Certainty Quotes - Page 18

• The quest for precision is analogous to the quest for certainty and both - precision and certainty are impossible to attain.

  Karl Popper

  Quests, Impossible, Precision

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• Most human things are full of conflict and ambivalence, not ease and simplicity. The world has grown increasingly fundamentalist, and the parameters of discussion have become narrowed. People, when they're fearful, are vulnerable to certainty in rhetoric.

  Dana Spiotta

  People, Simplicity, Ease

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• All men have a feeling, that they would rather you told them a civil lie than give them a point blank refusal.... If you make a promise, the thing is still uncertain, depends on a future day, and concerns but few people; but if you refuse you alienate people to a certainty and at once, and many people too.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Lying, Men, People

  "The Treatises of M. T. Cicero" by C. D. Yonge, On Standing for the Consulship, section 12, p. 499, 500, 1872.

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• I am walking like a bewitched corpse, with the certainty of being eaten by the infinite, of being annulled by the only existing Absurd.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Infinite, Absurd, Walking

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• Digital television is no longer a probability, it is a certainty.

  Tessa Jowell

  Television, Digital, Probability

  "BBC footing digital bill for poor". Speech at the Royal Television Society Cambridge Convention, www.imdb.com. September 15, 2005.

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• Not doubt, certainty is what drives one insane.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Doubt, Insane

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1989). “On the Genealogy of Morals”, Vintage

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• I'm through with Tolstoy. He has ceased to exist for me.... If I eat a bowl of soup and like it, I know by that fact alone and with absolute certainty that Tolstoy will find it bad, and vice versa.

  Ivan Turgenev

  Vices, Soup, Facts

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• Lack of self-confidence is, more often than not, simple laziness. We feel confused and uncertain because we do not know. But instead of making the effort to investigate, we procrastinate and worry. We tell ourselves we can't instead of learning how we can. If we used the mental energy we expend in worry and fear to get out and find out about what we do not know, we would see our self-confidence grow. Lack of self-confidence is not overcome by faith, but by action. It is a lack, not of certainty, but of effort. Too often we are certain that we can't before we give ourselves a fair chance.

  Laurence Boldt

  Confused, Self Confidence, Simple

  Laurence G. Boldt (1999). “Zen and the Art of Making a Living: A Practical Guide to Creative Career Design”, p.941, Penguin

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• When you believe you have found an important scientific fact, and are feverishly curious to publish it, constrain yourself for days, weeks, years sometimes, fight yourself, try and ruin your own experiments, and only proclaim your discovery after having exhausted all contrary hypotheses. But when, after so many efforts you have at last arrived at a certainty, your joy is one of the greatest which can be felt by a human soul.

  Louis Pasteur

  Believe, Fighting, Discovery

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• Without absolute certainty, what do we do? We do the best we can. Injustice is happening now; suffering is happening now. We have choices to make now. To insist on absolute certainty before starting to apply ethics to life decisions is a way of choosing to be amoral.

  Richard Stallman

  Choices, Decision, Suffering

  Slashdot interview, news.slashdot.org. May 1, 2000.

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• Wisdom is not finally tested in schools, Wisdom cannot be pass'd from one having it to another not having it, Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof, Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content, Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things; Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.

  Walt Whitman

  School, Reality, Sight

  Walt Whitman (2012). “Selected Poems”, p.33, Courier Corporation

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• [Heraclitus had] the highest form of pride [stemming] from a certainty of belief in the truth as grasped by himself alone. He brings this form, by its excessive development, into a sublime pathos by involuntary identification of himself with his truth.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Pride, Sublime, Development

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Greg Whitlock (2001). “The Pre-Platonic Philosophers”, p.55, University of Illinois Press

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• ... the English alphabet is pure insanity..., It can hardly spell any word in the language with any degree of certainty.

  Mark Twain

  Insanity, Degrees, Alphabet

  Mark Twain (2013). “Autobiography of Mark Twain”, p.268, Univ of California Press

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• Science deals in evidence and uncertainty. Religion deals in certainty without evidence.

  David Milne

  Evidence, Deals, Uncertainty

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• 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

  Fields, Lucky, Motion Pictures

  William Goldman (2012). “Adventures in the Screen Trade”, p.32, Hachette UK

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• I do believe that there is a conflict between science and religion ... the spirit or attitude toward the facts is different in religion from what it is in science. The uncertainty that is necessary in order to appreciate nature is not easily correlated with the feeling of certainty in faith.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Attitude, Believe, Order

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• Revolution is the only thing, the only power, that ever worked out freedom for any people. The powers that have ruled long and learned to love ruling, will never give up that prerogative until they must, till they see the certainty of overthrow and destruction if they do not. To plant-to revolutionize-these are the twin stars that have ruled our pathway. What have we then to dread in the word Revolution-we, the children of rebels!

  Wendell Phillips

  Stars, Children, Giving Up

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• Certainty abolishes hope, and robs us of renewal.

  Neil Postman

  Renewal, Abolish

  Neil Postman (2011). “Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future”, p.124, Vintage

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• People who need certainty are unlikely to make good entrepreneurs.

  Peter Drucker

  People, Entrepreneur, Needs

  Peter Drucker (2014). “Innovation and Entrepreneurship”, p.41, Routledge

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• So trust the process of your life unfolding, and know with certainty, through the peaks and valleys of your journey, that your soul rests safe and secure in the arms of God.

  Dan Millman

  Journey, Soul, Valleys

  Dan Millman (2001). “The Laws of Spirit: Simple, Powerful Truths for Making Life Work”, p.110, H J Kramer

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• Writing has to have a great deal of certainty and self-assurance, but it's not arrogant.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Writing, Self, Arrogant

  Source: www.newstatesman.com

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• So the journey is over and I am back again where I started, richer by much experience and poorer by many unexploded certainties. For convictions and certainties are too often the concomitants of ignorance. Those who like to feel they are always right and who attached a high importance to their own opinions should stay at home. When one is traveling, convictions are mislaid as easily as spectacles; but unlike spectacles, they are not easily replaced.

  Aldous Huxley

  Home, Ignorance, Journey

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• O Mother of God! If I place my confidence in thee, I shall be saved; if I am under thy protection, I have nothing to fear; for the fact of being thy client is a possession of a certainty of salvation which God grants only to those whom He intends to save.

  John of Damascus

  Mother, Facts, Clients

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• We are all of us invented. We are all of us cobbled together from cartilage and dust. Few of us know with certainty the name of our maker. But I do... Bram Stoker.

  Steven Dietz

  Dust, Names, Together

  Steven Dietz (1996). “Dracula”, p.9, Dramatists Play Service Inc

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• 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

  Thinking, Practice, Mind

  Ajahn Chah (2001). “Being Dharma: The Essence of the Buddha's Teachings”, p.9, Shambhala Publications

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