Quotes About Certainty

A thousand times, they nearly killed themselves off with political bickering and moral certainty and a lethal distaste for compromise. A thousand times they might have become nothing but a memory in the mind of God.

I believe in God the way I believe in quarks,' she said coolly. 'People whose business it is to know about quantum physics or religion tell me they have good reason to believe that quarks and God exist. And they tell me that if I wanted to devote my life to learning what they've learned, I'd find quarks and God just like they did.

A thousand times, they nearly killed themselves off with political bickering and moral certainty and a lethal distaste for compromise.

Most men were simple. They were looking for security, or power, or a feeling of usefulness or of certainty or competence. A cause to fight for, a problem to solve, a place to fit in. There were many possibilities but once you grasped what a man was looking for, you had the beginnings of understanding.

And Meredith says that reminds her of a Camus novel, the one about the plague, and she tells the story of it, the tale holding you in thrall, and she ends her version with a line you'll write down in your notebook, the place where the atheist doctor hollers at a priest: All your certainties aren't worth one strand of a woman's hair.

The American religion-so far as there is one anymore-seems to be doubt. Whoever believes the least wins, because he'll never be found wrong.

The American religion—so far as there is one anymore—seems to be doubt. Whoever believes the least wins, because he'll never be found wrong.

The weak spots in our union are there from the git-go—aren't they always? But every difference lures me, for if I can yield to Warren's way of being, his cool certainty can replace my ragtag—intermittently drunken—lurching around.

Lo que más duele de la juventud no son las hostias que da el mundo, sino las estúpidas esperanzas que se hacen pasar por certezas.

He was never quite certain what he thought about anything until he had tested his opinion for seaworthiness in the course of some polemical storm.

Fatalism is now offered, not as just one possible philosophical attitude among others with reasons given for and against it, but as a fact backed by the tremendous authority of science.

I read my books with diligence, and mounting skill, and gathering certainty. I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life.

Understand from the first this certainty. Butterflies don't write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn't mean they don't know, in their own way, what they are. That they don't know they are alive—that they don't feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans.

I simply was not able to risk wrecking her world, and I could see no possible way I could move the whole kingdom. So I left her with the only thing I could—the certainty of a little more time.

The whole business of what's reality and what isn't has never been solved and probably never will be. So I don't care to be too definite about anything. I have a lot of edges called Perhaps and almost nothing you can call Certainty.

What is certain in the rational realm is by no means certain in the kingdom of swoon.

We may be touched by the most powerful of suppositions--even to a certainty--as we stand in the rose petals of the sun and hear a murmur from the wind no louder than the sound it makes as it dozes under the bee's wings. This, too, I suggest, is the weather, and worthy of report.

Why do people keep asking to see God's identity papers when the darkness opening into morning is more than enough? Certainly any god might turn away in disgust. Think of Sheba approaching the kingdom of Solomon. Do you think she had to ask, "Is this the place?

You don't need proof. You just need an inclination

My bias is that it does exist. But I would never say that I know that. Until I prove it.

It's hard to say where is the bigger hubris, in their convictions or in the arrogance of carrying them to a third decimal point

Alas, for me, a belief is not something you are born into or that you simply choose to adopt one day. Belief, for me, calls for plausibility. And so I continue my wanderings.

Alas! Victor, when falsehood can look so like the truth, who can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?

Before you sign my death-warrant, be sure that you are yourself safe.