Quotes About Certainty And Doubt

#1. God transcends and encompasses conservatism and liberalism, certainty and doubt, simplicity and complexity, Divinity and humanity, crucifixion and resurrection.

Amos Smith

#2. To be creative you must set aside both certainty and doubt.

Pearl Zhu

#3. For instantly, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away.

Augustine Of Hippo

#4. But we couldn't see to form a chain of doubt between each other's eyes. And her voice had a vibrant certainty that made believing her feel liberating and obvious.

Miranda July

#5. The most distinctive characteristic which differentiates mathematics from the various branches of empirical science, and which accounts for its fame as the queen of the sciences, is no doubt the peculiar certainty and necessity of its results.

Carl Gustav Hempel

#6. The problem with certainty is that it is static; it can do little but endlessly reassert itself. Uncertainty, by contrast, is full of unknowns, possibilities, and risks. (65)

Stephen Batchelor

#7. Certainty sees things in restrictive, protective, aggressive ways, and thus isn't seeing at all.

Jerry Saltz

#8. Male appreciation hardened his features from doubt to certainty. Boobs, the best negotiation strategy of them all. She thanked the Lord and her genetics for her great rack.

Kate Meader

#9. Faith, doubt, humility, and confidence - this is the stuff and substance of theology at its best. Swagger, smugness, and certainty - this is the stuff and substance of ideology at its worst.

Austin Fischer

#10. We proceed by doubt, by trial and error, by resisting the impulse to lunge after certainty.

William Deresiewicz

#11. Living by faith isn't living with certainty. It's trusting God in spite of unanswered questions and unresolved doubts.

Rick Warren

#12. There are two modes of knowledge: through argument and through experience. Argument brings conclusions and compels us to concede them, but it does not cause certainty nor remove doubts that the mind may rest in truth, unless this is provided by experience.

Roger Bacon

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

Kevin Ashton

#14. We must doubt the certainty of everything which passes through the senses, but how much more ought we to doubt things contrary to the senses, such as the existence of God and the soul.

Leonardo Da Vinci

#15. In fact, as I get older, I begin to feel that actually what we need more in the world is doubt; more skepticism, less crazed certainty ... People who know the answer and are going to impose it on everybody else, I think, are terrifying people.

Ian McEwan

#16. Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions.

Thomas Szasz

#17. All great discoveries ... are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents.

Mark Helprin

#18. Existential anxiety of doubt drives the person toward the creation of certitude of systems of meaning, which are supported by tradition and authority. Neurotic anxiety builds a narrow castle of certitude which can be defended with the utmost certainty.

Paul Tillich

#19. 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.

John Ortberg

#20. God, how I ricochet between certainties and doubts.

Sylvia Plath

#21. We don't live in a world that suffers from doubt, but one that suffers from certainty, false certainties that compensate for the well of worldly anxieties and worries.

Les Back

#22. All great discoveries," the elder Marratta had once said, "are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents." At

Mark Helprin

#23. The press and the public like certainty and affirmation of popular biases. But real science thrives on the capacity for doubt.

Wendy Kaminer

#24. There has to be certainty and there has to be clarity. There can't be ambiguity, .. This has to be certain, clear in all respects from all the parties so nobody is in any doubt about what the future holds.

Tony Blair

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. There is no permanence in doubt; it incites the mind to closer inquiry and experiment, from which, if rightly managed, certainty proceeds, and in this alone can man find thorough satisfaction.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#29. Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well.

Brian Eno

#30. I would say that without any doubt he's the killer - the law says beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty which I - there's no question that he was the killer of President Kennedy.

Henry Wade

#31. Both doubt and certainty are as contagious as the common cold

Kathryn Schulz

#32. Lieutenant Harry Kim was, without doubt, the most optimistic individual she had ever known. No matter how close the darkness came, his determination to overcome it and certainty that goodness would prevail was refreshing. Conlon

Kirsten Beyer

#33. Science is the outcome of being prepared to live without certainty and therefore a mark of maturity. It embraces doubt and loose ends.

A.C. Grayling

#34. I did not imitate the skeptics who doubt only for doubting's sake, and pretend to be always undecided; on the contrary, my whole intention was to arrive at a certainty, and to dig away the drift and the sand until I reached the rock or the clay beneath.

Rene Descartes

#35. Lord Jesus, we praise you for your victory over death and your grace. In our moments of doubt and worry, remind us of the certainty of the resurrection, until we see it with our own eyes. Amen.

Northwestern Publishing House

#36. I want to say to you: Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.

John Patrick Shanley

#37. Night fell, the first I had spent not embracing a rock, and perhaps for this reason it seemed cruelly shorter to me. The light tended at every moment to erase Ayl, to cast a doubt on her presence, but the darkness restored my certainty she was there.

Italo Calvino

#38. Knowledge breeds doubt, not certainty,
And the more we know the more uncertain we become.

A.J.P. Taylor

#39. I hoisted myself onto my elbows. "Yeah, well, if I ever come back as a Grigori, then I'll kick your ass."
"You'll come back, and you'll be a Grigori." He spoke with such certainty it made me smile. "I doubt very greatly, however, that you'll kick my ass. But me and my ass will enjoy your efforts.

Jessica Shirvington

#40. Whatever doubt might rise, he knew that he was right. But the rightness was an intellectual rightness and the doubt emotional.

Clifford D. Simak

#41. My creativity isn't rooted in confidence. It grows from many things, no doubt, but chief among them is a deep, rebellious, and indeed almost hostile stance toward complacency- about anything. It feels like the enemy. And certainty? It closes doors. Ends discussions. Shuts other people out.

Robin Black

#42. The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice.

Saul D. Alinsky

#43. 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 ...

Roger Bacon

#44. Bertrand Russell writes that the painful thing about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

Rollo May