Quotes About Certainty

317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is so, because mathematical reality is built that way.

When you get a promise from God, it is worth just as much as a fulfillment.

the Great Redemption that God's love has provided. The everlasting certainty, the wonderful sufficiency, the infinite efficacy of the Holiness that God has prepared for us in His Son, are all revealed in this blessed, Holy in Christ. 'The Holy Ones in Christ Jesus!

The value of the promise depends on the promiser; faith in the promise depends on my knowledge of the promiser.

And yet what she has said--the lying brain--this is familiar; this has happened to him. Not exactly like this, not utter terrifying madness, but he knows his brain has told him things he has traveled around the world to forget. That the mind cannot be trusted is a certainty.

A patient may say that he has spent certain months suffering major depression, but this is a way of imposing measurement on the immeasurable. All that one can really say for certain is that one has known major depression, and that one does or does not happen to be experiencing it at any given present moment.

Everything I ever said to you was true and is true.

There was a satisfaction in being right and a terror in finding so much evidence that the world didn't work the way you or most other people thought it did.

You couldn't count on Providence for anything ever.

she spent a lot of time convincing herself that what you saw, even what you felt, had an unreliable relationship to what was actually there. What was actually there was reality, regardless of whether you saw it or how you felt about it.

It matters what's true. - Ann Druyan

me for anything

She sounded pretty certain. I wasn't so confident.

No. Here we can see why Pascal's wager, Kierkegaard's leap of faith, and other epistemological ponzi schemes won't do.

As long as a person maintains that his beliefs represent an actual state of the world (visible or invisible; spiritual or mundane), he must believe that his beliefs are a consequence of the way the world is. This, by definition, leaves him vulnerable to new evidence.

To speak truthfully is to accurately represent one's beliefs. But candor offers no assurance that one's beliefs about the world are true.

Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about.

every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which it has no evidence.

Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.

The pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth.

The certainty that life cannot be long, and the probability that it will be much shorter than nature allows, ought to awaken every man to the active prosecution of whatever he is desirous to perform. It is true, that no diligence can ascertain success; death may intercept the swiftest career; but he who is cut off in the execution of an honest undertaking has at least the honour of falling in his rank, and has fought the battle, though he missed the victory.

Those who take little thought find it easy to pronounce an opinion. - On Optimism

Anything thrice affirmed is true.

Why should such an angel be plunged so low as into the vulgar offices of domestic life? Were she mine, I should hardly wish to see her a mother unless there were a kind of moral certainty that minds like hers could be propagated.