certainty

An uncertain evil causes anxiety because, at the bottom of one's heart, one goes on hoping till the last moment that it may not be true; a certain evil, on the other hand, instills, for a time, a kind of dreary tranquillity.

A common fallacy in much of the adverse criticism to which science is subjected today is that it claims certainty, infallibility and complete emotional objectivity. It would be more nearly true to say that it is based upon wonder, adventure and hope.

The devil's happy when the critics run you off.

It's okay to be honest about not knowing rather than spreading falsehood. While it is often said that honesty is the best policy, silence is the second best policy.

It is a noble responsibility to not back down when you know that you know that you know that you are right.

My confidence is in the idea that I may be wrong on this or that. No man in this life should ever have to bear the burden of perfection.

Stop living the life with possibilities and probabilities, live the life with certainties.

[I]t would be a niceness that was enforced leniently, patiently and gracefully, with the sort of unflappable self-certainty [they] couldn't help displaying when all its statistics proved that it really was doing the right thing.

[Mathematics] is security. Certainty. Truth. Beauty. Insight. Structure. Architecture. I see mathematics, the part of human knowledge that I call mathematics, as one thing__ne great, glorious thing. Whether it is differential topology, or functional analysis, or homological algebra, it is all one thing. ... They are intimately interconnected, they are all facets of the same thing. That interconnection, that architecture, is secure truth and is beauty. That's what mathematics is to me.

My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers__ven the answers they themselves believed. I don__ know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being __olitically conscious___s much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty.

It is not always necessary to search for the cause behind everything, because every cause is unfounded. A cause only looks like a cause from a certain viewpoint.

Hope is certainty of the desired want.

Knowledge is so comforting, but so is mystery.

Curiosity is a worthwhile virtue than certainty. While the former leads to grow, the latter muzzles your growth and results in stagnation...

I remember, in no particular order:__ shiny inner wrist;__team rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;__outs of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house;__ river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams;__nother river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface;__athwater long gone cold behind a locked door.This last isn__ something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn__ always the same as what you have witnessed.We live in time__t holds us and moulds us__ut I__e never felt I understood it very well. And I__ not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time__ malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing__ntil the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.I__ not very interested in my schooldays, and don__ feel any nostalgia for them. But school is where it all began, so I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can__ be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That__ the best I can manage.

...but the loss of a memory, like the omission of a phrase during reading, rather than making for uncertainty, can lead to a premature certainty.

If imagination is what enables us to conceive of and enjoy stories other than our own, and if empathy is the act of taking other people__ stories seriously, certainty deadens or destroys both qualities. When we are caught up in our own convictions, other people__ stories__hich is to say, other people__ease to matter to us.

Why do people resist [engines, bridges, and cities] so? They are symbols and products of the imagination, which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we would not have the wherewithal to challenge certainty, and we could never rise above ourselves.