Quotes About Certainty

We treat our encounters with them with carefree casualness. We are certain that our relationships will naturally take care of themselves.

There is a remarkable sentence of Pascal according to which we know too little to be dogmatists and too much to be skeptics, which expresses beautifully what Plato conveys through his dialogues.

Three stages of truth for scientists: (1) It's not true. (2) If it is true, it's not very important. (3) We knew it all along.

Only individual opinions are fixed and dogmatic.

experience is the evidence

The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weathers is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant of experience.

Yes, he thought, I am ready, I have always been ready, I am ready at least.

Yes, he thought, I am ready, I have always been ready, I am ready at last.

We live untruth amid evidence of untruth.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.15

When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.

You might not know when it's wrong, but you sure know when it's right.

You'd have to trust in Hope," said Fern. "Is that it?" No," Ragginbone replied shortly. "Hope needs something tangible to sustain it. You would have to rely on Faith. Only Faith can endure in the teeth of the evidence.

I am his lover. They had made no promises, no vows; this was an interlude which might end with the next sunset or ebb with the changing tide. Yet she knew, with a certainty that belongs only to the young, that this was for always. Whether she had a year, or a week, or just a few hours, she would make it last forever.

Do not give way to useless alarm; though it is right to be prepared for the worst, there is no occasion to look on it as certain.

Where so many hours have been spent in convincing myself that I am right, is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?

It is particularly incumbent on those who never change their opinion, to be secure of judging properly at first.

Facts are such horrid things!

Oh! write, write. Finish it at once. Let there be an end of this suspense. Fix, commit, condemn yourself.

I will not allow books to prove any thing. But how shall we prove any thing? We never shall.

I will not allow books to prove anything.

I beg your pardon; one knows exactly what to think.

Where the mind is perhaps rather unwilling to be convinced, it will always find something to support its doubts.

I lay it down as a general rule, Harriet, that if a woman doubts as to whether she should accept a man or not, she certainly ought to refuse him. If she can hesitate as to 'Yes,' she ought to say 'No' directly. It is not a state to be safely entered into with doubtful feelings, with half a heart.