Quotes About Certainty

No battle was hard, no decision was dangerous where there was no soggy uncertainty, no shapeless evasion to encounter.

By refusing to say 'It is,' you are refusing to say 'I am.

She had been proved right so eloquently, she had thought, that comments were unnecessary.

This was not the time for his old doubts. He felt that he could forgive anything to anyone, because happiness was the greatest agent of purification. He felt certain that every living being wished him well tonight

Un grande romanzo acuisce le vostre percezioni, vi fa sentire la complessità della vita e degli individui, e vi difende dall'ipocrita certezza della validità delle vostre opinioni, nella morale a compartimenti stagni.

the underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us...

What's certain is that I don't need the stress.

when what felt like a wide distribution of probable outcomes narrows to the inevitable.

To claim otherwise, to insist that our safety and our standing in the world required us to do all that we could for as long as we could in every single instance, was an abdication of moral responsibility, the certainty it offered a comforting lie.

We must talk and reach for common understandings, precisely because all of us are imperfect and can never act with the certainty that God is on our side; and yet at times we must act nonetheless, as if we are certain, protected from error only by providence.

Both Marty and Smalls knew that in politics, like religion, power lay in certainty—and that one man's certainty always threatened another's.

I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place. We are a motley crew, distinguished not only by our inability to explain ourselves to those who are more certain of their beliefs than we are but in many cases by our distance from the centers of our faith communities as well.

At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure.

Beene-beene. The truest truth.

Nothing was more wonderful than waiting for a happiness you could be sure of.

If his decision to keep us here in the Congo wasn't right, then what else might he be wrong about? It has opened up in my heart a sickening world of doubts and possibilities, where before I had only faith in my father and love for the Lord. Without that rock of certainty underfoot, the Congo is a fearsome place to have to sink or swim.

If you know you are on the right track, if you have this inner knowledge, then nobody can turn you off. No matter what they say.

count on this terrible

Faith and it's doubting me that she is! But 'tis the truth I be telling ye, Emma. On the heads of the Blessed Saints I do swear it's the truth I am speaking, mavourneen.

History is: + the lies of the victors + the self-delusions of the defeated + a raw onion sandwich + certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation

fait accompli

I had a theology professor once," I said to John, "who told us that religion was not about being certain but about living with uncertainty. It was about being comfortable with doubt, and maintaining the continuity of one's reverence for a profound mystery.

Being able to criticize our own certainties is often a painful struggle, demanding some courage as we try to stand back and impartially judge ourselves and our own responsibility.

there is nothing objectively that makes objectivity objectively true)