Quotes About Certainty

if you don't have doubts you're either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants-in-the-pants of faith. They keep it alive and moving.

Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.

Lord, I believe; help my unbelief' is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough.

If it please you, the lady's name again? says Reginald. His quill is poised. If God had come to Reginald and not to Moses in the burning bush, he would have asked him how to spell the great I AM so he'd be sure he had it right.

Maybe the truth of it is that it's too good not to be true.

To be accused was to be convicted, and to be convicted was to be punished; the one always following the other with immutable certainty.

Faith: not wanting to know what the truth is.

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

Belief means not wanting to know what is true.

It is not doubt but certainty that drives you mad...

Not doubt, CERTAINTY is what drives one insane

Einer hat immer Unrecht: aber mit zweien beginnt die Wahrheit. Einer kann sich nicht beweisen: aber zweie kann man bereits nicht widerlegen.

there may even be puritanical fanatics of conscience, who prefer to put their last trust in a sure nothing, rather than in an uncertain something.

synthetic judgments a priori should not be possible at all; we have no right to them; in our mouths they are nothing but false judgments.

When I came to men, then found I them resting on an old infatuation: all of them thought they had long known what was good and bad for men.

No matter how strongly a thing may be believed, strength of belief is no criterion of truth.' But what is truth? Perhaps a kind of belief that has become a condition of life?

it is improbable that you are not mistaken, but why should it be the truth?

We see that science also rests on faith; there is simply no science without presuppositions

If there are any persons who contest a received opinion ... let us thank them for it, open our minds to listen to them, and rejoice that there is some one to do for us what we otherwise ought, if we have any regard for either the certainty or the vitality of our convictions, to do with much greater labor for ourselves. —John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.

We would not let ourselves be burned to death for our opinions: we are not sure enough of them for that.

Only a person of deep faith can afford the luxury of skepticism.

Scepticism is never certain of itself, being less a firm intellectual position than a pose to justify bad behavior.