Certainty Quotes

“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.”
― Francis Bacon, The Oxford Francis Bacon IV: The Advancement of Learning

“I like the scientific spirit—the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine—it always keeps the way beyond open—always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a mistake—after a wrong guess.”
― Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman's Camden Conversations

“In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”
― Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

“I believe in intuitions and inspirations...I sometimes FEEL that I am right. I do not KNOW that I am.”
― Albert Einstein

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“A woman's guess is much more accurate than a man's certainty.”
― Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills

“Let go of certainty. The opposite isn't uncertainty. It's openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow.”
― Tony Schwartz

“...but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”
― Benjamin Franklin, The Private Correspondence of Benjamin Franklin, LL.D ...: Comprising a Series of Letters on Miscellaneous, Literary, and Political Subjects ...

“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure.”
― H.L. Mencken

“I imagine that the intelligent people are the ones so intelligent that they don't even need or want to look 'intelligent' anymore.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.”
― David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

“Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one's voice.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“I'm a girl."
When Deryn opened her eyes, the lady boffin was staring at her with no change of expression.
"Indeed," she said.
Deryn's mouth feel open. "You mean you...Did you barking know?"
"I had no idea at all. But I make it a policy never to appear surprised." Dr. Barlow sighed, staring out the window. "Though on this occasion, it is proving rather more demanding than usual. A girl, you say? And you're quite certain?”
― Scott Westerfeld, Goliath

“Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.”
― Alain de Botton

“I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

“It (trying to keep the law) grants you the power to judge others and feel superior to them. You believe you are living to a higher standard than those you judge. Enforcing rules, especially in its more subtle expressions like responsibility and expectation, is a vain attempt to create certainty out of uncertainty. And contrary to what you might think, I have a great fondness for uncertainty. Rules cannot bring freedom; they only have the power to accuse.”
― Wm. Paul Young, The Shack

“My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

“There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing.”
― Robert Burns, Collected Poems of Robert Burns

“If you do not know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, then you don't know where you're going. And if you don't know where you're going, you're probably going wrong.”
― Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

“...Granny Weatherwax, who had walked nightly without fear in the bandit-haunted forests of the mountains all her life in the certain knowledge that the darkness held nothing more terrible than she was...”
― Terry Pratchett

“You’ve got to be sure of yourself before
You can ever win a prize.”
― Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich: The Landmark Bestseller Now Revised and Updated for the 21st Century

“If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

“The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice.”
― Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals

“We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes. The perfection that the human mind has been able to give to astronomy affords but a feeble outline of such an intelligence.”
― Pierre Simon de Laplace

“To better understand God we must first shatter our own idea of God - maybe even day after day. Maybe he's too great to stay compressed in the human mind. Maybe he splits it wide open; this is why pretentious intellectualism so often fails to comprehend the concept of God: it is only accepting of what it can explain while in the process finding higher sources offensive. What we may confidently assert is that faith is the opening that allows God, this unpredictable, unseen power, to travel in and out of the mind without all the pains of confusion.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“When your only regret is if anyone thinks you regret anything - that is the definition of conviction.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“I always make sure that the world will prove me right. It gives me the freedom to contradict myself.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Some make light of decisions, arguing that all possible decisions will occur. In such a world, how could one be responsible for his actions? Others hold that each decision must be considered and committed to, that without commitment there is chaos. Such people are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams