Certainty Quotes - page 2

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision. (Bertrand Russell)
The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. View quote
Bertrand Russell
To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it. View quote
Bertrand Russell
When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others. It is much more nearly certain that we are assembled here tonight than it is that this or that political party is in the right. Certainly there are degrees of certainty, and one should be very careful to emphasize that fact, because otherwise one is landed in an utter skepticism, and complete skepticism would, of course, be totally barren and completely useless. View quote
Bertrand Russell
I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it. View quote
Woodrow Wilson
Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man. View quote
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so. View quote
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions. View quote
Thomas Szasz
Fame is a vapor popularity an accident the only earthly certainty is oblivion. View quote
Mark Twain
In a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live. View quote
Robert James Waller
The Resistance is a moral certainty, not a poetic one. The true poet never uses words in order to punish someone. His judgment belongs to a creative order; it is not formulated as a prophetic scripture. (Salvatore Quasimodo)
As the future is never known with certainty, the evaluation of the prospective benefits requires the formation of expectations. An acceptable house, partner or job, then, is one that offers an expected stream of future benefit that has a value in excess of the option to continue to search for an even better alternative. View quote
Dale T. Mortensen
People who ask confidently get more than those who are hesitant and uncertain. When you've figured out what you want to ask for, do it with certainty, boldness and confidence. View quote
Jack Canfield
But teleological considerations can lead no further than to a belief and a hope. They do not give certainty. View quote
Christian Lous Lange
The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind. View quote
May Sarton
I am not accustomed to saying anything with certainty after only one or two observations. View quote
Andreas Vesalius
The new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate, and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible. Such a will can henceforth be relied on with confidence and certainty. View quote
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty. View quote
Bart D. Ehrman
A science only advances with certainty, when the plan of inquiry and the object of our researches have been clearly defined; otherwise a small number of truths are loosely laid hold of, without their connexion being perceived, and numerous errors, without being enabled to detect their fallacy. View quote
Jean-Baptiste Say
It has been said, and perhaps with truth, that the conclusions of Political Economy partake more of the certainty of the stricter sciences than those of most of the other branches of human knowledge. View quote
Thomas Malthus
I'm going to end a life that I thought could contain every kind of greatness but that in fact consisted only of my incapacity to really want to be great. Whenever I arrived at a certainty, I remembered that those with the greatest certainties are lunatics. (Fernando Pessoa)
Organisms [...] are directed and limited by their past. They must remain imperfect in their form and function, and to that extent unpredictable since they are not optimal machines. We cannot know their future with certainty, if only because a myriad of quirky functional shifts lie within the capacity of any feature, however well adapted to a present role. View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self.... What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself - a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required.... I am a theater and nothing more than a theater. View quote
Philip Roth
If we have not found heaven within, it is a certainty we will not find it without. View quote
Henry Miller