Quotes About Certainty

The offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can't give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don't know anything like enough yet; that I haven't understood enough; that I can't know enough; that I'm always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn't have it any other way.

The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.

Did I ever think I might have been wrong? Yes, sometimes and briefly. But never because of the supposed majority against me.

What can be asserted without proof can be dissmissed without proof.

I am so made that I cannot believe.

This is a small episode in an unending argument between those who know they are right and therefore claim the mandate of heaven, and those who suspect that the human race has nothing but the poor candle of reason by which to light its way.

If the matter is one that can be settled by observation, make the observation yourself. Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. He did not do so because he thought he knew. Thinking that you know when in fact you don't is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone.

people can be better off believing in something than in nothing, however untrue that something may be.

Faith of that sort—the sort that can stand up at least for a while in a confrontation with reason—is now plainly impossible.

That is not blind faith but just the opposite: faith continually tested, corrected and provisionally defended by the testimony of our senses and our common sense.

And do you think that unto such as you A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew God gave a secret, and denied it me? Well, well—what matters it? Believe that, too! —THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM (RICHARD LE GALLIENNE TRANSLATION)

Which mere primate is so damn sure that he can know the mind of god?

To believe in a god is in one way to express a willingness to believe in anything. Whereas to reject the belief is by no means to profess belief in nothing.

so much the greater is the triumph of faith in nevertheless believing.

Tertullian put it, either disarmingly or annoyingly according to your taste. I believe it because it is absurd. It is impossible to quarrel seriously with such a view. If one must have faith in order to believe something, or believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished.

Charlotte, meanwhile, has peeked into the oven and then closed its door again, announcing, 'twenty more minutes' with the absolute confidence of a great chef, which by God she isn't.

I doubt if one ever accepts a belief until one urgently needs it.

After all the evidence is in--after you've run all the facts by everything you know--and you're still lost, you have to do some things on faith.

Why understand when you can believe?

He's not dumb, Biff, he just has a talent for belief.

Action based on hope just felt better than the paralysis of certainty.

but no one is more heavily burdened than a guy who thinks he knows a thing.

What will happen will happen and I won't waste my time worrying.

Christopher Paolini