401 Quotes About Certainty

When you let someone change your mind, you let them rob you of your 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.

The opposite of certainty in life is called freedom. If you want to be free, you must be willing to advance your life into the uncertain.

It can be a good thing if deeper theology, or philosophy, only makes one more uncertain. It may lead to a healthy doubt; he may throw his hands up saying, 'God, I just don't know anymore. If you're out there, I'm giving it all to you.' From there, after the surrender, he is allowing God himself, rather than theories, books, and documents, to take over and lead him into all truth.

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’s stories seriously, certainty deadens or destroys both qualities. When we are caught up in our own convictions, other people’s stories—which is to say, other people—cease to matter to us.

Falsehood is not truth. Evil is not good. Ugliness is not beauty. Opinions are not facts. Fantasies are not realities. And, most of all, certainties are not platitudes.

The apparent reality is that life never quite permits us the certainty that we impose upon it.

Anyone claiming certainty about life, truth, creation, or purpose of the Universe, is either ignorant or unfit to comprehend the implications of the presented dilemmas.

When you stop trying to force the Bible to be something it's not--static, perspicacious, certain, absolute--then you're free to revel in what it is: living, breathing, confounding, surprising, and yes, perhaps even magic.