Quotes About Certainty

It is not possible to unknow what you do know - the result of that is fanaticism.

Farmers and ranchers need long-term certainty about who they will be able to sell to and under what terms.

I'm betting 100,000 that I'm the fastest man on the planet.

I want to be a woman who has a little bit more figured out, who doesn't have so many doubts.

My understanding of religion and science is that they're both arrogant schools of thought, and whether they acknowledge it or not they continually broadcast the idea that they have the world figured out. And what they don't know, they have a theory for which is probably correct. It feels like that shrinks the world, rather than expands it.

Is that your final answer?

The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness.

I pondered what I should do and wasn't sure. Then it just finally became clear.

How can you take seriously someone who likes to believe something because he finds it 'comforting'?

I have never doubted. I have had a firm belief in God and the church.

I'm very firm in my beliefs.

I'm a firm believer that when something feels right, you go with it.

Whoever feels predestined to see and not to believe will find all believers too noisy and pushy: he guards against them.

Whoever believes he knows why everything is as it is has hold of nothing.

Few delights can equal the presence of one whom we trust utterly.

If everything isn't black and white, I say, 'Why the hell not?'

Everybody in the Middle East wants to explain why they're right.

I'm basically a happy person. I'm content with my life and my wife and my family. But you do reach a point where you start to question the absolutes that are supposedly out there, and you realize that there simply are no absolutes.

I feel the first ten years of my career I really didn't care what the director said because I felt so arrogant. I was so certain about what should happen. But then I became a good listener.

I think it's the tendency to want to create gods and monotheistic absolutes and absolute certainties that is the continual temptation in human thought - that's the great danger. Every time we create a god, we diminish humanity.

Nothing is improbable until it moves into past tense.

You go back to T. H. Huxley, who coined the term, what he said - and I came to believe he is right - is that agnosticism asserts not only that he himself didn't know if there was a God or not, but that nobody could know.

Love and doubt have never been on speaking terms.

I'm always having a crisis of faith, with everything. People who are certain are terrifying to me. That's how religious wars get started.