Certainty Quotes
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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
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Certainty is a closing of the mind. To create something new you must have doubt.
Milton Glaser
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Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty -- some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.
Richard Feynman
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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
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The only time a dead certainty applies is in a dream world.
Tommy Franks
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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
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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
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Businesses need certainty, to see clearly the rules of engagement for investing in South Africa.
Nicky Oppenheimer
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things... It doesn't frighten me.
Richard Feynman
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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
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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
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Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
Will Durant
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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