Quotes About Certainties

Alas, Madame Straus, there are no certainties, even grammatical ones.… [O]nly that which bears the imprint of our choice, our taste, our uncertainty, our desire and our weakness can be beautiful.

Jung called the Shadow 'the seat of creativity'. Embracing the Shadow means opening yourself up to possibilities, letting go of fixed certainties about the Self and the world. It means engaging with complications and conflicts, which are necessary aspects of all creative work.

Small wonder that so many English writers have preferred the dramatic certainties of Catholicism. You simply couldn't write a novel like Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory about a church built on the conviction that anything can be settled over a cup of tea.

The British political system and the whole clapped out Westminster architecture, and the language that we use about politics, it's completely unsustainable. You either decide to be part of that transition to do something different. Or you cling to old certainties.

Especially about how hard it was for ex-military people. They entered the civilian world with all the wrong assumptions. They expected the same kind of certainties they had known before. The straightforwardness, the transparency, the honesty, the shared sacrifice.

So the journey is over and I am back again where I started, richer by much experience and poorer by many exploded convictions, many perished certainties. For convictions and certainties are too often the concomitants of ignorance. Those who like to feel that they are always right and who attach a high importance to their own opinions should stay at home. When one is traveling, convictions are mislaid as easily as spectacles; but unlike spectacles, they are not easily replaced.

I sense in his style an indefeasible core of Protestant certainties, the certainties of a simple, unchanging, entrenched ethic that knows how to distinguish, unarguably, between Right and Wrong, Natural and Unnatural, High and Low, Black and White, with a committed force, an ethic on which his ramified and seemingly conciliatory structures of argument are invisibly based

The more I meditate on our capacity for self-deception, the more my certainties crumble, slipping through my fingers as fine sand. And when this meditation becomes a feeling that clouds my mind, then the whole world appears to me as a mist made of shadows, a twilight of edges and corners, a fiction of the interlude,* a dawn that never becomes morning.

Homo homini lupus é uma das tristes certezas da vida. A tese, com efeito, pode ser alargada, e aplicada não só ao egoísmo nacional como também ao egoísmo dos indivíduos. (...)Só a paz é infecunda, só a concórdia é improfícua, só o humanitarismo é anti-humanitário. E assim morre, ante a análise sociológica, o último dos falsos princípios da Democracia moderna.

The idea that the law should punish what is rude; that government should protect our tender sensibilities from those who would - quite often with shallow motivations but sometimes with deeper and more serious complaints - challenge our national certainties and rituals, should alarm and anger us.

The core of science is not a mathematical modeling--it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.

There are very few certainties that touch us all in this mortal experience, but one of the absolutes is that we will experience hardship and stress at some point.

Bah. What does it matter now? There are no certainties let in the world. That was the age of great men, doing what was right." He frowned down at the broken rubble choking the floor of the colossal room. "This is the age of little men, doing what they must. Little men, with little dreams, walking in giant footsteps.

There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is impossible.

An empathy wall is an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances. In a period of political tumult, we grasp for quick certainties. We

When we seem to have won or lost in terms of certainties, we must, as literature teachers in the classroom, remember such warnings -- let literature teach us that there are no certainties, that the process is open, and that it may be altogether salutary that it is so.

The British Museum was founded with a civic purpose: to allow the citizen, through reasoned inquiry and comparison, to resist the certainties that endanger free society and are still among the greatest threats to our liberty.

Oh, fuck you and your certainties, Atticus. You're only sure because you're twenty-nine.

But that's Islam in the third millennium: they want the certainties of seventh-century society with the conveniences of the twenty-first century.

Occasion revived an illusion of discovery, as if one woke in a strange room to wonder afresh not only where but who one was; to shed assumptions, even certainties.

He who knows the past well can best explain the present and can tell the probable certainties and uncertainties of the future better

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

These core certainties are sheltered from your scrutiny. Because you know you can depend on them, you never question them.

He had never been a believer in systems—his was an overweening faith that life lay in the contradictions, not in the formulae, in the doubting, not the certainties, the needs rather than the riches—and political parties seemed to him little more than artificial structures designed to save man from his loneliness.