Quotes About Certainty

Belief in the absence of illusions is itself an illusion.

These are facts, these are not imaginary things.

If you don't have religious fallibilism, you have immense problems.

If you believe in what you do, you are immortal. The day that you don't believe it, the day you're taking other people's opinion, you better go to Tijuana.

It is certain because it is impossible.

I like to have the impression that whatever is happening is true.

Ancient Rome was as confident of the immutability of its world and the continual expansion and improvement of the human lot as we are today.

Blackjack is very scientific. There's always a right answer and a wrong answer. Do you take a card, increase your bet, bet big or bet small. There's absolutely a right and wrong answer.

We believe, it seems, where we ought to reason. We reason where we ought to believe. We believe too blindly and not blindly enough. We reason too closely and not closely enough.

Ma abbiamo paura, viviamo sempre tremando e per questo la vita ci disgusta, ma l'amiamo anche ed è tremendo andare a letto ogni sera senza la certezza di svegliarsi al mattino.

I might as well doubt of my own being, as of the being of those things I actually see and feel.

In her mother's album the activists always looked so relaxed, certain the world would tumble at nothing more than a gentle nudge and the strum of a guitar. Maybe it was the way the sun was always shining in the photographs, or her mother's face, simultaneously eighteen and fifty at the centre of every frame, but it had all seemed so harmless.

To demand the absolute and to be content with absolutely nothing else results in a skepticism.

Di tutte le cose sicure la più certa è il dubbio.

La verità è figlia del tempo e non dell'autorità.

Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.

Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

I don't think it's spiritually economic to be a skeptic about absolutely everything.

Selfawareness—recognizing a feeling as it happens—is the keystone of emotional intelligence . . . the ability to monitor feelings from moment to moment is crucial to psychological insight and understanding. . . . People with greater certainty about their feelings are better pilots of their lives, having a surer sense of how they really feel about personal decisions.

This is your last chance, Rhine Fontaine." "Understood. But I won't be changing my mind.

I've learned that sometimes I have to give up my right to know and simply believe that God's knowing is enough.