Certainty Quotes

• 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
  • Past
  • Hurt
  • Doubt

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

  

  Milton Glaser
  • Something
  • Certainty
  • Closing

• 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
  • Doubt
  • Fame
  • Mathematics

• 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.

  

  Anthony Robbins
  • Fear
  • Body
  • Certainty

• 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

• I think I developed a culture of healthy skepticism of claims of certainty on any side of the aisle. A sort of boldness in using economics no matter where it leads you in political circles, you know, rather than worrying about being left-wing or right-wing or biased or this or that.

  

  David Plotz
  • Thinking
  • Political
  • Worry

• Some people get certainty by working harder and saying I'm going to master something. Some people get certainty by lowering their expectations, going 'it will never work. And they lose their dreams, but they get their needs. The needs are not like goals. They're not like belief systems that are built into you.

  

  Anthony Robbins
  • People
  • Dream
  • Goal

• I have moved from certainty to doubt, from devotion to rebellion.

  

  Phil Donahue
  • Doubt
  • Moved
  • Certainty

• We demand of our political life greater certainty and greater perfection than we demand of our personal life.

  

  Max Lerner
  • Political
  • Perfection
  • Politician

• A writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine.

  

  Virginia Woolf
  • Giving
  • Water
  • Wine

• 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

• And when I hear it said that God is good and He will pardon us, and then see that men cease not from evil-doing, oh, how it grieves me! The infinite goodness with which God communicates with us, sinners as we are, should constantly make us love and serve Him better; but we, on the contrary, instead of seeing in his goodness an obligation to please Him, convert it into an excuse for sin which will of a certainty lead in the end to our deeper condemnation.

  

  Catherine of Genoa
  • Sin
  • Goodness
  • Excuse

• Time again for the waltz of smiles. Amazing how you sometimes make resolutions, tell yourself everything will be a certain way from now on, and then all it takes is a tiny movement of the lips to shatter your confidence in a certainty that seemed eternal.

  

  David Foenkinos
  • Sometimes
  • Movement
  • Resolution

• To be human : to strive in the face of the certainty of failure.

  

  Spider Robinson
  • Faces
  • Strive
  • Certainty

• If you are driven by certainty you can't grow. If you are driven by certainty if somebody messes with you, you can get very intense, even violent, depending upon the person's personality.

  

  Anthony Robbins
  • Personality
  • Intense
  • Certainty

• Faith to me is having absolute certainty that God is in control of my life and that He has my best interests at heart.

  

  Dan Ellis
  • Life
  • God
  • Control

• One must treat theory-in-use as both a psychological certainty and an intellectual hypothesis.

  

  Chris Argyris
  • Theory
  • Intellectual
  • Psychological

• If you see certainty in that which is uncertain, you are bound to suffer

  

  Ajahn Chah
  • Suffering
  • Bounds
  • Uncertain

• Do not expect to arrive at certainty in every subject which you pursue. There are a hundred things wherein we mortals. . . must be content with probability, where our best light and reasoning will reach no farther.

  

  Isaac Watts
  • Light
  • Subjects
  • Pursue

• The intellectual who no longer feels attached to anything is not satisfied with opinion merely; he wants certainty, he wants a system. The revolution provides him with his opium.

  

  Raymond Aron
  • Revolution
  • Intellectual
  • Satisfied

• You do not mean by mystery what a Catholic does. You mean an interesting uncertainty: the uncertainty ceasing interest ceases also.... But a Catholic by mystery means an incomprehensible certainty: without certainty, without formulation there is no interest;... the clearer the formulation the greater the interest.

  

  Gerard Manley Hopkins
  • Interesting
  • Mean
  • Catholic

• I think that feeling that if one believed absolutely in any cause, then one must have the confidence, the self-certainty, to go through with that particular course of action.

  

  Wole Soyinka
  • Action
  • Confidence
  • Feelings

• We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and 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.

  

  Richard Feynman
  • People
  • Doubt
  • Progress

• Everything had been based on a kind of certainty, a sense of man at the center of things, a sense of order and hierarchy. And suddenly, almost simultaneously, extraordinary discoveries are made.

  

  Stephen Fry
  • Men
  • Kind
  • Certainty

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