Certainty Quotes - Page 34

• If you look around the world and I can tell you right now that the majority of the planet is focused on certainty and significance. And those two absolutely guarantee unhappiness. Because if you're driven by significance, it doesn't matter what you achieve, it's never enough.

  Tony Robbins

  Two, Majority, Looks

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• If you are driven by certainty you can't grow. If you are driven by certainty if somebody messes with you, you can get very intense, even violent, depending upon the person's personality.

  Tony Robbins

  Personality, Intense, Violent

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• In a world of moral certainty, the unthinkable becomes permissible.

  Cullen Murphy

  World, Moral, Unthinkable

  Cullen Murphy (2012). “God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World”, p.22, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• He who wills believes with a fair amount of certainty that will and action are somehow one; he ascribes the success, the carrying out of the willing, to the will itself, and thereby enjoys an increase of the sensation of power which accompanies all success.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Believe, Action, Willpower

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2013). “The Selected Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche”, p.549, Simon and Schuster

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• In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.

  Cesare Pavese

  Writing, Effort, Pages

  Cesare Pavese (1961). “The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935-1950”, New York : Walker

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• Because of its concrete content, sense-certainty immediately appears as the richest kind of knowledge, indeed a knowledge of infinite wealth for which no bounds can be found, either when we reach out into space and time in which it is dispersed, or when we take a bit of this wealth, and by division enter into it. Moreover, sense-certainty appears to be the truest knowledge ... but, in the event, this very certainty proves itself to be the most abstract and poorest truth. All that it says about what it knows is just that it is; and its truth contains nothing but the sheer being of the thing.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Space, Events, Division

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• I imagine God to be like my father. My father was always the voice of certainty in my life. Certainty in the wisdom, certainty in the path, certainty always in God. For me God is certainty in everything. Certainty that everything is good and everything is God.

  Yehuda Berg

  Fathers Day, Voice, Certainty In Life

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• I examined my Liberalism and found it like an addiction to roulette. Here, though the odds are plain, and the certainty of loss apparent to anyone with a knowledge of arithmetic, the addict, failing time and again, is convinced he yet is graced with the power to contravene natural laws. The roulette addict, when he invariably comes to grief, does not examine either the nature of roulette, or of his delusion, but retires to develop a new system, and to scheme for more funds.

  David Mamet

  Grief, Loss, Odds

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• We say that we often see animals in our dreams, but we forget that almost always we are ourselves animals therein, deprived of that reasoning power which projects upon things the light of certainty; on the contrary we bring to bear on the spectacle of life only a dubious vision, extinguished anew every moment by oblivion, the former reality fading before that which follows it as one projection of a magic lantern fades before the next as we change the slide.

  Marcel Proust

  Dream, Animal, Reality

  Marcel Proust (1981). “Remembrance of Things Past: Swann's way. Within a budding grove”, New York : Random House

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• The truth has no need to be uttered to be made apparent, and ... one may perhaps gather it with more certainty, without waiting for words and without even taking any account of them, from countless outward signs, even from certain invisible phenomena, analogous in the sphere of human character to what atmospheric changes are in the physical world.

  Marcel Proust

  Truth, Character, Waiting

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume III: The Guermantes Way”, p.80, Modern Library

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• The faith towards God in Christ must be sure and steadfast, that it may solace and make glad the conscience, and put it to rest. When a man has this certainty, he has overcome the serpent; but if he be doubtful of the doctrine, it is for him very dangerous to dispute with the devil.

  Martin Luther

  Men, Devil, Overcoming

  Martin Luther (1848). “The table talk or familiar discourse of Martin Luther, tr. by W. Hazlitt”, p.19

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• Once you get it into your head that somebody is controlling events, you can interpret everything in that light and find no reasonable certainty anywhere.

  Isaac Asimov

  Light, Events, Reasonable

  Isaac Asimov (2012). “Foundation's Edge”, p.229, Spectra

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• Can any man say with certainty that he was happy at a particular moment of time which he remembers as being delightful? Remembering it certainly makes him happy, because he realizes how happy he could have been, but at the actual moment when the alleged happiness was occurring, did he really feel happy? He was like a man owning a piece of ground in which, unknown to himself, a treasure lay buried.

