Certainty Quotes

• If there is any one skill that every professional must learn, it is how to brand himself or herself in the marketplace. A brand provides certainty to customers and lets them know that what they`re getting is the best. People don`t like to make decisions. Once we decide, for example, the kind of toothpaste we prefer, rarely do we change. We have to make so many decisions every day in our lives that most of us are overwhelmed.

  

  Anthony Robbins
  • People
  • Kind
  • Decision

• 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
  • Difficult
  • Careful
  • Uncertainty

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

  

  William Deresiewicz
  • Impulse
  • Trial
  • Resisting

• Regarding this Dhamma, it is not something that we can simply talk about or take another's word for it. We need to develop meditation so that the understanding arises clearly within oneself. It is not the case that merely by listening to another's explanation our defilements will disappear. When we gain some understanding we need to chew on it again so that we see it for ourselves with certainty: paccattam.

  

  Ajahn Chah
  • Understanding
  • Listening
  • Meditation

• 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.

  

  Anthony Robbins
  • People
  • Need
  • Instinct

• Certainty is not to be had. But as we learn this we become not more moral but more resigned. We become nihilists.

  

  Allen Wheelis
  • Certainty
  • Resigned
  • Nihilists

• 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
  • Children
  • Persons
  • Strange

• We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified — how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don’t know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.

  

  Richard Feynman
  • World
  • Action
  • Purpose

• This is what it is to be human: to see the essential existential futility of all action, all striving -- and to act, to strive. This is what it is to be human: to reach forever beyond your grasp. This is what it is to be human: to live forever or die trying. This is what it is to be human: to perpetually ask the unanswerable questions, in the hope that the asking of them will somehow hasten the day when they will be answered. This is what it is to be human: to strive in the face of the certainty of failure. This is what it is to be human: to persist.

  

  Spider Robinson
  • Trying
  • Action
  • Forever

• 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
  • Life
  • Reason
  • Opinion

• For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.

  

  Vincent Van Gogh
  • Dream
  • Inspiration
  • Certainty

• 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
  • Past
  • Imagination
  • Vision

• 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.

  

  Anthony Robbins
  • Mind
  • Bored
  • Surprise

• 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
  • Lucky
  • Educated
  • Certainty

• My mother has always been the point I calibrated myself against. In knowing where she was, I could always locate myself, as well. These months she'd been gone, I felt like I'd been floating, loose and boundaryless, but now that I knew where she was, I kept waiting for a kind of certainty to kick in. It didn't. Instead, I was more unsure than ever, stuck between this new life and the one I'd left behind.

  

  Sarah Dessen
  • Mother
  • Waiting
  • Behinds

• Faith is a process of leaping into the abyss not on the basis of any certainty about where we shall land, but rather on the belief that we shall land.

  

  Carter Heyward
  • Faith
  • Belief
  • Certainty

• Certainty is a closing of the mind. To create something new you must have doubt.

  

  Milton Glaser
  • Something
  • Certainty
  • Closing

• One of the most basic and pervasive social processes is the sorting and labeling of things, activities, and people... Sorting and labeling processes involve a trade-off of costs and benefits. In general, the more finely the sorting is done, the greater the benefits - and the costs... Sorting and labeling, whether of people or of things, is a sorting and labeling of probabilities rather than of certainties.

  

  Thomas Sowell
  • Process
  • Social
  • Trade

• Businesses need certainty, to see clearly the rules of engagement for investing in South Africa.

  

  Nicky Oppenheimer
  • Businesses
  • Certainty
  • Investing

• Self-development is the only thing that keeps a person from burning out. We all have many needs - the need for certainty, the need for variety, the need for significance, and the need for connection. But, ultimately, we must grow, and we must contribute in a meaningful way in order to feel fulfilled.

  

  Anthony Robbins
  • Meaningful
  • Variety
  • Significance

• If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives.

  

  Richard Feynman
  • Science
  • Opportunity
  • Progress

• In its efforts to learn as much as possible about nature, modern physics has found that certain things can never be "known" with certainty. Much of our knowledge must always remain uncertain. The most we can know is in terms of probabilities.

  

  Richard Feynman
  • Effort
  • Certain
  • Term

• 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
  • Reality
  • Language
  • Logic

• Know for a certainty that if men understood how terrible is even one solitary sin, they would rather be cast into a heated furnace, and there remain, living both in soul and body, than to support such a sight. And if the sea were all fire they would cast themselves therein and never leave it, if they were certain of meeting the sin on doing so.

  

  Catherine of Genoa
  • Soul
  • Support
  • Suffering

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