Quotes About Certainty

To fear to face an issue to believe that the worst is true. --Atlas Shrugged

The Council of Scholars has said that we all know the things which exist and therefore the things which are not known by all do not exist.

the Council of Schools has said that there are no mysteries.

Some times you have to believe it before you can see it

No es lo que no sabes lo que te mete en problemas. Es lo que sabes con certeza pero que no es verdad.»

We have believed in any number of things - the tooth fairy, cold fusion, and benefits of smoking, the free lunch - that turn out not to exist. We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don't know yet which ones they are.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. —VOLTAIRE

Samuel Willard

And yet we knew, for a certainty, that when first emissaries of Earth went walking among the planets, Earth's other sons would be dreaming not about such expeditions but about a piece of bread.

ignoramus et ignorabimus

The "well-informed" think they know something about matters that the experts are reluctant even to speak of. Information at second hand always gives an impression of tidiness, in contrast with the data at the scientist's disposal, full of gaps and uncertainties.

The popular saying is "seeing is believing," but in Christ, believing leads to seeing.

Passiamo metà della vita a deridere ciò in cui altri credono, e l'altra metà a credere in ciò che altri deridono.

Only those could maintain certainty who were themselves of great permanence – like the stars, the mountains and the sea.

Only those could maintain certainty who were themselves of great permanence – like the stars, the mountains and the sea. And they in turn possessed no words with which to tell what they had come to know from their long existence.

This deep agnosticism is more than the refusal of conventional agnosticism to take a stand on whether God exists or whether the mind survives bodily death. It is the willingness to embrace the fundamental bewilderment of a finite, fallible creature as the basis for leading a life that no longer clings to the superficial consolations of certainty.

you only set out to prove what you have already decided to believe.

Great doubt—great awakening; Little doubt—little awakening; No doubt—no awakening.

By emphasizing doubt rather than belief, perplexity rather than certainty, and questions rather than answers, Zen practice granted me the freedom to imagine.

All believers, by definition, must be agnostics. The moment you declare that you believe in God or the law of karma, you are acknowledging that you do not know whether they exist or not. For if you did know, you would have no need to believe. Only fools, fanatics, and omniscient beings would claim to know such things.

As an engineer, he knew that a bucket-load of philosophical principles wasn't worth a grain of good hard fact.

I said yes because I didn't want to do anything wrong.

As I have always held it a crime to anticipate evils I will believe it a good comfortable road untill I am conpelled to beleive differently.

Intuition he did not reject. He knew that it is part of our equipment, and the sensitiveness he valued in himself and in others is connected with it. But he also knew that it can make dancing dervishes of us all, and that the man who believes a thing is true because he feels it in his bones, is not really very far removed from the man who believes it on the authority of a policeman's truncheon.