401 Quotes About Certainty

Possibilities are hope in numbers. Even the most certain statement - your dinner at 7 pm - may not happen because many things can influence the change of events. What is taken for sure will score the highest likelihood, but never the certitude because the world runs on probabilities. Like a game.

In the Congress of the United States, Cromwell had known a good many men who were possessed of absolute certainty, and this he feared so much that he felt the only real and enduring evil on the face of the earth was unbending certainty, unshakable orthodoxy.

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

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.

Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of "knowing what we know" arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.

I know that I do not know, and uncertainty, certainly, is the cruelest of words.

I believe that we do not know anything for certain, but everything probably.

So the paradox goes: No man who is really ignorant is ever aware that he is ignorant. That is its finest, most faulty manifestation; there can be no true ignorance without first some claim of intelligence or consciousness, or superiority or enlightenment.

It sometimes requires ignorance and arrogance to know something for sure.