Quotes on Certainty

The is always much to be said for not attempting more than you can do and for making a certainty of what you try. But this principle, like others in life and war, has it exceptions.

The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity

Our best built certainties are but sand-houses and subject to damage from any wind of doubt that blows

He seemed so certain about everything, didn't he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman's head. He wasn't even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man.

When I consider this carefully, I find not a single property which with certainty separates the waking state from the dream. How can you be certain that your whole life is not a dream?

It is the certainty that you are about to recover, that brings results, not the hope.

From all our observations we may collect with certainty, that misery is the lot of man, but cannot discover in what particular condition it will find most alleviations.

If you want to save capitalism there is only one type of argument that you should adopt, the only one that has ever won in any moral issue: the argument from self-esteem. Check your premises, convince yourself of the rightness of your cause, then fight for capitalism with full, moral certainty.

Unless you have courage, a courage that keeps you going, _x000D_ always going, no matter what happens, there is no _x000D_ certainty of success. It is really an endurance race.

It is not that there are no certainties, it is that it is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties.

We can say with certainty - or 90% probability - that the new industries that are about to be born will have nothing to do with information.

The person with the most certainty in a given situation will influence the other.

The need for certainty is the greatest disease the Mind faces

He who does not understand the supreme certainty of mathematics is wallowing in confusion.

A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree or certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world suffers.

Even when the universe made it quite clear to me that I was mistaken in my certainties ... I did not break. The shattering of my sureties did not shatter me.

He wondered how he could ever have thought of the planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets - as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven - excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness.

Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely leave the result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation.

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

The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.

The quest for certainty in forecasting outcomes can be the enemy of progress.