which they stood, a sensation both agreeably stilmulating and sightly unnerving
David Lodge
#28. I realized that there are no certainties in life. You can't manipulate fate.
Bethenny Frankel
#29. 'The Company You Keep' is about outgrowing not just the delusions that accompany youth but the harsh certainties driving our lives and then trapping them before the years outpace the velocity of our dreams.
Steve Erickson
#30. The melancholy comes over me, the dismal misery of not knowing where I am, or perhaps losing any sense of who I am, as if the mist is bringing about an evaporation of identity, all the certainties of the self leaching away into the cloud.
Simon Armitage
#31. In the ideal State laws are few and simple, because they have been derived from certainties. In the corrupt State laws are many and confused, because they have been derived from uncertainties.
Solon
#32. Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
Erich Fromm
#33. All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgements of probabilities, and not on certainties.
Charles William Eliot
#34. Oversimplified moral certainties - always requiring hostility, always potentially violent - isolate us from mercy, pity, peace, and love and leave us lonely and dangerous.
Wendell Berry
#35. Genes work with probabilities; they don't work with certainties. So most things that you're looking at with these genetic tests, it's not like you're condemned to automatically get the disease or the syndrome. There's a lot of factors in play there.
Sam Kean
#36. There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is impossible.
Jack Vance
#37. Given the ease with which health infuses life with meaning and purpose, it is shocking how swiftly illness steals away those certainties ... Time unused and only endured still vanishes, as if time itself is starving, and each day is swallowed whole, leaving no crumbs, no memory, no trace at all.
Elisabeth Tova Bailey
#38. Marie Houzelle is a master of the first-person narrative. In Tita she has created a strange, utterly original child whose deadpan certainties are a beguiling invitation to readers of all ages.
Katharine Weber
#39. The only certainties in life are "time" and "change." The question you must ask yourself: is now the time to change?
Doug Pedersen
#40. If I've learned anything, it's really just to stop trying to find answers and certainties.
Emma Watson
#41. Because I don't understand Him. Why He is, who He is, or how He is. And Maurice tells me I am quite intelligent. I think God must be very intelligent to be so much more intelligent than I am. To give me no clues. No certainties. No sights. No reasons. No motives.
John Fowles
#42. It was like the time he'd failed algebra and felt so relieved, so free: failure was definite, a certainty, and there is always peace in certainties.
Truman Capote
#43. Religion deals in certainties and philosophy deals more in un-answered questions.
Steve Hackett
#44. I can't keep from fooling around with our irrefutable certainties. It is, for example, a pleasure knowingly to mix up two and three dimensionalities, flat and spatial, and to make fun of gravity.
M.C. Escher
#45. Rene Descartes, in order to raise skeptical doubts about even our firmest certainties, imagined that we might he under the influence of an evil demon, and more modern philosophers have speculated about the possibility of our being brains in vats.
Victor Reppert
#46. Few things look as unstable as the rock-solid certainties of previous ages.
Geoff Nicholson
#47. The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.
Christopher Hitchens
#48. People, chained by monotony, afraid to think, clinging to certainties ... they live like ants.
Bela Lugosi
#49. He seemed so certain of everything, didn't he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman's head. He couldn't even be sure he was alive because he was living like a dead man.
Albert Camus
#50. Men simplify the world with words and thoughts, and that's how they create their certainties; and having certainty is the most potent pleasure in this world, far more potent than money, sex, and power all combined. Renouncing
Martin Page
#51. A great literature is chiefly the product of inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation
H.L. Mencken
#52. And in life, at least her new life, chances were the best she could hope for. They were like her rocks. Imperfect and surprising and maybe better in the long run than certainties. Chances, she thought, WERE life.
Veronica Rossi
#53. Unattached and aimless, these old men are always infatuated with little certainties and regularities such as those that ordered the life of Mr. Krupper as seen from outside. Habit is living. Anything unexpected reminds them of death.
("Hard Candy")
Tennessee Williams
#54. I think this lack of a center has something to do with the loss of certainties that Christianity had to offer.
Bridget Riley
#55. You can't fundamentally change a person, and some actions are certainties, doomed to be repeated. If fate exists, then it pertains only to people. The fact that we are stubborn is often our undoing.
Ryan Daff
#56. One thing we knew for certain- despite all our certainties, it was very difficult to guess what one individual was thinking at any given moment.
Joshua Ferris
#57. I am writing because sometimes we are closer to the truth in our vulnerability than in our safe certainties,
Rachel Held Evans
#58. our world has a growing need for people trained in profound degrees of doubt, more so than for people skilled at handling certainties.
Nilton Bonder
#59. Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties.
Gail Sheehy
#60. The British Museum was founded with a civic purpose: to allow the citizen, through reasoned inquiry and comparison, to resist the certainties that endanger free society and are still among the greatest threats to our liberty.
Neil MacGregor
#61. But that's Islam in the third millennium: they want the certainties of seventh-century society with the conveniences of the twenty-first century.
Mark Steyn
#62. The world now has a new kind of hero, one who listens more than speaks, who preaches in riddles not in certainties, a leader who doesn't show his face, who says his mask is really a mirror. And in the Zapatistas, we have not one dream of a revolution, but a dreaming revolution.
