Quotes
Quotes about Certainty
Such sober certainty of waking bliss.
The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, that smiles in yer face while it picks yer pocket; and the glorious uncertainty of it is of mair use to the professors than the justice of it.
He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.
Fireside happiness, to hours of ease
Blest with that charm, the certainty to please.
What a chimera, then, is man! what a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! A judge of all things, feeble worm of the earth, depositary of the truth, cloaca of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe!
All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing. A day will come when science will turn upon its error and no longer hesitate to shorten our woes. A day will come when it will dare and act with certainty; when life, grown wiser, will depart silently at its hour, knowing that it has reached its term.
I had said good-bye to my warm, loving mother and elected for cold, uncertainty, sin, the horror of the normal and respectable, their claws, latent but acute
After all his former doubts, he now felt something he had never before experienced--the certainty that love is invincible.
Uncertainty and mystery are energies of life. Don't let them scare you unduly, for they keep boredom at bay and spark creativity.
Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.
A bird in the hand is a certainty, but a bird in the bush may sing.
Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.
As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure." - H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)
From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.
From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.
In terms of the game theory, we might say the universe is so constituted as to maximize play. The best games are not those in which all goes smoothly and steadily toward a certain conclusion, but those in which the outcome is always in doubt. Similarly, the geometry of life is designed to keep us at the point of maximum tension between certainty and uncertainty, order and chaos. Every important call is a close one. We survive and evolve by the skin of our teeth. We really wouldn't want it any other way.
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.
In these matters the only certainty is that there is nothing certain.
There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing.
Feast of All Souls The antithesis between death and life is not so stark for the Christian as it is for the atheist. Life is a process of becoming, and the moment of death is the transition from one life to another. Thus it is possible for a Christian to succumb to his own kind of death-wish, to seek that extreme of other-worldliness to which the faith has always been liable, especially in periods of stress and uncertainty. There may appear a marked preoccupation with death and a rejection of all temporal things. To say that this world is in a fallen state and that not too much value must be set upon it, is very far from the Manichaean error of supposing it to be evil throughout. The Christian hope finds ambivalence in death: that which destroys, also redeems.
Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
The opinion of the intelligent is better than the certainty of the ignorant.
Adventure upon all the tickets in the lottery, and you lose for certain; and the greater the number of your tickets the nearer your approach to this certainty.
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. - The Quest for Certainty.
