Quotes About Certainty

Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.

Es bedeutete: mehr Prüfungen, aber auch da muss ich sagen, ich hab ganz gerne feste Perspektiven, vorhersehbare Paniksituationen, auf die ich meine Ängste konzentrieren kann.

he never knows what he's saying. He says everything, so he has to be right some of the time.

Even in expecting, one leaps away from the possible and gets a footing in the real. It is for its reality that what is expected is expected. By the very nature of expecting, the possible is drawn into the real, arising from it and returning to it.

Do we know ourselves—our "self"? How are we supposed to be ourselves if we are not our selves? And how can we be our selves without knowing who we are, such that we are certain of being the ones we are?

The rigorousness of restraint is other than the one of the "exactitude" of a loose, indifferent "reasoning" which belongs equally to everyone and whose results are compelling within the sphere of its own claims to certainty. Such results are compelling, however, only because the claim to truth is content with the correctness that comes from deduction and from insertion into a regulated and calculable order.

But anyone who only expects thinking to give assurances, and awaits the day when we can go beyond it as unnecessary, is demanding that thought annihilate itself.

becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to.

while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty

E je une mê vecje massime chê che, quant che si à scartât l'impussibil, ce che al reste, ancje se improbabil, e scuen jessi la veretât.

Tell us the truth, for there lies your only hope of safety.

Nichts ist trügerischer als eine offenkundige Tatsache.

Es preferible la verdad, cualquiera que sea, a una duda indefinida.

What did you do. Hopkins, after you had made certain that you had made certain of nothing?

It was easier to know it than to explain why I know it. If you were asked to prove that two and two made four, you might find some difficulty, and yet you are quite sure of the fact.

Any truth is better than indefinite doubt.

When the impossible has been eliminated, all that remains no matter how improbable is possible.

when they both have equal confidence.

The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.

There was no certainty; only the appeal to that mocking oracle they called History, who gave her sentence only when the jaws of the appealer had long since fallen to dust.

Nu puteai fi sigur; puteai doar s? recurgi la acel oracol batjocoritor care se numeÈ™te istorie È™i care pronun?? sentinÈ›a abia dup? ce gura celui care-l consult? s-a umplut de mult cu ??rân?.

The Devil is precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone...

Certain things have to be, the sun has to rise.

FRANK, peeved: The trouble with you is, you don't believe in anything. JIM: And your trouble is that you believe in anything. You didn't see my kid this morning, did you?