Naomi Klein
#63. Maybe that's what is means to be human ... forever questioning our certainties.
Kay Hooper
#64. I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.
Simone De Beauvoir
#65. The Public ... demands certainties ... But there are not certainties
H.L. Mencken
#66. I am not a mathematician, but I was aware that for centuries, mathematics was considered the queen of the sciences because it claimed certainty. It was grounded on some fundamental certainties - axioms - that led to others.
Tom Stoppard
#67. Revolutions usually begin as replacements for older certainties, and not as pristine discoveries in uncharted terrain.
Stephen Jay Gould
#68. The thing the Buddhists and the Sufis have in common is a belief that religious certainties are destructive.
Luke Rhinehart
#69. Death and taxes are the only two certainties in life, as Mark Twain once said. Or was it Benjamin Franklin?
Stephen Leather
#70. Fundamentalists believe that we don't believe in anything. In their view of the world, they are in possession of absolute certainties, while we are descending into decadence. We will be able to triumph over terrorism not by waging war on it, but through a conscious, fearless way of life.
Salman Rushdie
#71. Never be absolutely certain that either those claiming to be the terrorists, ot those accused of committing an act of terrorism, were the perpetrators.
The only absolute certainties are forever victims.
Richard Bunning
#72. Perhaps this was part of growing older, to undergo hideous alterations in the deepest certainties, in love, in lovers, finally in one's self.
Elizabeth Harrower
#73. Those who rely on certainties are certain to be disappointed
R.A. Salvatore
#74. Valued. Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities. Right
Hanya Yanagihara
#75. The core of science is not a mathematical modeling
it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.
Sam Harris
#76. The whole social structure is now tumbling down, dethroning its God, undermining all its certainties. All this, wonderfully enough, is being done in the name of the health, wealth, and happiness of all mankind.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#77. It is not that there are no certainties, it is that it is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties.
Christopher Hitchens
#78. Truth was sometimes not the same as reality - this was one of the certainties that lived in the hollow, cavey place at the center of his divided nature.
Stephen King
#80. Phases of the creative process: Preparation-gathering impressions Incubation-letting go of certainties Immersion/Illumination-creative intervention/risk Revision-conscious structuring and editing of creative material.
Gail Sheehy
#81. Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing absurdity.
Vaclav Havel
#82. When I was learning by myself, despite my parents, despite my teachers, despite society, when I was fighting for building my life as a young wire walker at age 16, I didn't have feelings, I had certainties.
Philippe Petit
#83. The certainties of one age are the problems of the next.
R. H. Tawney
#84. Perspective gets lost in moral certainties. Which only means that no one was ever burned at the stake by a doubter.
Thomas H. Cook
#85. The only certainties in life are death and taxes.
Mark Twain
#86. Sometimes, the stars line up, the gods smile, and love gets a fighting chance. Just a chance. That's all it can really hope for. No guarantees, no certainties
Tess Gerritsen
#87. I want to speak, show, see, and hear outrageously astute questions and comments. I want to be on the sides of pleasure and laughter and to disrupt the dour certainties of pictures, property, and power.
Barbara Kruger
#89. We have in fact only two certainties in this world - that we are not everything and that we will die.
Georges Bataille
#90. We do naught but scratch the world, frail and fraught. Every vast drama of civilizations, of peoples with their certainties and gestures, means nothing, affects nothing. Life crawls on, ever on.
Steven Erikson
#91. Love," he said, "is always a risk, isn't it? I've always thought that there were no certainties in life, but I was wrong. Love is a certainty. And love always gives more than it takes.
Patricia Briggs
#92. It took me less than half a lifetime to realize that regret is one of the few guaranteed certainties. Sooner or later everything is touched by it, despite our naive and senseless hope that just this time we will be spared its cold hand on our heart.
Jonathan Carroll
#93. There are three certainties in a writer's life: death, taxes, and rejection letters.
T.L. Rese
#94. One of the few certainties in life is that persons of certainty should certainly be avoided.
Willy Russell
#95. For doing so, and who prefer certainties to doubts. Join with those who are open and not afraid to be vulnerable: they understand that people can only improve once they start looking at what their fellows are doing, not in order to judge them, but to admire them for their dedication and courage.
Paulo Coelho
#96. What hurts so bad about youth isn't the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It's the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.
Mary Karr
#97. Between history and the eternal I have chosen history because I like certainties. Of it, at least, I am certain, and how can I deny this force crushing me.
Albert Camus
#98. That which is true must always remain true, though the applications may change greatly from generation to generation. It is the absence of such fundamental certainties, no doubt, that leads men into continual search for a satisfying religion, or that drives them away from their old religion.
John Andreas Widtsoe
#99. Inside the word "emergency" is "emerge"; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.
Rebecca Solnit
#100. Malice, in its false witness, promotes its tale with so cunning a confusion, so mingles truths with falsehoods, surmises with certainties, causes of no moment with matters capital, that the accused can absolutely neither grant nor deny, plead innocen.
Philip Sidney
