Certainty Quotes - Page 32

• Certainty and similar states of ‘knowing what we know’ arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.

  Robert A. Burton

  Like Love, Knowing, Brain

  Robert A. Burton, M.D., M.D. (2008). “On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not”, p.7, Macmillan

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• The world is certainty a sudden place.

  Carson McCullers

  World

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• The image of the presence, whatever it was, waiting there for him to go -this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, he did stop short - he hung back from really seeing. The risk was too great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an awful specific form.

  Henry James

  Fear, Waiting, Risk

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• Joy adapts and changes, but it always endures,
  even as a flicker of light born of our personal certainty that,
  when everything is said and done, we are infinitely loved.

  Pope Francis

  Light, Joy, Done

  Pope Francis (2014). “The Joy of the Gospel”, p.6, BookBaby

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• There is no certainty of what will or won't be in our lives. All we have is this moment. The last is gone, the next isn't here yet.

  Curt Mega

  Gone, Lasts, Next

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• The Western World has been brainwashed by Aristotle for the last 2,500 years. The unconscious, not quite articulate, belief of most Occidentals is that there is one map which adequately
  represents reality. By sheer good luck, every Occidental thinks he or she has the map that fits. Guerrilla ontology, to me, involves shaking up that certainty.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Good Luck, Reality, Thinking

  "Robert Anton Wilson: Searching For Cosmic Intelligence". Interview with Jeffrey Elliot, 1980.

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• Action based on hope just felt better than the paralysis of certainty.

  Christopher Moore

  Action, Paralysis, Felt

  Christopher Moore (2009). “Coyote Blue: A Novel”, p.260, Simon and Schuster

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• Mystery is an inescapable ingredient of mathematics. Mathematics is full of unanswered questions, which far outnumber known theorems and results. It's the nature of mathematics to pose more problems than it can solve. Indeed, mathematics itself may be built on small islands of truth comprising the pieces of mathematics that can be validated by relatively short proofs. All else is speculation.

  Ivars Peterson

  Islands, Ontology, May

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• Mathematics is purely hypothetical: it produces nothing but conditional propositions.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Ontology, Logic, Mathematics

  Charles Sanders Peirce (1931). “Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce”

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• A first fact should surprise us, or rather would surprise us if we were not used to it. How does it happen there are people who do not understand mathematics? If mathematics invokes only the rules of logic, such as are accepted by all normal minds...how does it come about that so many persons are here refractory?

  Henri Poincare

  People, Mind, Ontology

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• But as the work proceeded I was continually reminded of the fable about the elephant and the tortoise. Having constructed an elephant upon which the mathematical world could rest, I found the elephant tottering, and proceeded to construct a tortoise to keep the elephant from falling. But the tortoise was not more secure than the elephant, and after some twenty years of very arduous toil, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing more that I could do in the way of making mathematical knowledge indubitable.

  Bertrand Russell

  Fall, Years, Elephants

  Bertrand Russell (1998). “Autobiography”, p.725, Psychology Press

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• Do you think it's possible that things that seem to be discrete in three dimensions might all be part of the same bigger object in four dimensions? ...What if humanity- that collective noun we so often employ- really is, at a higher level, a singular noun? What it what we perceive in three dimensions as seven billion individual human beings are really all just aspects of one giant being?

  Robert J. Sawyer

  Thinking, Humanity, What If

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• We admit, in geometry, not only infinite magnitudes, that is to say, magnitudes greater than any assignable magnitude, but infinite magnitudes infinitely greater, the one than the other. This astonishes our dimension of brains, which is only about six inches long, five broad, and six in depth, in the largest heads.

  Voltaire

  Long, Brain, Ontology

  Voltaire (2016). “Voltaire – The Philosophical Works: Treatise On Tolerance, Philosophical Dictionary, Candide, Letters on England, Plato’s Dream, Dialogues, The Study of Nature, Ancient Faith and Fable, Zadig…: From the French writer, historian and philosopher, famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion and freedom of expression”, p.1207, e-artnow

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• We think of the number "five" as applying to appropriate groups of any entities whatsoever - to five fishes, five children, five apples, five days... We are merely thinking of those relationships between those two groups which are entirely independent of the individual essences of any of the members of either group. This is a very remarkable feat of abstraction; and it must have taken ages for the human race to rise to it

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Children, Taken, Independent

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• To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Ontology, Logic, Aim

  Alfred North Whitehead (1958). “An Introduction to Mathematics”, p.4, New York : Oxford University Press, 1958 [c1948]

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• The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation of it.

  Eugene Wigner

  Ontology, Logic, Mysterious

  Eugene Paul Wigner, Jagdish Mehra, Arthur S. Wightman (1997). “Philosophical Reflections and Syntheses”, p.535, Springer Science & Business Media

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• It is true that of far the greater part of things, we must content ourselves with such knowledge as description may exhibit, or analogy supply; but it is true likewise, that these ideas are always incomplete, and that at least, till we have compared them with realities, we do not know them to be just. As we see more, we become possessed of more certainties, and consequently gain more principles of reasoning, and found a wider base of analogy.

  Samuel Johnson

  Knowledge, Reality, Ideas

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1837). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: Lives of the poets”, p.629

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• When you meditate you feel joy, harmony, peace, stillness, ecstasy, laughter, certainty, courage, strength, awareness and immortality. In the beginning you will feel these things vaguely, a distant knocking at your castle door.

  Frederick Lenz

  Laughter, Buddhism, Doors

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• The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness. But the strongest argument against Christianity is also Christians-when they are somber and joyless, when they are self-righteous and smug in complacent consecration, when they are narrow and repressive, then Christianity dies a thousand deaths.

  Joseph C. Aldrich

  Christian, Self, Joy

  Joseph C. Aldrich, Joe Aldrich (1993). “Lifestyle Evangelism: Learning to Open Your Life to Those Around You”, Multnomah

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• The inherent preferences of organizations are clarity, certainty and perfection. The inherent nature of human relationships involves ambiguity, uncertainty, and imperfection. How one honors, balances, and integrates the needs of both is the real trick of feedback.

  Richard Pascale

  Inspirational, Educational, Real

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• Indecision is fatal. It is better to make a wrong decision than build up a habit of indecision. If you're wallowing in indecision, you certainty can't act - and action is the basis of success

  Marie Beynon Lyons Ray

  Decision, Action, Habit

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• Audiences aren't going to get rid of me. One thing I can say, with absolute certainty, is that my shows will still be performed when I'm dead, buried and forgotten. They're going to absolutely outlive me, which is a wonderful thing to think about.

  Cameron Mackintosh

  Thinking, Wonderful, Forgotten

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• The only certainty is that we never know what tomorrow holds. We live for today, life is short, so let's enjoy it together while we can.

  Jinxx

  Life Is Short, Today Life, Bvb

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• We have to deal with this new type of threat in a way we haven’t yet defined. . . . With a low-probability, high-impact event like this . . . If there’s a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.

  Dick Cheney

  Impact, Events, Nuclear

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• As its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we cant predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe. Poised between intransigent scepticism and uncritical credulity, it is par excellence the literature of the open mind.

  John Brunner

  Mind, Excellence, Different

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