Certainty Quotes

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

~ Francis Bacon

I like the scientific spirit—the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine—it always keeps the way beyond open—always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a mistake—after a wrong guess.

~ Walt Whitman

I imagine that the intelligent people are the ones so intelligent that they don't even need or want to look 'intelligent' anymore.

~ Criss Jami

To better understand God we must first shatter our own idea of God - maybe even day after day. Maybe he's too great to stay compressed in the human mind. Maybe he splits it wide open; this is why pretentious intellectualism so often fails to comprehend the concept of God: it is only accepting of what it can explain while in the process finding higher sources offensive. What we may confidently assert is that faith is the opening that allows God, this unpredictable, unseen power, to travel in and out of the mind without all the pains of confusion.

~ Criss Jami

It's not about whether or not someone is a bigot, but whether or not the argument which that someone is arguing is worth being a bigot about.

~ Criss Jami

I always make sure that the world will prove me right. It gives me the freedom to contradict myself.

~ Criss Jami

It is debatable whether blind faith is truly faith at all. Faith is the perceptive gray area where scientific facts meet an individual's experiential truths - the extreme of the former is left feeling in the dark whereas the latter is caught blinded by the light. By proper scientific method, it is intellectually dishonest for me to declare the existence of God with utmost certainty, but to my individual spirit, I would be intellectually dishonest to deny the existence of God even for a second. This leaves the best of both worlds, as the believer is called to be able to give reasons for his faith, a deviation from mere fantasy.

~ Criss Jami

In God's eyes, a man who teaches one truth and nothing else is more righteous than a man who teaches a million truths and one lie.

~ Criss Jami

No one knows for sure about the future. But if you feel reluctant to plan something about it, then someone with guts would define it for you.

~ Toba Beta

It (trying to keep the law) grants you the power to judge others and feel superior to them. You believe you are living to a higher standard than those you judge. Enforcing rules, especially in its more subtle expressions like responsibility and expectation, is a vain attempt to create certainly out of uncertainty. And contrary to what you might think, I have a great fondness for uncertainty. Rules cannot bring freedom; they only have the power to accuse.

~ William Paul Young

There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing.

~ Robert Burns

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

~ Bertrand Russell

Peaceful disputes are maintained when men sincerely believe that they are morally, logically correct about the issues at hand. It is when neither side is really certain that wars are instigated.

~ Criss Jami

Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing.

~ Victor Hugo

I know that I do not know, and uncertainty, certainly, is the cruelest of words.

~ Auliq Ice

The devil's happy when the critics run you off.

~ Criss Jami

Having friends was weird . . . but in a good way.

~ Gwenda Bond

How do you ever hold on to anybody?

~ Elizabeth Wein

Looking up at the stars and smoking in silence.

~ Elizabeth Wein

My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.

~ Haruki Murakami

I believe in intuitions and inspirations...I sometimes FEEL that I am right. I do not KNOW that I am.

~ Albert Einstein

When your only regret is if anyone thinks you regret anything - that is the definition of conviction.

~ Criss Jami

Doubter wants proof which contributes nothing to her faith.

~ Toba Beta

He who asserts belief with absolute certainty knows nothing of faith and makes himself into a fool. He who is wise, upon realizing they have done this, recants and searches themselves for further enlightenment.

~ Cristina Marrero

The South African artist William Kentridge speaks to this type of certainty: 'To say that one needs art, or politics, that incorporate ambiguity and contradiction is not to say that one then stops recognizing and condemning things as evil. However, it might stop one being so utterly convinced of the certainty of one's own solutions. There needs to be a strong understanding of fallibility and how the very act of certainty or authoritativeness can bring disasters.'The outcome of the current crisis is already determined.

~ Nick Flynn

The opposite of faith isn’t doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty.

~ Claudia Gray

From the house of unbeliefto true religionis a single breath;From the world of doubtto certaintyis a single breath;Enjoy this precious single breath,for the harvestof our whole livesis that same one breath.

~ Omar Khayyám

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

~ Charles Darwin

If you do not know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, then you don't know where you're going. And if you don't know where you're going, you're probably going wrong.

~ Terry Pratchett

I believe that we do not know anything for certain, but everything probably.

~ Christiaan Huygens

Certainty is the most vivid condition of ignorance and the most necessarycondition for knowledge.

~ Kedar Joshi

So the paradox goes: No man who is really ignorant is ever aware that he is ignorant. That is its finest, most faulty manifestation; there can be no true ignorance without first some claim of intelligence or consciousness, or superiority or enlightenment.

~ Criss Jami

If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics.

~ Francis Bacon

It sometimes requires ignorance and arrogance to know something for sure.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Because you're always learning, the chief lesson remains: you still know nothing.

~ Criss Jami

Knowledge is not the same as wisdom. You can know all the facts and still not be able to act wisely. But without knowledge, it is harder to be wise –– even if what wisdom tells us is that knowledge is very often provisional and that we cannot wait to have certainty about every fact before we act.

~ Dan Smith

You’ve got to be sure of yourself beforeYou can ever win a prize.

~ Napoleon Hill

Success comes not from having certainty, but being able to live with uncertainty.

~ Jeffrey Fry

When nothing is certain in your life, you have a blank canvas to work with. You can determine a new future for yourself with passionate actions. You can pursue anything that you put your mind to. When things seem uncertain it is the best time to take action.

~ Avina Celeste

We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes. The perfection that the human mind has been able to give to astronomy affords but a feeble outline of such an intelligence.

~ Pierre-Simon Laplace