Certainty Quotes - Page 21

• The language of judicial decision is mainly the language of logic. And the logical method and form flatter that longing for certainty and for repose which is in every human mind. But certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Men, Destiny, Decision

  "The Path of the Law" (1897)

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• The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

  Milan Kundera

  Attitude, Tolerance, World

  "Siraaj: An Arab Tale". Book by Radwa Ashour, 2007.

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• No wind serves him who addresses his voyage to no certain port.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Journey, Wind, Decision

  Michel de Montaigne (2015). “Montaigne's Essays: Top Essays”, p.370, 谷月社

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• Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Education, Truth, Freedom

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Steven R. Weisman (2010). “Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary”, p.2, PublicAffairs

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• Jealousy is bred in doubts. When those doubts change into certainties, then the passion either ceases or turns absolute madness.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Jealousy, Passion, Doubt

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• Whatever Seattle says, the great chief at Washington can rely upon with as much certainty as he can upon the return of the sun or the seasons.

  Chief Seattle

  Rely Upon, Return, Sun

  Seattle (Chief) (1980). “How can one sell the air?: the manifesto of an Indian chief”, Book Publishing Company (TN)

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• Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity.

  Alan Turing

  Exercise, Two, Intuition

  "Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals". Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Series 2, Volume 45, 1939.

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• I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and a proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the non-plused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.

  Joan Didion

  Children, Men, Keys

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Sep 10, 2011

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• ...we should all fortify ourselves against the dark hours of depression by cultivating a deep distrust of the certainties of despair. Despair is relentless in the certainties of its pessimism. But we have seen again and again, from our own experience and others', that absolute statements of hopelessness that we make in the dark are notoriously unreliable. Our dark certainties are not sureties.

  John Piper

  Dark, Despair, Pessimism

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• Genius is neither learned nor acquired. It is knowing without experience. It is risking without fear of failure. It is perception without touch. It is understanding without research. It is certainty without proof. It is ability without practice. It is invention without limitations. It is imagination without boundaries. It is creativity without constraints. It is...extraordinary intelligence!

  Patricia Polacco

  Creativity, Practice, Knowing

  FaceBook post by Patricia Polacco from Mar 24, 2014

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• Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth

  Ayn Rand

  Fighting, Pride, Men

  Ayn Rand (2016). “Atlas Shrugged”, p.817, Hamilton Books

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• I have no talent for certainty.

  Jane Austen

  Talent

  "Fictional character: Fanny Price". "Mansfield Park", www.imdb.com. 1999.

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• I have lived with magic and without magic, and I can tell you with certainty that a life with magic is better.

  Chris Bohjalian

  Magic, I Can

  FaceBook post by Chris Bohjalian from Oct 08, 2015

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• We had been hopelessly labouring to plough waste lands; to make nationality grow in a place full of the certainty of God… Among the tribes our creed could be only like the desert grass – a beautiful swift seeming of spring; which, after a day’s heat, fell dusty.

  T. E. Lawrence

  Beautiful, Spring, Military

  T. E. Lawrence (2013). “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”, p.338, Black House Publishing Ltd

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• There’s faith that knows itself as faith, Proyas, and there’s faith that confuses itself for knowledge. The first embraces uncertainty, acknowledges the mysteriousness of the God. It begets compassion and tolerance. Who can entirely condemn when they’re not entirely certain they’re in the right? But the second, Proyas, the second embraces certainty and only pays lip service to the God’s mystery. It begets intolerance, hatred, violence.

  R. Scott Bakker

  Compassion, Hatred, Tolerance

  R. Scott Bakker (2008). “The Darkness that Comes Before: The Prince of Nothing, Book One (The Prince of Nothing)”, p.314, The Overlook Press

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• History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

  Julian Barnes

  Memories, Imperfection, Documentation

  Julian Barnes (2011). “The Sense of an Ending”, p.59, Random House

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• There is certainty in a ring. The non-ending, the non-beginning. The ongoing. The way it holds on to you not because it's fastened or stretched or adhered. It holds on because it fits.

  David Levithan

  Ongoing, Way, Fit

  David Levithan (2008). “The Realm of Possibility”, p.202, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• All great discoveries...are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents.

  Mark Helprin

  Air, Discovery, Two

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• I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Stars, Believe, Men

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.8, Simon and Schuster

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• The offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet; that I haven’t understood enough; that I can’t know enough; that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Giving, Risk, Want

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• Still, being fragile creatures, humans always try to hide from themselves the certainty that they will die. They do not see that it is death itself that motivates them to do the best things in their lives. They are afraid to step into the dark, afraid of the unknown, and their only way of conquering that fear is to ignore the fact that their days are numbered. They do not see that with an awareness of death, they would be able to be even more daring, to go much further in their daily conquests, because then they would have nothing to lose- for death itself is inevitable.

  Paulo Coelho

  Fear, Dark, Trying

  Paulo Coelho (1992). “The diary of a magus”, Harpercollins

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• Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65]

  Julian Barnes

  Example, Witness, Discovering

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• Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel-the spiritual texture-of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.

  Tim O'Brien

  Spiritual, Hate, War

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.78, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• An expectation was there, mixed in with so many other emotions - excitement, resignation, hesitation, confusion, fear - that would well up then wither on the vine. You're optimistic one moment, only to be racked the next by the certainty that it will all fall to pieces. And in the end it does.

  Haruki Murakami

  Fall, Optimistic, Expectations

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• The greatest weapon any warrior can carry into battle is absolute certainty of her eternal soul.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Warrior, Soul, Battle

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