Quotes About Certainty

In a situation in which every rational person is telling you a fact and you're the one who denies it, doesn't that make you the one most likely wrong?

Moral certainty is intellectual immorality.

Setelah sekian lama membaca surat permintaan konsultasi, ada satu hal yang kupahami. Dalam berbagai kasus, sebenarnya si pengirim surat sudah menemukan jawabannya. Mereka berkonsultasi hanya demi memastikan bahwa orang lain juga membenarkan keputusan mereka.

If we know the truth, there's nothing to be afraid of,

I'm actually not a big fan of the word hope. I think it's a depressing word. I don't want to hope - I want to know. Like I don't hope there's a God, I know there's a God.

There's always the certainty that the opposite of what I might believe in might also be true.

The greater their ignorance, the stronger their opinions.

We so want to be right and so trust that our desire to be right is something that God would surely bless. Yet the desire to be right comes with a price: the fear of being wrong. And so, in a counter-intuitive way, this focus on being right seems to be the porridge we settle for when we exchange our birthright because we're famished and fear that father won't feed us.

There's no such thing in this world as absolute certainty. So accept that and go forward acting toward the best outcome no matter what.

How strong is a faith that can't stand up to a few honest questions?

Years ago on the flyleaf of my Bible I wrote in red ink, "The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it.

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Heb. 11:1).

Falsehood and error arise, not from our perceptions, but from the conclusions to which we jump about things which have not yet been established as true; in such cases further investigation may not confirm our first opinions, and may even disprove them. . . .

It is the nature of man to expose with laws of doubt & impatience, no feeling of wonder that he should a participant in such an incredible undertaking; but rather the shameful certainty that what has been willed without him must in some way resemble the productions of his own sand-castle magnificence.

While a "don't-know mind" is alive and full of possibilities, a mind that claims to know is a closed and stagnant one.

When you can do nothing, what can you do? [...] This is the most amazing, yet most obvious and logical answer: that in the certainty of death, one should get as much out of life as possible. Paradoxically it is the absence of choice in this matter that allows us to have more inner freedom.

But facts are chiels that winna ding, and downa be disputed.

Ruben Dario has said that the sorrow of the gods lies in not reaching death. As for men, if from the moment they are conscious, they could be sure of reaching death, they could be happy forever, But unfortunately, men are never sure of dying: they feel an obscure desire and a yearning to die but they always doubt that they will die. The sorrow of men, we declare, lies in never being certain of death.

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

You can't know, you can only believe - or not.

start with one true thing

We want to have certainties and no doubts--results and no experiments--without even seeing that certainties can arise only through doubt and results only through experiment.

From the beginning, I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security, and, though I could never prove to myself, it proved itself to me. I did not have the certainty, it had me.