Quotes About Certainty

Is a fixed income not a good thing? Does not everyone love to count on a sure thing? Especially every petty-bourgeois, narrow-minded Frenchman? the 'ever needy' man?

For how can a man stand, unless he have something sure under his feet. Can a man tread the unstable water all his life, and call that standing? Better give in and drown at once.

It affords a violent prejudice against almost every science, that no prudent man, however sure of his principles, dares prophesy concerning any event, or foretell the remote consequences of things.

No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.

...skepticism can never provide firm ground under a man's feet. And perhaps, after all, we need firm ground.

Some men are just as sure of the truth of their opinions as are others of what they know.

He must pull out his own eyes, and see no creature, before he can say, he sees no God; He must be no man, and quench his reasonable soul, before he can say to himself, there is no God.

Men will die upon dogma but will not fall victim to a conclusion.

A man's religion consists, not of the many things he is in doubt of and tries to believe, but of the few he is assured of and has no need of effort for believing.

Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say that he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe.

The man of faith who has never experienced doubt is not a man of faith.

In the affairs of this world, men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it.

Where men of judgment creep and feel their way, The positive pronounce without dismay.

If a man will stand up and assert, and repeat and re-assert, that two and two do not make four, I know nothing in the power of argument that can stop him.

One man's faith is another man's delusion

...while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.

Every man seeks the truth, but God only knows who has found it.

There is no man so blind as one who has made up his mind.

Faith is among men what gravity is among planets and suns.

Every man is fully satisfied that there is such a thing as truth, or he would not ask any question.

If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust.

If there is a God, man's immortality is certain. If not, Immortality would not be worth having.

A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.

We pass through elementary school, high school, and maybe college, and in one sense every diploma is an award for developing a more sophisticated ignorance. Education reinforces the habit of seeing the world through a certain lens. We