Certainty Quotes
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The sun meets not the springing bud that stretches towards him with half the certainty that God, the source of all good, communicates himself to the soul that longs to partake of him.
William Law -
Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.
Tom Stoppard
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... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.
William James -
What has once been settled by a precedent will not be unsettled overnight, for certainty and uniformity are gains not lightly sacrificed. Above all is this true when honest men have shaped their conduct on the faith of the pronouncement.
Benjamin Cardozo -
I know nothing but the certainty of my own ignorance.
Socrates -
We see it [the as-yet unseen, probable new planet, Neptune] as Columbus saw America from the coast of Spain. Its movements have been felt, trembling along the far-reaching line of our analysis with a certainty hardly inferior to that of ocular demonstration.
William Herschel -
In a world of moral certainty, the unthinkable becomes permissible.
Cullen Murphy -
I will repeat a technique until it is mastered, no matter when that will be. One certainty though: it will be.
Georges St-Pierre
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For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.
Vincent Van Gogh -
[Heraclitus had] a regal air of certainty.
Friedrich Nietzsche -
I can't say with certainty that slavery would have ended more quickly and more completely if the South had been allowed to leave and escaped former slaves had been allowed to remain free, and the North and the rest of the world had been a positive influence on the South. However, it's certainly a possibility that it would have ended sooner if the southern slave owners had agreed to a system of compensated emancipation and freed the slaves without a war and without secession, as most nations that ended slavery did. That absolutely would have been preferable to the Civil War as it happened.
David Swanson -
Nobody knows anything...... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one.
William Goldman -
When salvation is viewed as man's program, it is left up to man as to whether he will let God do this or that, but when it is viewed as God's program, there is a confidence and a certainty that no one whom God regenerates will be a carnal Christian.
Michael Horton -
Certainty is not to be had. But as we learn this we become not more moral but more resigned. We become nihilists.
Allen Wheelis
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Your imagination is ten times more potent than your willpower. Unleashed, it provides a sense of certainty and tenacious vision that goes far beyond any limitation of the past.
Anthony Robbins -
While we were never able to provide 100 percent certainty regarding the disposition of Iraq's proscribed weaponry, we did ascertain a 90-95 percent level of verified disarmament. This figure takes into account the destruction or dismantling of every major factory associated with prohibited weapons manufacture, all significant items of production equipment, and the majority of the weapons and agent produced by Iraq.
Scott Ritter -
Many persons entertain a prejudice against mathematical language, arising out of a confusion between the ideas of a mathematical science and an exact science. ...in reality, there is no such thing as an exact science.
William Stanley Jevons -
I don't know anything with certainty, but seeing the stars makes me dream.
Vincent Van Gogh -
My God, how badly one calculates in this world! ... Let us leave off calculating on anything but death -- it is the only certainty.
Eugenie de Guerin -
We demand of our political life greater certainty and greater perfection than we demand of our personal life.
Max Lerner
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We 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 Teachout -
Absolute certainty is a privilege of uneducated minds and fanatics. - It is, for scientific folk, an unattainable ideal.
Cassius Jackson Keyser -
In 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 Chah -
Be sure of the foundation of your life. Know why you live as you do. Be ready to give a reason for it. Do not, in such a matter as life, build an opinion or custom on what you guess is true. Make it a matter of certainty and science.
Thomas Starr King