Quotes About Certainty

#1. Certainty is the culprit. The spiritual person knows uncertainty - a state of mind unknown to the religious fanatic.

Anthony De Mello

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

John Goodlad

#3. Can success change the human mechanism so completely between one dawn and another? Can if make one feel taller, more alive, handsomer, uncommonly gifted and indomitably secure with the certainty that this is the way life will always be? It can and it does!

Moss Hart

#4. The statistics of life out there and the statistics of intelligent beings and advanced civilization is a certainty, the way I look at it. that It has not been accepted, because we've been in an anthropocentric era.

Story Musgrave

#5. I don't know where you'll find her, or what mindset she'll have, but I know one thing with unwavering certainty - that girl loves you like no woman has ever loved a man in the history of the world. She called you her heart. And I believed her.

Jewel E. Ann

#6. The only certainty we have is that those who are certain of a way to arrive at worldly salvation, are committed enough to organize around this, and seek power to enforce it, will invariably descend into a bloody totalitarian fascism.

Maajid Nawaz

#7. I'm opposed to censure, .. Whether or not one will be permitted, it's under discussion. It isn't ruled out, but it's not a dead-bang certainty either.

Henry Hyde

#8. 'Faith' and 'trust' are words that put the power in the hands of an outside force that we are meant to rely on - whether it is God or a person or the universe. Certainty puts the power back in our hands.

Yehuda Berg

#9. A bird in hand is a certainty. But a bird in the bush may sing.

Bret Harte

#10. 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.

Bertrand Russell

#11. Sometimes the most valuable of all talents is to be able not to seek resolution; to notice the craving for completeness or certainty or comfort, and not to feel compelled to follow where it leads.

Oliver Burkeman

#12. From the house of unbelief
to true religion
is a single breath;
From the world of doubt
to certainty
is a single breath;
Enjoy this precious single breath,
for the harvest
of our whole lives
is that same one breath.

Omar Khayyam

#13. To abandon language is to stop/creating a place other than your own life/in which to live. It is to enter/the terrible certainty of the flesh. Even god/is only possible through language.

Jude Nutter

#14. Where the quest for knowledge is relatively, and now almost absolutely, unrestrained, the public benefit will be great, especially where the certainty of the law ensures that knowledge is rewarded. This is exactly the combination that is the foundation of wealth-creation.

Paul Johnson

#15. Moral certainty, clear standards, and a commitment to spiritual ideals will set you apart in a world that searches for meaning.

Mitt Romney

#16. I have devoted my life to uncertainty. Certainty is the death of wisdom, thought, creativity.

Shekhar Kapur

#17.
,all our lives we postpone everything that can be postponed; perhaps we all have the certainty, deep inside, that we are immortal and sooner or later every man will do everything, know all there is to know.

Jorge Luis Borges

#18. An aphorism is an extreme synthesis of thesis and antithesis, theory and practice, it's a mixture of intuition and observation, hypothesis and illusions of certainty and probability, history and stupidity.

William C. Brown

#19. Until it had been clearly explained that men were always and always partly wrong in all their ideas, life would be full of poison and secret bitterness. Men fight about their philosophies and religions, there is no certainty in them; but their contempt for women is flawless and unanimous.

Dorothy Richardson

#20. 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

#21. Badger had been waiting with ever increasing certainty for that brown, government stamped envelope, to hit the floor with the impact of several atomic bombs; the shockwaves hitting him before the sound could penetrate his ears.

Paul Howsley

#22. There are few things reason can discover with so much certainty and ease as its own insufficiency.

Jeremy Collier

#23. Statistically it's a certainty there are hugely advanced civilizations, intelligences, life forms out there. I believe they're so advanced they're even doing interstellar travel. I believe it's possible they even came here.

Story Musgrave

#24. Most people and most organizations can't stand the uncertainty and the risk of real innovation. Learning and creating are inherently vulnerable. There's never enough certainty. People want guarantees.

Brene Brown

#25. If you want to save capitalism there is only one type of argument that you should adopt, the only one that has ever won in any moral issue: the argument from self-esteem. Check your premises, convince yourself of the rightness of your cause, then fight for capitalism with full, moral certainty.

Ayn Rand

#26. Not only can no one predict the future, we don't understand the present - and there isn't even any certainty about the past.

Harry Browne

#27. Maybe the goal in America is to have an easy life, and so we find it too disgraceful to tell the truth. I meet a lot of people in my line of work, and I can say with utmost certainty
life is pretty hard for almost all of them.

Matthew Quick

#28. The certainty about the uncertain (in view to life) is that it will remain uncertain till the time its certain.

Mayank Sharma

#29. The hope we have in Christ is an absolute certainty. We can be sure that the place Christ is preparing for us will be ready when we arrive, because with Him nothing is left to chance. Everything He promised He will deliver.

Billy Graham

#30. We are often less grieved at disappointments than at ourselves for having said much concerning the certainty of our expectations.

Norm MacDonald

#31. There was so calm, so natural, so total a certainty in the sound of her voice that the mere sound seemed to carry an immense persuasiveness.

