As a businessman, I know that businesses need certainty.
On September 11, people were shaken, but they quickly calmed down. There was a flash of awareness, which lasted a few fractions of a second. People could feel that something was happening. Then a blanket of silence covered up the crack in our certainty of safety.
The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.
Where the quest for knowledge is relatively, and now almost absolutely, unrestrained, the public benefit will be great, especially where the certainty of the law ensures that knowledge is rewarded. This is exactly the combination that is the foundation of wealth-creation.
‘Faith’ and ‘trust’ are words that put the power in the hands of an outside force that we are meant to rely on – whether it is God or a person or the universe. Certainty puts the power back in our hands.
It took me less than half a lifetime to realize that regret is one of the few guaranteed certainties. Sooner or later everything is touched by it, despite our naive and senseless hope that just this time we will be spared its cold hand on our heart.
I avoid writing about sex out of a certainty that no matter how grown up and matter-of-fact I might try to be, there is a snickering yet nun-terrorized 12-year-old-boy inside me who would at some point be certain to grab the reins in his hairy palms.
I don’t judge my effectiveness by how many words I say. I think liberals often see nuances in things… Conservatives tend to see things in black and white. It gives them an air of certainty and conviction that might make them more comfortable to watch.
A written constitution guides and directs the application of law in a way utterly unlike oral guidance. It reminds us that the certainty and consistency of legal application is essential.
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.
I discovered that Thailand was one of those countries, like Sri Lanka and India, where memory of past lives used to be commonplace. Go back a few generations, and you find people talking about earlier lives with total certainty.
It has long been said the only things in life that are certain are death and taxes. Automatic enrollment for insurance of 401k loans would add an additional certainty. Fewer Americans would suffer the unnecessary loss of retirement savings due to unanticipated and untimely misfortune in an already stressful time of need.
I believe that the day one stops being spiritual, one ends up being religious. I live by the adage that the only certainty in life is death. We should, therefore, learn to live for the day and be content.
If falling into desperation worked to make things better, then I would say, ‘Let’s all jump into despair.’ But it doesn’t help. The only way to truly find meaning and fulfillment is to look at the disaster, the pain, the difficulty, and know with complete certainty that good can come from this.
The very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past.
The government will not support a nine-week work year. That I can say with certainty.
Our need for certainty in an endeavor as uncertain as raising children makes explicit ‘how-to-parent’ strategies both seductive and dangerous.
Genes work with probabilities; they don’t work with certainties. So most things that you’re looking at with these genetic tests, it’s not like you’re condemned to automatically get the disease or the syndrome. There’s a lot of factors in play there.
When I was learning by myself, despite my parents, despite my teachers, despite society, when I was fighting for building my life as a young wire walker at age 16, I didn’t have feelings, I had certainties.
We must ensure that more binding, durable, and enforceable fiscal rules go hand-in-hand with funding certainty for countries pursuing sound and sustainable economic policies. We need to keep pushing forward towards a comprehensive solution to the challenges of the eurozone.
No one can forecast the economy with certainty.
We have lost certainty and predictability in the regulatory and tax climate in America, and this is why we’re recovering so slowly.
Persuasion is achieved by the speaker’s personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible. We believe good men more fully and more readily than others: this is true generally whatever the question is, and absolutely true where exact certainty is impossible and opinions are divided.
Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties.
Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other than their own.
A fighter in his prime needs to stay active. A fighter, who doesn’t have certainty when he’s going to fight again, it’s hard for him to stay mentally ready.
Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
Religion gives you a sense of certainty. It makes you feel that you have the right answers to really big questions and that you’ve grasped the truth.
Spending a weekend with Hitler would have been boring in the extreme, although you would have had a greater certainty in coming back alive.
The cubism of Braque or Picasso, the dissonant compositions of Schoenberg or Stravinsky, the free-flowing and often erotic choreography of Isadora Duncan and Nijinsky – these were acts of rebellion against the certainties and traditions of the old world.
I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life. God is in everyone’s life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else – God is in this person’s life. You can – you must – try to seek God in every human life.
The average religious person has their beliefs, but they’re not trying to get people fired who don’t have their beliefs. But zealots do do that. It’s not enough for them to believe it; they can’t tolerate other people who don’t believe what they believe, and they have this absolute certainty that they’re right.
If you want to attract more investment, foreign investment, more talent, more business, I think having some level of certainty that the business environment respects, those who have been your partners for a long time, is important.
The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty. It is madness. You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do.
That though we are certain of many things, yet that Certainty is no absolute Infallibility, there still remains the possibility of our being mistaken in all matters of humane Belief and Inquiry.
Religion deals in certainties and philosophy deals more in un-answered questions.
The Palestinians are the only nation in the world that feels with certainty that today is better than what the days ahead will hold. Tomorrow always heralds a worse situation.
For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.
Usually, I chalk Democratic dreams of a blue Texas to the same sort of thinking that brought us the inevitability of the coalition of the ascendant and 100% certainty that Donald Trump was going to lose.
In reality, both religion and science are expressions of man’s uncertainty. Perhaps the paradox is that certainty, whether it be in science or religion, is dangerous.
If there is one certainty in soccer, it is this: The quickest road to becoming a winning soccer team is to have a great goalkeeper.
People fear leaving their safe harbor of the known and venturing off into the unknown. Human beings crave certainty – even when it limits them.
True believers of Scientology seem to know with utmost certainty that they have found the answer to the deepest riddles of all time – they may or may not be right, but that kind of self-belief is very appealing.
Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.
A woman’s guess is much more accurate than a man’s certainty.
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
When you’ve been living in hope for a long time as I have, suddenly you realize that certainty is far more desirable than hope.
The brain builds a version of the universe and projects this version of the universe like a bubble all around us. So I can say with some certainty, ‘I think therefore I am.’ But I cannot say, ‘You think therefore you are,’ because you are within my perceptual bubble.
I used to fast during Ramadan because I admired the people fasting around me. What made me convert was that I had that certainty that Islam was for me. I felt this relationship with God, and that enlightened my life. I had that conviction in my heart that that was my religion.
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
One thing, however, I know with certainty: violence, or the direct threat of violence, of the kind we have seen in the past few days, is totally unjustified as a response to any published word or image.
