Certainty Quotes - Page 23

• More important than the quest for certainty is the quest for clarity.

  Francois Gautier

  Inspirational, Learning, Clarity Of Purpose

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• What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It's a sure thing! It's a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles.

  Nora Ephron

  Food, Long, Cooking

  FaceBook post by Nora Ephron from Sep 06, 2016

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• Happiness is above all things the calm, glad certainty of innocence.

  Henrik Ibsen

  Happiness, Laughter, Joy

  Henrik Ibsen (1983*). “Seven plays”

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• We do not worry about being respected in towns through which we pass. But if we are going to remain in one for a certain time, we do worry. How long does this time have to be?

  Blaise Pascal

  Time, Math, Long

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• The inherent preferences of organizations are clarity, certainty and perfection. The inherent nature of human relationships involves ambiguity, uncertainty, and imperfection. How one honors, balances, and integrates the needs of both is the real trick of feedback.

  Richard Pascale

  Inspirational, Educational, Real

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• Audiences aren't going to get rid of me. One thing I can say, with absolute certainty, is that my shows will still be performed when I'm dead, buried and forgotten. They're going to absolutely outlive me, which is a wonderful thing to think about.

  Cameron Mackintosh

  Thinking, Wonderful, Forgotten

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• We have to deal with this new type of threat in a way we haven’t yet defined. . . . With a low-probability, high-impact event like this . . . If there’s a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.

  Dick Cheney

  Impact, Events, Nuclear

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• As its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we cant predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe. Poised between intransigent scepticism and uncritical credulity, it is par excellence the literature of the open mind.

  John Brunner

  Mind, Excellence, Different

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• Uncertainty is wondrous, and.. certainty, were it to be real, would be moral death.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Real, Would Be, Moral

  Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1999). “The End of the World as We Know it: Social Science for the Twenty-first Century”, p.4, U of Minnesota Press

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• I do not have easy days at home now and I drift between fear and helplessness in sunny rooms where it is unspeakably cold. Strange shudders of transformation, bodily experienced to the point of vulnerability, visions of mysteries until the certainty of having died, ecstasies to the point of stony petrifaction, and a continuation of dreaming sad dreams.

  Georg Trakl

  Dream, Home, Vision

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• Psychological man may be going nowhere, but he aims to achieve a certain speed and certainty in going. Like his predecessor, the man of the market economy, he understands morality as that which is conducive to increased activity. The important thing is to keep going.

  Philip Rieff

  Men, Important, May

  Philip Rieff (1987). “The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud”, p.41, University of Chicago Press

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• He had found the band of jackals he needed. But as Jack McCall rode through the center of town, he experienced the terrifying certainty that a man faces when he's about to make his own name famous. He lacked both a hero's calm and a coward's resolve to survive at any price.

  Walter Hill

  Fear, Hero, Men

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• The difference between religion and science is the difference between thoughtless certainty and thoughtful doubt.

  Kedar Joshi

  Thoughtful, Differences, Doubt

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• The scientist has to take 95 per cent of his subject on trust. He has to because he can't possibly do all the experiments, therefore he has to take on trust the experiments all his colleagues and predecessors have done. Whereas a mathematician doesn't have to take anything on trust. Any theorem that's proved, he doesn't believe it, really, until he goes through the proof himself, and therefore he knows his whole subject from scratch. He's absolutely 100 per cent certain of it. And that gives him an extraordinary conviction of certainty, and an arrogance that scientists don't have.

  Christopher Zeeman

  Believe, Science, Giving

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• While the dogmatist is harmful, the sceptic is useless ...; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or of ignorance. Knowledge is not so precise a concept as is commonly thought. Instead of saying 'I know this', we ought to say 'I more or less know something more or less like this'. ... Knowledge in practical affairs has not the certainty or the precision of arithmetic.

  Bertrand Russell

  Philosophy, Ignorance, Knowledge

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• The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. If you take your children for a picnic on a doubtful day, they will demand a dogmatic answer as to whether it will be fine or wet, and be disappointed in you when you cannot be sure.

  Bertrand Russell

  Nature, Children, Science

  Bertrand Russell, John G. Slater, Peter Köllner (1997). “Last Philosophical Testament: 1943-68”, p.379, Psychology Press

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• Sometimes I think death is a greater awareness than life. Life gives us the illusion of immortality, whereas death gives us the certainty of immortality

  Frederick Lenz

  Death, Thinking, Giving

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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

  Thinking, Circles, Wings

  Source: www.slate.com

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• Almost all religions provide opportunities for human beings to convince themselves of their own righteousness, to speak in the name of God, and even to go to war on God's behalf. This 'blasphemy of certainty' is also rife among secularists who in their case have not God but science or the proletariat on their side.

  Stephen Prothero

  Atheist, War, Opportunity

  Stephen Prothero (2010). “God Is Not One”, p.356, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Life to the great majority is only a constant struggle for mere existence, with the certainty of losing it at last.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Struggle, Majority, Lasts

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• We want to have certainties and no doubts- results and no experiments- without even seeing that certainties can arise only through doubt and results only thorough experiment.

  Carl Jung

  Doubt, Want, Thorough

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• I can't keep from fooling around with our irrefutable certainties. It is, for example, a pleasure knowingly to mix up two and three dimensionalities, flat and spatial, and to make fun of gravity.

  M. C. Escher

  Fun, Two, Example

  "On Being a Graphic Artist" by M. C. Escher, 1981.

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• Phases of the creative process: Preparation-gathering impressions Incubation-letting go of certainties Immersion/Illumination-creative intervention/risk Revision-conscious structuring and editing of creative material.

  Gail Sheehy

  Letting Go, Creativity, Illumination

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• With the only certainty in our daily existence being change, and a rate of change growing always faster in a kind of technological leapfrog game, speed helps people think they are catching up.

  Gail Sheehy

  Thinking, Games, People

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• I have throughout been curious about how much we can be said to know and with what degree of certainty or doubtfulness.

  Bertrand Russell

  Curiosity, Degrees, Curious

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