Ayn Rand

#32. [Heraclitus had] the highest form of pride [stemming] from a certainty of belief in the truth as grasped by himself alone. He brings this form, by its excessive development, into a sublime pathos by involuntary identification of himself with his truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#33. But there is something delusional nonetheless in his optimistic certainty that human beings will wish to choose altruistic values without invoking transcendent principles. They may do so; but they may also wish to build death camps, and may very well choose to do that instead. For

David Bentley Hart

#34. To tell you the truth, the older I get, the less I know. I keep meeting people, both older and younger, who seem to have accrued so much more knowledge or expertise or certainty about who they are and the jobs they do. I just marvel at it.

Hugh Laurie

#35. I distrust those people who knew so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. Susan D. Anthony

John Ortberg

#36. People always tell me with absolute certainty that they don't trust themselves.

Richard Bandler

#37. Science is not the affirmation of a set of beliefs but a process of inquiry aimed at building a testable body of knowledge constantly open to rejection or confirmation. In science, knowledge is fluid and certainty fleeting. That is at the heart of its limitations. It is also its greatest strength.

Michael Shermer

#38. But was it worth anything?
That's the hopelessness of it. The openness of it. The part of it I can never understand.
I am afraid of ambiguity and certainity and permanence and impermanence.
And so is everybody else.

Katherine Ewell

#39. Safety and certainty in oil lie in variety, and variety alone.

Winston Churchill

#40. The only thing that anyone can diagnose, with any certainty, by looking at a fat person, is their own level of stereotype and prejudice toward fat people.

Marilyn Wann

#41. If there is anything more frightening than the threat of global nuclear war, it is the certainty that humans not only stand on the verge of producing new life forms but may soon be able to tinker with them as if they were vintage convertibles or bonsai trees.

Michael Specter

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

Rudyard Kipling

#43. Absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error ...

Carl Sagan

#44. We must content ourselves with the mystery, the absurdity, the contradictions, the hostility, but also the generosity that our environment offers us. It's not much, but it's always better than the deadly, defeatist certainty of the paranoid.

Philip K. Dick

#45. If we get total certainty, we get ... bored out of our minds. So, God, in Her infinite wisdom, gave us a second human need, which is uncertainty. We need variety. We need surprise.

Tony Robbins

#46. Faith cannot be about absolute certainty in the letters of the Bible and wrath against those who don't comply (Ephesians 2:15). It has to be about overwhelming trust in God's love,6 which as the apostle Paul confirms, is beyond the letter of law and narrow legalistic interpretations.

Amos Smith

#47. 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.

John McCain

#48. Certainty shuts down possibilities and keeps us small.

L.R.W. Lee

#49. As far as miracles are concerned, I'm not aware that I perform miracles. After many years and lifetimes of meditation, I am able to use the kundalini energy to alter other people's awareness and aid them in their search for light and certainty.

Frederick Lenz

#50. 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.

Johann Bernoulli

#51. They weren't looking at him as if he was their only hope. They were looking at him as if he was their Certainty.

Terry Pratchett

#52. I count it as a certainty that in paradise, everyone naps.

Tom Hodgkinson

#53. The past would haunt when the present let up, and always, always the future would loom with its certainty of tragedy and pain.

Erika Robuck

#54. when the uncertainty is known, certainty is guaranteed. Until we unravel the uncertainties of our lives, we shall always be uncertain with the life we live

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#55. But minds are not to be trusted. Minds are always drifting toward ambiguity, toward questions, when what you really need is certainty. Purpose. Clarity. Do not trust your minds.

Anthony Doerr

#56. To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.

John Stuart Mill

#57. We are creatures of loss; we have left everything behind. I have no home, no path, and no certainty. I am no longer Tris, the selfless, or Tris, the brave. I suppose now, I must become more than either.

Veronica Roth

#58. At sixteen, he was cursed with all the certainty of youth, unleavened by any trace of humor or self-doubt, and wed to the arrogance that came so naturally to those born blond and strong and handsome.

George R R Martin

#59. When prayer removes distrust and doubt and enters the field of mental certainty, it becomes faith; and the universe is built on faith.

Ernest Holmes

#60. I wonder if you're fast as they say," Bessie Weasel chirruped, her hand slowly straying toward the belt.
"Wondering is free," Cinnabar said finally, his voice soft and low. "Certainty has its price".

Daniel Polansky

#61. Feed and strengthen your body. Fear is physical. When you lift weights or go for a sprint, that energy flows back into your body and restores you to certainty.

Tony Robbins

#62. His quiet certainty made the ground beneath my feet feel solid. Like someday everything might actually be okay.

Lisa Kleypas

#63. Sheldon Van Auken wrote,"The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness." Guess what he said is the best argument against it? "When Christians are sombre, joyless, self-righteous, smug, narrow, repressive - Christianity dies a thousand deaths.

John Ortberg

#64. The only principle I'm prepared to absolutely commit to, with absolute certainty, is that I can change my mind.

Alan Richardson

#65. This kind of certainty comes but just once in a lifetime!

Robert James Waller

#66. We can say with certainty - or 90% probability - that the new industries that are about to be born will have nothing to do with information.

