Certainty Quotes

1. "There are lots of reasons why a woman stays with a man, even when she's given up on changing him and can predict with certainty the shape that the rest of her life with him is going to take."
Author: A.S.A. Harrison

2. "The two most challenging tasks a man can face in life is education of the heart and education of the child-every other task he contemplates in life before him pales in comparison to those two. On this path of absolute uncertainty, the descending heart will permiate the education of the mind... An initiation rite for young heart. An initiation rite for young men."
Author: Adam Kovacevic

3. "It was not a matter, mind you, of the certainty I had of being more intelligent than everyone else. Besides, such certainty is of no consequence because so many imbeciles share it."
Author: Albert Camus

4. "One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary."
Author: Aldous Huxley

5. "A shift, a change of feeling, will bring with certainty a change in your future. This is the very first step in changing your destiny."
Author: Alice Hocker

6. "Logic, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basic of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion - thus:Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man.Minor Premise: One man can dig a post-hole in sixty seconds; Therefore-Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a post-hole in one second.This may be called syllogism arithmetical, in which, by combining logic and mathematics, we obtain a double certainty and are twice blessed."
Author: Ambrose Bierce

7. "Motherhood is a nature, and fatherhood is a culture.. Motherhood is a certainty while fatherhood is an assumption.. Motherhood is original to the female whereas fatherhood is an acquired extension.."
Author: Arabic Saying

8. "The chemists who uphold dualism are far from being agreed among themselves; nevertheless, all of them in maintaining their opinion, rely upon the phenomena of chemical reactions. For a long time the uncertainty of this method has been pointed out: it has been shown repeatedly, that the atoms put into movement during a reaction take at that time a new arrangement, and that it is impossible to deduce the old arrangement from the new one. It is as if, in the middle of a game of chess, after the disarrangement of all the pieces, one of the players should wish, from the inspection of the new place occupied by each piece, to determine that which it originally occupied."
Author: Auguste Laurent

9. "To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason - Purpose - Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge - Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve - Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man's virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride."
Author: Ayn Rand

10. "Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences."
Author: Bertrand Russell

11. "Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance."
Author: Bertrand Russell

12. "It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images."
Author: C.G. Jung

13. "Zizi was young and often confused about how to live his life, ?and when he made a choice he clung to it with fierce resolve, ?as if to beat his uncertainty into submission."
Author: Candace Bushnell

14. "It is a part of our nature to survive. Faith is an instinctive response to aspects of existence that we cannot explain by any other means, be it the moral void we perceive in the universe, the certainty of death, the mystery of the origin of things, the meaning of our lives, or the absence of meaning. These are basic and extremely simple aspects of existence, but our limitations prevent us from responding in an unequivocal way and for that reason we generate an emotional response, as a defense mechanism. It's pure biology."
Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón

15. "The living used to wonder what happened after death. She said that whole religions were born and evolved around this one simple uncertainty."
Author: Carrie Ryan

16. "Uncertainty is a sign of humility, and humility is just the ability or the willingness to learn."
Author: Charlie Sheen

17. "Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

18. "It's like my entire conscious state has been reduced to this toxic blend of hope and uncertainty. I hate that I have to act cool and almost pretend I don't like him when in fact I do, because, God forbid, I might come across as desperate for affection or a little clingy, which everyone should know are perfectly natural human behaviors, after all. Ugh!"
Author: Daria Snadowsky

19. "Certainty is the mother of quiet and repose, and uncertainty the cause of variance and contentions."
Author: Edward Coke

20. "Not doubt, CERTAINTY is what drives one insane"
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

21. "At sixteen, he was cursed with all the certainty of youth, unleavened by any trace of humor or self-doubt, and wed to the arrogance that came so naturally to those born blond and strong and handsome."
Author: George R.R. Martin

22. "Uncertainty will always be part of the taking charge process."
Author: Harold S. Geneen

23. "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."
Author: Haruki Murakami

24. "Most of us feel some kind of uncertainty, with the population increasing and resources decreasing. We have to face these issues."
Author: Issey Miyake

25. "In moments of spiritual crisis we naturally fall back upon what worked for us, or seemed to work, heretofore. Sometimes this shows up through the reassertion of our old values in belligerent, testy ways. Regression of any kind is just such a return to old presumptions, often after they have been shown to be insufficient for the complexity of larger questions. The virtue of the old presumptions is that they once worked, or seemed to work, and therein lies if not certainty, then nostalgia for a previous, presumptive security. In our private lives, we frequently fall back upon our old roles."
Author: James Hollis

26. "If and perhaps.... The language of procrastination and uncertainty. That's just people looking to justify their own lack of action."
Author: John Flanagan

27. "The the uncertainty was dispelled and the melancholy lifted as he saw a familiar stocky figure moving near one of the tents. "Halt!" he cried out gladly, and a slight pressure with his knees set Tug galloping through the deserted Gathering site. The dog, caught by surprise, barked once, then shot in pursuit like an arrow from a bow. The grim-faced Ranger straightened from the fire at the sound of his former student's voice. He stood, hands on hips and a frown on his face as Will and Tug careered toward him. But inside, there was a lightening of his heart that he never failed to feel when in Will's company. Not for the first time, the realization hit Halt that Will was no longer a mere boy. No one wore the Silver Oakleaf if he hadn't proven himself to be worthy. Despite himself, he felt a surge of pride."
Author: John Flanagan

