Certainty Quotes - Page 27

• The remarkable thing is that it is the crowded life that is most easily remembered. A life full of turns, achievements, disappointments, surprises, and crises is a life full of landmarks. The empty life has even its few details blurred, and cannot be remembered with certainty.

  Eric Hoffer

  Disappointment, Empty Life, Achievement

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• And why do we reduce the beauty of relating to relationship? Why are we in such a hurry? - because to relate is insecure, and relationship is a security, relationship has a certainty. Relating is just a meeting of two strangers, maybe just an overnight stay and in the morning we say good-bye. Who knows what is going to happen tomorrow? And we are so afraid that we want to make it certain, we want to make it predictable. We would like tomorrow to be according to our ideas; we don't allow it freedom to have its own say. So we immediately reduce every verb to a noun.

  Rajneesh

  Relationship, Morning, Insecure

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• Certainty is a cruel mindset. It hardens our minds against possibility.

  Ellen Langer

  Wise, Growth, Mind

  Ellen J. Langer (2009). “Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility”, p.24, Ballantine Books

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• The speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.

  Audre Lorde

  Love You, Creativity, Missing

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• Those who say they dislike dogma, or 'certainty', tend to be liars, hypocrites, or simply wrong. What they really dislike is the dogma of those they disagree with. A society that was certain, certain beyond all certainty, that putting its citizens in death camps was wrong, would never put people in death camps. Such things are only possible when you're open to new ideas.

  Jonah Goldberg

  Liars, Knowledge, Hypocrite

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• To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

  Richard Miller

  Inspirational, Thinking, Fool

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• 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.

  Bertrand Russell

  Math, Science, Giving

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• Now suppose both death and hell were utterly defeated.  Suppose the fight was fixed.  Suppose God took you on a crystal ball trip into your future and you saw with indubitable certainty that despite everything — your sin, your smallness, your stupidity — you could have free for the asking your whole crazy heart’s deepest desire: heaven, eternal joy.  Would you not return fearless and singing?  What can earth do to you, if you are guaranteed heaven?  To fear the worst earthly loss would be like a millionaire fearing the loss of a penny — less, a scratch on a penny.

  Peter Kreeft

  Crazy, Heart, Loss

  Peter Kreeft (1989). “Heaven, the Heart's Deepest Longing”, p.82, Ignatius Press

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• For a Man cannot believe a Miracle without relying upon Sense, nor Transubstantiation without renouncing it. So that never were any two things so ill coupled together as the Doctrine of Christianity and that of Transubstantiation, because they draw several ways, and are ready to strangle one another: For the main Evidence of the Christian Doctrine, which is Miracles, is resolved into the certainty of Sense, but this Evidence is clear and point blank against Transubstantiation.

  John Tillotson

  Christian, Believe, Men

  John Tillotson (1685). “A discourse against transubstantiation”, p.40

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• There are normal times when it is wholly admirable to be steadfast, resolute, unconflicted, and therefore when integrity is unmistakenly a virtue. The person of integrity knows what to do, and does it. But as we have been exploring, there are also times when certainty and single-mindedness indicate something less admirable: a deafness to voices that should be heard or a blindness to aspects of a situation that need to be considered.

  Simon Blackburn

  Integrity, Voice, Doe

  Simon Blackburn (2014). “Mirror, Mirror: The Uses and Abuses of Self-Love”, p.173, Princeton University Press

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• Through experiments over the past few decades physicists have discovered matter to be completely mutable into other particles or energy and vice-versa and on a subatomic level, matter does not exist with certainty in definite places, but rather shows 'tendencies' to exist. Quantum physics is beginning to realise that the Universe appears to be a dynamic web of interconnected and inseparable energy patterns. If the universe is indeed composed of such a web, there is logically no such thing as a part. This implies we are not separated parts of a whole but rather we are the Whole.

  Barbara Brennan

  Past, Discovery, Experience

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• Educators must resist the quest for certainty. If there were certainty there would be no scientific advancement.  So it is with morals and patriotism.

  John Goodlad

  Advancement, Would Be, Quests

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

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Confusion, Ontology, Doe

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• Lay your wishes aside for a spell, and look deep into what you believe about yourself. Make sure your beliefs about your own life are anchored in greatness, in holiness, in worth, in grace, in joy, in excitement -in internal certainties rather than external circumstances. Because that belief? That's where you're heading, no matter what it may look like on the outside.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Believe, Greatness, Joy

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• Therefore, criticism has to direct itself against itself, and against the mysterious Substance in which it has up to now hid itself. In this way criticism must resolve things such that the development of this Substance drives itself forward to the Universality and Certainty of the Idea of its actual existence, the Eternal Self-consciousness.

  Bruno Bauer

  Self, Ideas, Criticism

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• No great deed, private or public, has ever been undertaken in a bliss of certainty.

  Leon Wieseltier

  Deeds, Bliss, Certain

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• Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art, you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

  Mark Vonnegut

  Art, Thinking, Giving

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• PRETTY LITTLE LIARS works as a metaphor for our central human experience: we have no way to objectively know about anything, no way to move forward with certainty, and yet move forward we must. We stumble through life, trying to find our own way, not knowing whom to listen to, whom to trust, whom to suspect, what to believe. But in that process we discover our most authentic selves.

  Norman Buckley

  Liars, Believe, Moving

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• The only thing that anyone can diagnose, with any certainty, by looking at a fat person, is their own level of stereotype and prejudice toward fat people.

  Marilyn Wann

  People, Prejudice, Levels

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• There is a big difference between wanting to say you wrote a book, and actually writing one. Many people think they want to write, even though they find crafting sentences and paragraphs unpleasant. They hope there is a way to write without writing. I can tell you with certainty there isn’t one.

  Scott Berkun

  Book, Writing, Thinking

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• Summers was simply a master explainer, able to deftly boil down the complexities of economic and financial, and to put them in terms the non-expert could understand. He was brilliant at cultivating a sense of control, even as events spun far beyond what could be managed with any certainty. He could will into being the confidence that eluded others, those less self-assured and, maybe sensibly, on humbler terms with the world.

  Ron Suskind

  Summer, Self, Events

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• On the other hand, I view the whole matter from a cosmic perspective. I don't take a position. I believe that there are no more positions to take, no certainties, no facts. Many people find this confusing about my films; they say I am hiding out behind irony. But from a cosmic viewpoint, it is eternally unimportant whether one lives or not.

  Peter Greenaway

  Believe, Views, Hands

  Peter Greenaway, Vernon W. Gras (2000). “Peter Greenaway: Interviews”, p.64, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• The creation is the Bible of the Deist. He there reads, in the handwriting of the Creator himself, the certainty of His existence and the immutability of His power, and all other Bibles and Testaments are to him forgeries.

  Thomas Paine

  Handwriting, Creation, Deism

  Thomas Paine (2013). “The Thomas Paine Reader”, p.557, Simon and Schuster

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• A testimony is a conviction, a quiet inward certainty of the reality of the living God, of the divinity of His Beloved Son, of the restoration of Their work in this time. It demands that we do what He has asked us to do.

  Gordon B. Hinckley

  Son, Reality, Demand

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• Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well.

  Brian Eno

  Doubt, Increase, Simultaneous

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