Quotes About Certainty

I closed my eyes. I dreamed again the dream called Yes: the worst is true .

I don't want to believe. I want to know.

The principle of equal chance is of such sensitivity that any serious doubt about the loyalty of all participants already renders the principle's application impossible. For it is self-evident that one can hold open an equal chance only for those whom one is certain would do the same.

An historical truth is only true once

We are experiencing hyperpartisanship. Paradoxically, it is confusion within each camp—not certainty—that fuels the vehemence. It is because each side can't see its own compass clearly that makes it so distrustful and defiant whenever the other side suggests a direction.

Human beings often cling to their certainties for fear that their opinions will be proven false. But a certainty that cannot be called into question is not a certainty. Solid certainties are those that survive questioning. In order to accept questioning as the foundation for our voyage toward knowledge, we must be humble enough to accept that today's truth may become tomorrow's falsehood.

The most credible answers are the ones given by science, because science IS the search for the most credible answers available, not for answers pretending to certainty.

Science is not reliable because it provides certainty. It is reliable because it provides us with the best answers we have at present. Science is the most we know so far about the problems confronting us. It is precisely its openness, the fact that it constantly calls current knowledge into question, which guarantees that the answers it offers are the best so far available: if you find better answers, these new answers become science.

The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical absence of certainty.

La precariedad de la verdad no implica que no podamos ponernos de acuerdo.

Lo que nos hace avanzar es la duda y no la certeza.

Science, I believe, is a passionate search for always newer ways to conceive the world. Its strength lies not in the certainties it reaches but in a radical awareness of the vastness of our ignorance.

Therefore the scientific quest for knowledge is not nourished by certainty, it is nourished by a radical lack of certainty. Its way is fluid, capable of continuous evolution, has immense strength and a subtle magic. It is able to overthrow the order of things and reconceive the world time and again.

I may not know something with certainty, but I can still assign a lesser or greater degree of probability to something.

The solidity of the classical vision of the world is nothing other than our own myopia. The certainties of classical physics are just probabilities. The well-defined and solid picture of the world given by the old physics is an illusion.

Por un lado se tiene la certeza de conocer la verdad. Por otro está el reconocimiento de nuestra ignorancia y la duda perpetua de toda certeza. La religión, especialmente el monoteísmo, encuentra una profunda dificultad de aceptar el pensamiento del cambio, el pensamiento crítico. Eva recogió la manzana para llegar a saber. Pero ante el dios que quiere ser el Dios Único e indiscutible fue el primero de los pecados.

Science is the human adventure of accepting uncertainty, exploring ways of thinking about the world, and being ready to overturn any and all certainties we have possessed to this point. This is among the most beautiful of human adventures.

The self-confidence of the warrior is not the self-confidence of the average man. The average man seeks certainty in the eyes of the onlooker and calls that self-confidence. The warrior seeks impeccability in his own eyes and calls that humbleness. The average man is hooked to his fellow men, while the warrior is hooked only to infinity.

When I come to a design decision, people know that is that.

She had never met anyone who was more of a sure thing, sure to stay put in her life now that he'd walked through its door. Now she could unhook her hopes from lost love. Now she didn't have to go looking for a future.

Of all the things I had learned in my life, nothing was so simple as fanatics imagined.

Don't you give me that postmodern bullshit. There is truth, There is a truth. And what you want, or you feel, or you need, isn't going to change the truth. Any more than it's going to topple a skyscraper. There's truth, and there's belief. Don't call a mule a stallion.

The university doesn't THINK; the university KNOWS. If the university says it's Thursday, then it's Thursday.

You can almost believe what you know is not true when you really have to.