  Eugene Delacroix

  Men, Pieces, Treasure

  "Journal of Delacroix". Book by Hubert Wellington, translated by Lucy Norton, p. 227, 1980.

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• Does not all the world know that when in autumn the Bismarcks of the world, or they who are bigger than Bismarcks, meet at this or that delicious haunt of salubrity, the affairs of the world are then settled in little conclaves, with grater ease, rapidity, and certainty than in large parliaments or the dull chambers of public offices?

  Anthony Trollope

  Autumn, Office, Doe

  Anthony Trollope (2015). “The Palliser Novels: Complete Parliamentary Chronicles (All Six Novels in One Volume): Can You Forgive Her? + Phineas Finn + The Eustace Diamonds + Phineas Redux + The Prime Minister + The Duke’s Children”, p.2289, e-artnow

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• Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh?

  Leslie Stephen

  Angel, Men, Laughing

  Sir Leslie Stephen (1903). “An Agnostic's Apology, and Other Essays”

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• Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one. What is most repellent in the System of Nature - after the recipe for making eels from flour - is the audacity with which it decides that there is no God, without even having tried the impossibility. If God did not exist, he would have to be invented." But all nature cries aloud that he does exist: that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence on it.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Order, Eels, Doubt

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• There is always a pleasure in unravelling a mystery, in catching at the gossamer clue which will guide to certainty.

  Elizabeth Gaskell

  Mystery, Clue, Pleasure

  Elizabeth Gaskell (2010). “The Complete Works of Elizabeth Gaskell (20+ Books)”, p.1045, BookCaps Study Guides

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• Certainty, not data, is knowledge.

  L. Ron Hubbard

  Data

  "The Factors". Book by L. Ron Hubbard, 1967.

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• The new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate, and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible. Such a will can henceforth be relied on with confidence and certainty.

  Johann Gottlieb Fichte

  Opposites, Decision, Soil

  Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1968). “Addresses to the German nation”

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• In our worship of certainty we must distinguish between the sound certainty and the sham, between what is gold and what is tinsel; and then, when certainty is attained, we must remember that it is not the only good; that we can buy it at too high a price; that there is danger in perpetual quiescence as well as in perpetual motion; and that a compromise must be found in a principle of growth.

  Benjamin Cardozo

  Growth, Gold, Sound

  "The Growth of the Law". Book by Benjamin N. Cardozo, 1924.

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• All speech should be presumed to be protected by the Constitution, and a heavy burden should be placed on those who would censor to demonstrate with relative certainty that the speech at issue, if not censored, would lead to irremediable and immediate serious harm.

  Alan Dershowitz

  Issues, Freedom Of Speech, Serious

  Alan Dershowitz (2008). “Finding, Framing, and Hanging Jefferson: A Lost Letter, a Remarkable Discovery, and Freedom of Speech in an Age of Terrorism”, p.30, John Wiley & Sons

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• It has been said, and perhaps with truth, that the conclusions of Political Economy partake more of the certainty of the stricter sciences than those of most of the other branches of human knowledge.

  Thomas Malthus

  Political, Branches, Economy

  Thomas Malthus (2015). “An Essay on the Principle of Population and Other Writings”, p.240, Penguin UK

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• While we were never able to provide 100 percent certainty regarding the disposition of Iraq's proscribed weaponry, we did ascertain a 90-95 percent level of verified disarmament. This figure takes into account the destruction or dismantling of every major factory associated with prohibited weapons manufacture, all significant items of production equipment, and the majority of the weapons and agent produced by Iraq.

  Scott Ritter

  Iraq, Agents, Levels

  "Is Iraq a True Threat to the US?". Boston Globe, July 2002.

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• Religion seems to have always offered us that false duality ... the silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.

  Dan Simmons

  Space, Silence, Comfort

  Dan Simmons (2014). “The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle: Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion”, p.2195, Spectra

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• Is there any evidence to the contrary? I don't need certainty in order to act on a well-founded suspicion.

  Robert Charles Wilson

  Order, Needs, Suspicion

  "Julian Comstock: A Story of the 22nd Century". Book by Robert Charles Wilson, June 1, 2009.

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