Peter Drucker

#67. 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.

Susan Davis

#68. Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

Charles Darwin

#69. He dropped his head and kissed her. He kisses her and it was a kiss of utter certainty, the kind of kiss during which monarchs die and whole continents fall without your even noticing.

Jojo Moyes

#70. to follow God does not often mean traveling with certainty about where God will lead us. Rather, following God propels us to be present to the place where we are, for this is the very place where God shows up.

Jan L. Richardson

#71. In a time lacking in truth and certainty and filled with anguish and despair, no woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart.

Louise Bogan

#72. 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.

Agatha Christie

#73. There is a big difference between wanting to say you wrote a book, and actually writing one. Many people think they want to write, even though they find crafting sentences and paragraphs unpleasant. They hope there is a way to write without writing. I can tell you with certainty there isn't one.

Scott Berkun

#74. Learning emerges from discovery, not directives; reflection, not rules; possibilities, not prescriptions; diversity, not dogma; creativity and curiosity, not conformity and certainty; and meaning, not mandates.

Stephanie Pace Marshall

#75. I have found that the platonic affection
in friendships and familial
love for children can be relied upon
with certainty to lift the bruised soul
and repair the wounded spirit

Maya Angelou

#76. Her ambitions were no longer specifically for happiness or financial security or freedom from disease (thought they included all three), but for something more general: the continuing certainty of things. She needed to know that she would carry on being herself.

Julian Barnes

#77. One certainty when you travel is the moment you arrive in a foreign country, the American dollar will fall like a stone.

Erma Bombeck

#78. certainty makes you beautiful and uncertainty makes you dutiful.

Rajesh Walecha

#79. In our instinctive attachments, our fear of change, and our wish for certainty and permanence, we may undercut the impermanence which is our greatest strength, our most fundamental identity. Without impermanence, there is no process. The nature of life is change. All hope is based on process.

Rachel Naomi Remen

#80. The brain builds a version of the universe and projects this version of the universe like a bubble all around us. So I can say with some certainty, 'I think therefore I am.' But I cannot say, 'You think therefore you are,' because you are within my perceptual bubble.

Henry Markram

#81. Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change

Bruce Dickinson

#82. The present is the only reality and the only certainty.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#83. Things happen, and nothing is for sure, but you just have to keep going, believing that one day, you'll find something that is.

A.J. Darkholme

#84. There is no such thing as permanence at all. Everything is constantly changing. Everything is in a flux. Because you cannot face the impermanence of all relationships, you invent sentiments, romance, and dramatic emotions to give them certainty. Therefore you are always in conflict.

U.G. Krishnamurti

#85. The quest for absolute certainty is an immature, if not infantile, trait of thinking.

Herbert Feigl

#86. Pride lives on the defensive against anyone and anything that tries to subtract from its self-sustained worth. Confidence, on the other hand, is driven by the certainty of God-given identity and the conviction that nothing can take that identity away.

Beth Moore

#87. I think Shehnaz was right. In the end it wasn't about the Poet, or me or anyone. It was about a minute, five minutes, ten minutes in which she believed, with utter certainty, that she simply could not endure any more.' It seemed impossible, already, to have denied this truth for so long.

Kamila Shamsie

#88. Gansey was using his Mr. Gansey professorial voice, the one that exuded certainty and commanded rats and small children to get up, get up, follow me!

Maggie Stiefvater

#89. In what concerns divine things, belief is not appropriate. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God.

Simone Weil

#90. To the extent that in one's act of faith one participates in the truth through reason and heart, faith already implies a particular level of knowledge and of certainty.

Osman Bakar

#91. To have reservations is to show true leadership. To have certainty without question, to lead people to battle with no qualms, or to prosecute without hesitation are qualities of a tyrant.

Laura Kreitzer

#92. Certainty ends inquiry.

Jacob Bronowski

#93. I found myself doing this same thing - playing a role of having greater certainty and greater competence than I really possess. I can't tell you how disgusted with myself I felt as I realized what I was doing: I was not being me, I was playing a part.

Carl R. Rogers

#94. The things of another world being distant, operate but faintly upon us: to remedy this inconvenience, we must frequently revolve their certainty and importance.

Francis Atterbury

#95. It's all a risk. Always. That's not true, actually. The only exception: it's a certainty that there's risk. The safer you play your plans for the future, the riskier it actually is. That's because the world is certainly, definitely, and more than possibly changing.

Seth Godin

#96. Of a certainty Madame has died," Leonie said wickedly. "Tiens, c'est bien drole!

Georgette Heyer

#97. There's only one certainty in life: how you come into the world. Where you go from there is up to you.

Katie Kacvinsky

#98. I'm afraid of an extra face
in the mirror and sudden
nights with voices, the deep
certainty of things.
(from Parca)

Salvador Espriu

#99. The Palestinians are the only nation in the world that feels with certainty that today is better than what the days ahead will hold. Tomorrow always heralds a worse situation.

Mahmoud Darwish

#100. People have a need for certainty - and that need for certainty is in every human being, certainty that you can avoid pain, certainty that you can at least be comfortable. It's a survival instinct.

Tony Robbins