Certainty Quotes - Page 37

• 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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• I am a product of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic...In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.

  C. S. Lewis

  Father, Book, Men

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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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• Only one absolute certainty is possible to man, namely that at any given moment the feeling which he has exists.

  Thomas Huxley

  Men, Feelings, Absolute Certainty

  Thomas Henry Huxley, Henrietta A. Huxley (1908). “Aphorisms and reflections”

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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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• There has to be certainty and there has to be clarity. There can't be ambiguity, .. This has to be certain, clear in all respects from all the parties so nobody is in any doubt about what the future holds.

  Tony Blair

  Party, Doubt, Clarity

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• As a scientist, I don't believe anything. Science shouldn't use the word belief. There are things more likely and less likely. Science can say nothing with absolute certainty.

  Lawrence M. Krauss

  Faith, Believe, Use

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• Human life is proverbially uncertain; few things are more certain than the solvency of a life-insurance company.

  Arthur Eddington

  Life, Math, Statistics

  Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (1933). “The nature of the physical world”

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• The propositions of mathematics have, therefore, the same unquestionable certainty which is typical of such propositions as "All bachelors are unmarried," but they also share the complete lack of empirical content which is associated with that certainty: The propositions of mathematics are devoid of all factual content; they convey no information whatever on any empirical subject matter.

  Carl Gustav Hempel

  Math, Typical, Statistics

  Carl Gustav Hempel (2001). “The Philosophy of Carl G. Hempel: Studies in Science, Explanation, and Rationality”, p.13, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.

  David Hilbert

  Math, Simple, Games

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• It has been pointed out already that no knowledge of probabilities, less in degree than certainty, helps us to know what conclusions are true, and that there is no direct relation between the truth of a proposition and its probability. Probability begins and ends with probability.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Truth, Math, Degrees

  John Maynard Keynes (2006). “A Treatise on Probability”, p.322, Cosimo, Inc.

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