Certainty Quotes

Benjamin Franklin said there were only two things certain in life: death and taxes. But I'd like to add a third certainty: trash. And while some in this room might want to discuss reducing taxes, I want to talk about reducing trash.

Probability is expectation founded upon partial knowledge. A perfect acquaintance with all the circumstances affecting the occurrence of an event would change expectation into certainty, and leave nether room nor demand for a theory of probabilities.

Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.

Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.

Moral certainty, clear standards, and a commitment to spiritual ideals will set you apart in a world that searches for meaning.

Spending a weekend with Hitler would have been boring in the extreme, although you would have had a greater certainty in coming back alive.

We have lost certainty and predictability in the regulatory and tax climate in America, and this is why we're recovering so slowly.

As a painter today you have to work without that essential platform. But if one does not deceive oneself and accepts this lack of certainty, other things may come into play.

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things.

There is no certainty; there is only adventure.

If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.

If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles!

I would say that without any doubt he's the killer - the law says beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty which I - there's no question that he was the killer of President Kennedy.

Fundamentalists are panicked by the apparent disintegration of the family, the disappearance of certainty and the decay of morality. Fear leads them to ask, if we cannot trust the Bible, what can we trust?

Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made.

The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.

It is far better to foresee even without certainty than not to foresee at all.

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.

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

Step by step a powerful and enterprising race has driven them back from the Atlantic to the West until at last there is scarcely a spot of ground upon which the Indians have any certainty of maintaining a permanent abode.

To counter the avoidance of intellectual challenge and responsibility, we must reduce the domination of certainty in education.

The unique and supreme voluptuousness of love lies in the certainty of committing evil. And men and women know from birth that in evil is found all sensual delight.

The Resistance is a moral certainty, not a poetic one. The true poet never uses words in order to punish someone. His judgment belongs to a creative order; it is not formulated as a prophetic scripture.

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

It is only of life on Earth, however, that one can speak with any certainty. It seems to me that all life on Earth, the sum total of life upon the Earth, has purpose.

The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.

Adventure upon all the tickets in the lottery, and you lose for certain; and the greater the number of your tickets the nearer your approach to this certainty.

If a man fights his way through his doubts to the conviction that Jesus Christ is Lord, he has attained to a certainty that the man who unthinkingly accepts things can never reach.