Quotes About Certainties

Truth was sometimes not the same as reality—this was one of the certainties that lived in the hollow, cavey place at the center of his divided nature.

if philosophy develops in the right ways, it might help ease the conflicts between rival dogmatic certainties. But, even if this hope is right, philosophy will never be a quick fix. Its influence is slow, the result of patient questioning and discussion.

See, the sad thing about a guy like you is, in 50 years you're gonna start doin' some thinkin' on your own and you're going to come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life: one, don't do that, and two, you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!

And Meredith says that reminds her of a Camus novel, the one about the plague, and she tells the story of it, the tale holding you in thrall, and she ends her version with a line you'll write down in your notebook, the place where the atheist doctor hollers at a priest: All your certainties aren't worth one strand of a woman's hair.

What hurts so bad about youth isn't the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It's the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.)

Education as I knew it was made up of such a preestablished collection of certainties. Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves.

Only a fool wants to go back to the land of childhood . . . Or perhaps it is the longing for the certainties of childhood that makes a man a fool.

The conversation progressed, bumper-car style, to a very heated discussion about death and the survival of the soul. It amazes me that we, as a species, can argue so fervently over something that is, when all is said and done, unknowable and unprovable. Nonetheless, we all arrive at conclusions and cleave to our certainties: that there is nothing but the Void; or that we will find ourselves writing an admissions exam at the Pearly Gates.

I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.

Todo homem, aonde quer que vá, está envolto por uma nuvem de convicções confortadoras, que se deslocam com ele como moscas em um dia de verão.

There are certainties in existence, but love is something much harder to define than light and dark, life and death. I think saying you are "like" someone in love sounds right.

Jealousy is bred in doubts. When those doubts change into certainties, then the passion either ceases or turns absolute madness.

certainties is putting faith in our imagination rather than in God's. It is like me demanding an explanation from Lucy in that

Las preguntas que empiezan con un <> son las más difíciles de contestar - dijo Dale - Al final acabas haciendo suposiciones, en vez de basarte en certezas.

Las preguntas que empiezan con un "por qué" son las más difíciles de contestar -dijo Dale- Al final acabas haciendo suposiciones, en vez de basarte en certezas.

We do naught but scratch the world, frail and fraught. Every vast drama of civilizations, of peoples with their certainties and gestures, means nothing, affects nothing. Life crawls on, ever on.

But the people who struggle against what we call totalitarian regimes cannot function with queries and doubts. They, too, need certainties and simple truths to make the multitudes understand, to provoke collective tears.

While all the future, for thy purer soul, With "sober certainties" of love is blest.

Unattached and aimless, these old men are always infatuated with little certainties and regularities such as those that ordered the life of Mr. Krupper as seen from outside. Habit is living. Anything unexpected reminds them of death. (Hard Candy)

That is the hazard in curiosity, I thought: all the certainties fragment and dissolve. A man curious enough and persistent enough might find even the round and solid ball of earth to be not so. He might be less proud of his faculty of reasoning when it left him with nothing whereon to stand. But then again, was not the truth a more solid foundation than illusion?

She would never be able to console herself that she was pressured or bullied. She never was. She trapped herself, she marched into the labyrinth of her own construction, and was too young, too awestruck, too keen to please, to insist on making her own way back. She was not endowed with, or old enough to possess, such independence or spirit. An imposing congregation had massed itself around her first certainties, and now it was waiting and she could not disappoint it at the altar.

We do naught but scratch the world, frail and fraught. Every vast drama of civilizations, of peoples with their certainties and gestures, means nothing, affects nothing. Life crawls on, ever on. She wondered if the gift of revelation—of discovering the meaning underlying humanity—offered nothing more than a devastating sense of futility.

I [am] obliged to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne, I feel: therefore I exist. I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.

Maybe that's what is means to be human . . . forever questioning our certainties.