Certainties Quotes

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

We want to have certainties and no doubts- results and no experiments- without even seeing that certainties can arise only through doubt and results only thorough experiment.

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

On the other hand, I view the whole matter from a cosmic perspective. I don't take a position. I believe that there are no more positions to take, no certainties, no facts. Many people find this confusing about my films; they say I am hiding out behind irony. But from a cosmic viewpoint, it is eternally unimportant whether one lives or not.

...our best built certainties are but sand-houses and subject to damage from any wind of doubt that blows.

There are no certainties.

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.

He seemed so certain about everything, didn't he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman's head. He wasn't even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man.

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul when hot for certainties in this our life!

'The Company You Keep' is about outgrowing not just the delusions that accompany youth but the harsh certainties driving our lives and then trapping them before the years outpace the velocity of our dreams.

The older I get, the less I know. By that I mean the less I am sure of. I view people with strong opinions on the big stuff with distrust. I don't think we should have certain certainties on faith and politics; I think we should be open-minded.

It is true that of far the greater part of things, we must content ourselves with such knowledge as description may exhibit, or analogy supply; but it is true likewise, that these ideas are always incomplete, and that at least, till we have compared them with realities, we do not know them to be just. As we see more, we become possessed of more certainties, and consequently gain more principles of reasoning, and found a wider base of analogy.

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.

Between history and the eternal I have chosen history because I like certainties. Of it, at least, I am certain, and how can I deny this force crushing me.