Quotes About Certainty

Do trees dream?" "Trees? No . . ." "They do," Bran said with sudden certainty. "They dream tree dreams. I dream of a tree sometimes. A weirwood, like the one in the godswood. It calls to me. The wolf dreams are better. I smell things, and sometimes I can taste the blood.

We have in fact only two certainties in this world - that we are not everything and that we will die.

Art is made to disturb, science reassures.

Art disturbs, science reassures.

Art is meant to disturb. Science reassures.

Testing may convincingly demonstrate the presence of bugs, but can never demonstrate their absence."- Edsger W. Dijkstra, Computing Pioneer (1930–2002), "Programming as a discipline of mathematical nature," Am. Math. Monthly, 81 (1974), No. 6, pp. 608–12.

Years later he would add that Italians have "no other aim than to live" because they "discovered a long time ago that there is only one life and that certainty has made them allergic to cruelty.

They must find it difficult, those who have taken authority as truth, rather than truth as authority.

If there is one class of person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt.

My Tom died as babies do, gently and without complaint. Because they have been such a little time with us, they seem to hold to life but weakly. I used to wonder if it was so because the memory of Heaven still lived within them, so that in leaving here they do not fear death as we do, who no longer know with certainty where it is our spirits go. This, I thought, must be the kindness that God does for them and for us, since He gives so many infants such a little while to bide with us.

A woman had thrown her own babe down a well. When she was brought to answer for the murder, she said that one great good had come of her evil act. At last, she said, she was free of the uncertainty that had plagued her every waking thought: was she numbered among the damned or the saved? Her whole life had been bent about that question. Finally, she knew.

One learns by doing the thing; for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try.

Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.

Ignorance never settles a question.

When I do things without any explanation, but just with spontaneity ... I can be sure that I am right.

The conclusions of passion are the only reliable ones.

You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

Oh! Let us never, never doubt What nobody is sure about.

When we hear news we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.

To be positive: to be mistaken at the top of one's voice.

Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth.

Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worst.

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is.