Quotes About Certainty

An atheist is someone who is certain that God doesn't exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence.

Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science — by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans — teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us.

We must surrender our skepticism only in the face of rock-solid evidence. Science demands a tolerance for ambiguity.

In all our journeying through space and time, it is, so far, the only world on which we know with certainty that the matter of the Cosmos has become alive and aware.

La prueba de ausencia no es prueba de ausencia

saben realmente lo que afirman saber?

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absences

Una señal inequívoca del amor a la verdad —escribía John Locke en 1690—, es no mantener ninguna proposición con mayor seguridad de la que garantizan las pruebas en las que se basa.» En el tema de los ovnis, ¿cuál es la fuerza de las pruebas?

For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes.

la certeza absoluta siempre se nos escapará.

La ausencia de pruebas no es prueba de ausencia.

Yo no puedo cambiar la verdad! Yo no soy Dios. Ni siquiera estoy segura que él pudiese. No creo que Dios mismo pueda cambiar la verdad.

Sometimes faith in something is all you have.

We can do nothing about those who do, those fools who think that dogma equates with truth.

A] great deal of what we believe we do not know firsthand; instead we have faith in the knowledge of specialists.

Being afraid something is true is accepting the possibility. Accepting the possibility is the first step to believing.

Wizard's Ninth Rule A contradiction can not exist in reality. Not in part, nor in whole.

But in the end, we can't live our lives by 'what if' and 'if only.' We can only do the best we can to the best of our ability based on what we know. That's why the truth is so important.

My mother always said that if you predicted rain long enough, sooner or later you would get wet and be proven right.

Some truths, after a certain point, could be felt viscerally, and at that point everything clicked with the finality of a dead bolt on a prison of truth.

Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn't believing. It's where belief stops, because it isn't needed any more.

and the funny thing was that people who weren't entirely certain they were right always argued much louder than other people, as if the main person they were trying to convince were themselves.

WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU HADN'T SAVED HIM? Yes! The sun would have risen just the same, yes? NO Oh, come on. You can't expect me to believe that. It's an astronomical fact. THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN. ... Really? Then what would have happened, pray? A MERE BALL OF FLAMING GAS WOULD HAVE ILLUMINATED THE WORLD.

Granny Weatherwax was not lost. She wasn't the kind of person who ever became lost. It was just that, at the moment, while she knew exactly where SHE was, she didn't know the position of anywhere else.