Quotes About Certainties

It's enough that if I am rich in anything, it is in perplexities rather then in certaintes.

as though frustration were an unbearable form of self-doubt, a state in which we can so little tolerate not knowing what we want, not knowing whether it is available, and not having it that we fabricate certainties to fill the void (we fill in the gaps with states of conviction). The frustration is itself a temptation scene, one in which we must invent something to be tempted by.

The windows were one of Tony's Certainties, and I disagreed with him and stood against him over them from the beginning, because I believe a house ought first and foremost to be cosy and to allow you to forget the outside when you're in it.

One thing we knew for certain- despite all our certainties, it was very difficult to guess what one individual was thinking at any given moment.

Inside the word emergency is emerge; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.

Inside the word emergency is emerge; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.

But that doesn't stop it being true. And far more often than it is bewildering or frightening, scientific truth is wonderful, beautiful. You need courage to face the frightening, bewildering conclusions of science; and with the courage comes the opportunity to experience all that wonder and beauty. The courage to cut yourself adrift from comforting, tame apparent certainties and embrace the wild truth. Like my friend Julia did when she lost her Christian faith.

But time...how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

how time first grounds us and then confounds us....give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

This was a typical statement from my mother: lucid, opinionated, explicitly impatient of opposing views. Her dominance of the family, and her certainties about the world, made things usefully clear in childhood, restrictive in adolescence, and grindingly repetitive in adulthood.

Time … give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

But time … how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time … give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

Poetry exists partly to undermine the certainties of an accepted intellectual system, by opening a fissure of awareness at which the reality of the unconquered world may enter.

We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, but struggling against the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.

The few certainties in our existences are pain, death and bereavement.

The emotionally mature individual should completely accept the fact that we live in a world of probability and chance, where there are not, nor probably ever will be, any absolute certainties, and should realize that it is not at all horrible, indeed—such a probabilistic, uncertain world.

Non-Aristotelian logic deals with existencial/operacional probabilities. Aristotelian logic deals with certainties, and in the lack of certainties throughout most of life, Aristotelian logic subliminally programs us to ivent fictitious certainties. That rush for fictitious certainties explains most of the Ideologies and damn near all Religions on the planet, I think.

If perception is not absolute, no deduction from perception can be absolute. No matter how ingeniously one juggles with approximations, they do not magically turn into certainties; at best, they become the most accurate possible approximations.

Non-Aristotelian logic deals with existential/operational probabilities. Aristotelian logic deals with certainties, and in the lack of certainties throughout most of life, Aristotelian logic subliminally programs us to invent fictitious certainties. That rush for fictitious certainties explains most of the Ideologies and damned near all the Religions on the planet, I think.

Religion deals in certainties and philosophy deals more in un-answered questions.

People, chained by monotony, afraid to think, clinging to certainties... they live like ants.

There is a confusing dual structure in the relationship of the individual to history. Even the sensory certainties of suffering follow a predictable order of physical reactions, so that the undeniable reality of their dizziness, queasiness, or nausea can be regarded with equal plausibility as the hysterical symptoms of a transitional period - a hypochondria of the epoch and not of individual people.

The certainties of one age are the problems of the next.

Sometimes, the stars line up, the gods smile, and love gets a fighting chance. Just a chance. That's all it can really hope for. No guarantees, no certainties