Certainty Quotes

Everything I ever worried about turned out exactly as it was going to, despite my anxious moments to the contrary.

Truth is confirmed by inspection and delay; falsehood by haste and uncertainty.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points.

Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.

To me the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet. That I haven’t understood enough. That I can’t know enough. That I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom… Those who tell you that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority: don’t think of that as a gift. Think of it as a poison chalice. Push it aside, however tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

When a scientist doesn't know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty - some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.

An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.

Truth is no harlot who throws her arms round the neck of him who does not desire her; on the contrary, she is so coy a beauty that even the man who sacrifices everything to her can still not be certain of her favors.

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

Nothing in life is promised except death.

Convictions are much more an enemy of the truth than lies.

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

When one turns from reason to faith, when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of one's consciousness - and one's mind becomes an organ one cannot trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim it to be: a tool of distortion.

Believe those who seek the truth; doubt those who find it.

For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible.

The person who has no opinion will seldom be wrong.

To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

When men are most sure and arrogant, they are commonly the most mistaken.

People seem very arrogant when they say 'I'm right and you're wrong', but in practice we all believe we're right. We have a staggering arrogance in our own belief. That can be tempered by not being 100% certain; by being provisional. No matter what the debate is, very few people have the modesty to suspend judgement on a whole range of things; most intelligent people have an opinion and are expected to have an opinion by other people - but it always requires making a personal judgement that goes way-beyond your expertise. We do it all the time.

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.