28. "My only certainty in life is that I shall one day die. I can be certain of nothing else in the future. But either we survive (and so far in human history a vast majority has always survived) and having survived when we might not have done so gives us what we call happiness; or we do not survive and do not know it."
Author: John Fowles

29. "Why is music capable of inflicting such pain? Because it works on our feelings directly. No ideas interfere with its emotions. This is why "all art aspires to the condition of music." The symphony gives us the thrill of uncertainty--the pleasurable anxiety of searching for a pattern--but without the risks of real life. When we listen to music, we are moved by an abstraction. We feel, but we don't know why."
Author: Jonah Lehrer

30. "I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are."
Author: Jose Saramago

31. "Are you finally admitting that you can sell a man hope? Have I at last succeeded in teaching you that?'He laughed and flicked his whip again, harder. He was in a better mood than I had seen for months.'No, Camelot, not hope. Hope is for the weak; have I not succeeded in teaching you that? To hope is to put your faith in others and in things outside yourself; that way lies betrayal and disappointment. They didn't want hope, Camelot; they wanted certainty. What a man needs is the certainty that he is right, no selfdoubt, no fleeting thought that he might be wrong or misled. Absolute certainty that he is right, that's what gives a man the confidence and power to do whatever he wants and to take whatever he wants from this world and the next."
Author: Karen Maitland

32. "The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered forms, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind."
Author: Karl Marx

33. "I sometimes find, especially among my peers, that authenticity is not a…means of growing in holiness, but a convenient cover for endless introspection, doubt, uncertainty, anger, and worldliness. So that if other Christians seem pure, assured, and happy we despise them for being inauthentic.Granted, the church shouldn't be happy-clappy naive about life's struggles. Plenty of psalms show us godly ways to be real with our negative emotions. But the church should not apologize for preaching a confident Christ and exhorting us to trust Him in all things. Church is not meant to foster an existential crisis of faith every week"
Author: Kevin DeYoung

34. "Mortals live with lack of certainty- except for Death."
Author: Lee Monroe

35. "From an early age I was very, very fascinated by uncertainty."
Author: Myron Scholes

36. "This was difficult to prove as most hydrogenosomes have lost their entire genome, but it is now established with some certainty.1 In other words, whatever bacteria entered into a symbiotic relationship in the first eukaryotic cell, its descendents numbered among them both mitochondria and hydrogenosomes."
Author: Nick Lane

37. "Are you very much in love with him?' he asked. She did not answer for some time, but stood gazing at the landscape.'I wish I knew' she said at last.He shook his head. -'Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.All ways end at the same point, my dear Gladys.'--'What is that?'-'Disillusion."
Author: Oscar Wilde

38. "Musical comedy is the Irish stew of drama. Anything may be put into it, with the certainty that it will improve the general effect."
Author: P.G. Wodehouse

39. "We tangle and merge. Love and let go. No one will ever know her like I do. I've touched every inch of skin. I've explored every part of her being. I love her shy when I pull her to my hips, my lap. I love her present uncertainty for things she knows how to do so fucking good. I love her pink flushed skin all over."
Author: Pella Grace

40. "Memories particularly of when they weren't being what parents are nine-tenths of the time, the taskmasters, the examples, the moral authorities, the nags of pick-that-up and you're-going-to-be-late, keepers of the diary of her duties and routines, memories, rather, of when they found one another afresh, beyond the tensions between parental mastery and inept childish uncertainty, of those moments of respite in a family's life when they could reach one another in calm"
Author: Philip Roth

41. "He looked at me again, and while he was still grinning, I could see…something move across his face. Just the littlest moment of uncertainty. "But you felt loved, right?" he asked. "Adored and appreciated and all the other things the commercials say you're supposed to feel?"Squeezing his fingers, I nodded. "I did. And also a little claustrophobic.""A natural side effect of True Love."
Author: Rachel Hawkins

42. "In moments of great uncertainty on my travels, I have always felt that something is protecting me, that I will come to no harm."
Author: Tahir Shah

43. "So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened."
Author: Ted Nelson

44. "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."
Author: Thomas Szasz

45. "We tend to fantasise about eliminating uncertainty so that the world can be safe… the first thing to note about uncertainty – or insecurity, the uncomfortable feeling it produces – is that it is intrinsic to a dynamic existence… insecurity is inescapable."
Author: Tim Lott

46. "I count it as an absolute certainty that in paradise, everyone naps. A nap is a perfect pleasure and it's useful, too. It splits the day into two halves, making each half more manageable and enjoyable. How much easier it is to work in the morning if we know we have a nap to look forward to after lunch; and how much more pleasant the late afternoon and evening become after a little sleep. If you know there is a nap to come later in the day, then you can banish forever that terrible sense of doom one feels at 9 A.M. with eight hours of straight toil ahead. Not only that, but a nap can offer a glimpse into a twilight nether world where gods play and dreams happen."
Author: Tom Hodgkinson

47. "That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living."
Author: Virginia Woolf

48. "Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one."
Author: Voltaire

49. "One of the few certainties in life is that persons of certainty should certainly be avoided."
Author: Willy Russell

50. "Real danger is nothing more than just living. Of course, living is merely the chaos of existence, but more than that it's a crazy mixed-up business of dismantling existence instant by instant to the point where the original chaos is restored, and taking strength from the uncertainty and the fear that chaos brings to re-create existence instant by instant. You won't find another job as dangerous as that. There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it."
Author: Yukio Mishima

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