Quotes About Certainties

No son gente de ideas, los polis. El pensamiento tiene la irritante costumbre de sabotear las certidumbres.

She was striving to change, she was, but it was hard, all the same, to let go of the glory of her past certainties, of her belief in passion, and surrender, and the seductive power of giving in to inclination.

What if the choice isn't between certainties, between this faith and that, but between faith and doubt? Between renouncing the mystery and embracing it?

But I understand your doubts. They're what make you a great man, not your certainties.

understand your doubts. They're what make you a great man, not your certainties.

To the last we have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished.

New York is at once cosmopolitan and parochial, a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world's great cities - in its self-congratulation a kind of San Francisco of the East

Professional learning does not advance… through the inexorable confirmation of previous certainties, but through a systematic challenge to our present conceptions

At Oxford University, the certainties of my atheist faith (and atheism is a faith) began to crumble

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

Questions, inside the larger mystery of sorrow, which contains us and our daily transit, and is large enough indeed to contain the whole shifting tidal theater where I make small constructions, my metaphors, my defenses. Against which I play out theories, doubts, certainties bright as high tide in sunlight, which shift just as that brightness does, in fog or rain.

The doctors at Hayden may have erred about the details of her condition. They need their labels, their certainties. What are depression and psychosis, after all, but lapses from realism? And what's that? But the doctors were right about the general crisis. An insufficient God is better than no God at all.

I ask only one indulgence. Please remember that like any scientist, I hope to present probable and reasonable solutions, not certainties.

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

All of us carry around countless bags of dusty old knickknacks dated from childhood: collected resentments, long list of wounds of greater or lesser significance, glorified memories, absolute certainties that later turn out to be wrong. Humans are emotional pack rats. These bags define us.

Everywhere in Asia life is infused with a few terrible certainties—hunger, indignity, and violence." This was the world Americans perceived themselves advancing to save, not merely from the Japanese, but from imperialists of every hue—including their closest allies, the British.

We have always found your mortal insistence on certainties strange. Nothing is as clear as you wish it to be. You have walked your path blindly until now. Time to open your eyes.

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.

In love everything changes, and continues changing all the time. There is no stillness, no stopped clock of the heart in which the moment of happiness holds forever, but only the constant whirring forward motion of desire and need, rising and falling, falling and rising, full of doubts then certainties that moment by moment change and become doubts again.

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.

The tired expression, 'What we need is a good war' was common enough: 'a good war' that would preserve the old world, conservative certainties. In

a faith that remains open to the ever-moving Spirit and new possibilities, rather than chaining the Spirit to our past •?a faith that welcomes opportunities to think critically and reflectively on how we think about God, the world, and our place in it, rather than resting at all costs on maintaining familiar certainties