Certainty Quotes - Page 33

• The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty.

  Franz Kafka

  Spiritual, Giving, World

  Franz Kafka (1954). “Wedding preparations in the country: and other posthumous prose writings. With notes by Max Brod”

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• Uncertainty is wondrous, and.. certainty, were it to be real, would be moral death.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Real, Would Be, Moral

  Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1999). “The End of the World as We Know it: Social Science for the Twenty-first Century”, p.4, U of Minnesota Press

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• I do not have easy days at home now and I drift between fear and helplessness in sunny rooms where it is unspeakably cold. Strange shudders of transformation, bodily experienced to the point of vulnerability, visions of mysteries until the certainty of having died, ecstasies to the point of stony petrifaction, and a continuation of dreaming sad dreams.

  Georg Trakl

  Dream, Home, Vision

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• I am a product of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic...In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.

  C. S. Lewis

  Father, Book, Men

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• Psychological man may be going nowhere, but he aims to achieve a certain speed and certainty in going. Like his predecessor, the man of the market economy, he understands morality as that which is conducive to increased activity. The important thing is to keep going.

  Philip Rieff

  Men, Important, May

  Philip Rieff (1987). “The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud”, p.41, University of Chicago Press

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• He had found the band of jackals he needed. But as Jack McCall rode through the center of town, he experienced the terrifying certainty that a man faces when he's about to make his own name famous. He lacked both a hero's calm and a coward's resolve to survive at any price.

  Walter Hill

  Fear, Hero, Men

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• Only one absolute certainty is possible to man, namely that at any given moment the feeling which he has exists.

  Thomas Huxley

  Men, Feelings, Absolute Certainty

  Thomas Henry Huxley, Henrietta A. Huxley (1908). “Aphorisms and reflections”

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• The difference between religion and science is the difference between thoughtless certainty and thoughtful doubt.

  Kedar Joshi

  Thoughtful, Differences, Doubt

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• The scientist has to take 95 per cent of his subject on trust. He has to because he can't possibly do all the experiments, therefore he has to take on trust the experiments all his colleagues and predecessors have done. Whereas a mathematician doesn't have to take anything on trust. Any theorem that's proved, he doesn't believe it, really, until he goes through the proof himself, and therefore he knows his whole subject from scratch. He's absolutely 100 per cent certain of it. And that gives him an extraordinary conviction of certainty, and an arrogance that scientists don't have.

  Christopher Zeeman

  Believe, Science, Giving

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• While the dogmatist is harmful, the sceptic is useless ...; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or of ignorance. Knowledge is not so precise a concept as is commonly thought. Instead of saying 'I know this', we ought to say 'I more or less know something more or less like this'. ... Knowledge in practical affairs has not the certainty or the precision of arithmetic.

  Bertrand Russell

  Philosophy, Ignorance, Knowledge

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• The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. If you take your children for a picnic on a doubtful day, they will demand a dogmatic answer as to whether it will be fine or wet, and be disappointed in you when you cannot be sure.

  Bertrand Russell

  Nature, Children, Science

  Bertrand Russell, John G. Slater, Peter Köllner (1997). “Last Philosophical Testament: 1943-68”, p.379, Psychology Press

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• Sometimes I think death is a greater awareness than life. Life gives us the illusion of immortality, whereas death gives us the certainty of immortality

  Frederick Lenz

  Death, Thinking, Giving

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• I think I developed a culture of healthy skepticism of claims of certainty on any side of the aisle. A sort of boldness in using economics no matter where it leads you in political circles, you know, rather than worrying about being left-wing or right-wing or biased or this or that.

  David Plotz

  Thinking, Circles, Wings

  Source: www.slate.com

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• Almost all religions provide opportunities for human beings to convince themselves of their own righteousness, to speak in the name of God, and even to go to war on God's behalf. This 'blasphemy of certainty' is also rife among secularists who in their case have not God but science or the proletariat on their side.

  Stephen Prothero

  Atheist, War, Opportunity

  Stephen Prothero (2010). “God Is Not One”, p.356, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Life to the great majority is only a constant struggle for mere existence, with the certainty of losing it at last.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Struggle, Majority, Lasts

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• We want to have certainties and no doubts- results and no experiments- without even seeing that certainties can arise only through doubt and results only thorough experiment.

  Carl Jung

  Doubt, Want, Thorough

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• I can't keep from fooling around with our irrefutable certainties. It is, for example, a pleasure knowingly to mix up two and three dimensionalities, flat and spatial, and to make fun of gravity.

  M. C. Escher

  Fun, Two, Example

  "On Being a Graphic Artist" by M. C. Escher, 1981.

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• Phases of the creative process: Preparation-gathering impressions Incubation-letting go of certainties Immersion/Illumination-creative intervention/risk Revision-conscious structuring and editing of creative material.

  Gail Sheehy

  Letting Go, Creativity, Illumination

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• With the only certainty in our daily existence being change, and a rate of change growing always faster in a kind of technological leapfrog game, speed helps people think they are catching up.

  Gail Sheehy

  Thinking, Games, People

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• I have throughout been curious about how much we can be said to know and with what degree of certainty or doubtfulness.

  Bertrand Russell

  Curiosity, Degrees, Curious

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• There has to be certainty and there has to be clarity. There can't be ambiguity, .. This has to be certain, clear in all respects from all the parties so nobody is in any doubt about what the future holds.

  Tony Blair

  Party, Doubt, Clarity

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• All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self. What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself - a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required. I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.

  Philip Roth

  Player, Self, Identity

  "The Counterlife". Book by Philip Roth, 1986.

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• Politics have always covered two distinct kinds of problems: problems of administrative routine, and those that may be called 'questions of the moment.' A question of the moment is, indeed, a substitute for some notion, such as the idea of God, or hereditary monarchy, or national glory, that has hitherto acted as a symbol of human co-ordination. It provides no new positive certainty to replace the discredited certainty, but is what the name implies: the raising of a question which the old certainty no longer answers.

  Laura Riding

  Names, Ideas, Two

  "Poetry and Politics". "The Common Asphodel". Book by Robert Graves, 1949.

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• People have a need for certainty - and that need for certainty is in every human being, certainty that you can avoid pain, certainty that you can at least be comfortable. It's a survival instinct.

  Tony Robbins

  Pain, People, Survival

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• Some people get certainty by working harder and saying I'm going to master something. Some people get certainty by lowering their expectations, going 'it will never work. And they lose their dreams, but they get their needs. The needs are not like goals. They're not like belief systems that are built into you.

  Tony Robbins

  Dream, People, Goal

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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