Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.
~By William Osler ~
When prayer removes distrust and doubt and enters the field of mental certainty, it becomes faith; and the universe is built on faith.
~By Ernest Holmes ~
I always work out of uncertainty but when a painting's finished it becomes a fixed idea, apparently a final statement. In time though, uncertainty returns... your thought process goes on.
~By Georg Baselitz ~
The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.
~By May Sarton ~
I used to be scared of uncertainty; now I get a high out of it.
~By Jensen Ackles ~
I'm sad to report that in the past few years, ever since uncertainty became our insistent 21st century companion, leadership has taken a great leap backwards to the familiar territory of command and control.
~By Margaret J. Wheatley ~
Psychologists have set about describing the true nature of women with a certainty and a sense of their own infallibility rarely found in the secular world.
~By Naomi Weisstein ~
The statistics of life out there and the statistics of intelligent beings and advanced civilization is a certainty, the way I look at it. that It has not been accepted, because we've been in an anthropocentric era.
~By Story Musgrave ~
From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.
~By Tom Stoppard ~
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.
~By Salman Rushdie ~
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.
~By Salvatore Quasimodo ~
Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
~By Vaclav Havel ~
In this era of uncertainty and conflict, the United States - blessed with the world's strongest military, most ingenious economy, and most tolerant society - remains a model and leader to the world.
~By Joe Lieberman ~
We regard it as a certainty that the earth, enclosed between poles, is bounded by a spherical surface.
~By Nicolaus Copernicus ~
But teleological considerations can lead no further than to a belief and a hope. They do not give certainty.
~By Christian Lous Lange ~
I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.
~By Michael Crichton ~
If you just watch a teenager, you see a lot of uncertainty.
~By Jamie Lee Curtis ~
The markets don't like instability and they don't like uncertainty.
~By Peter Mandelson ~
Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.
~By Bertrand Russell ~
Well, as a former small businessperson - I understand what's going on, I think in the business community. And businesspeople around the country are looking at all the spending and all the debt. They're looking at all the policies coming out of this Congress and this administration the last two years, and they - it's created all this uncertainty.
~By John Boehner ~
I don't think we should tell them what we're going to do in advance. Let them think. Worry. Wonder. Uncertainty is the most chilling thing of all.
~By Vernon A. Walters ~
Listen, I think what's best for the economy and to create jobs is to extend all of the current tax rates - for all Americans. It - it begins to reduce the uncertainty. And for small businesspeople, they can look up and begin to plan.
~By John Boehner ~
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.
~By Clifford D. Simak ~
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.
~By Ruth Ann Minner ~
Although economists have studied the sensitivity of import and export volumes to changes in the exchange rate, there is still much uncertainty about just how much the dollar must change to bring about any given reduction in our trade deficit.
~By Martin Feldstein ~
The power of the lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law.
~By Jeremy Bentham ~
Certainty? In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.
~By Benjamin Franklin ~
Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.
~By Tom Stoppard ~
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.
~By Bruce Catton ~
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?
~By Garrett Hardin ~
Investors don't like uncertainty.
~By Kenneth Lay ~
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.
~By William Barclay ~
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
~By Ursula K. LeGuin ~
The fastest way to break the cycle of perfectionism and become a fearless is mother is to give up the idea of doing it perfectly - indeed to embrace uncertainty and imperfection.
~By Arianna Huffington ~
Truth is confirmed by inspection and delay; falsehood by haste and uncertainty.
~By Tacitus ~
If it is widely assumed that the new President cannot move forward simply because of a narrow victory, there can easily develop a sense of unease and uncertainty, adversely affecting every sector of American society, our economy and the perception of other nations.
~By Richard V. Allen ~
When the human mind exists in the light of reason and no more than reason, we may say with absolute certainty that Man and all that made him will be in that instant gone.
~By Loren Eiseley ~
Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing.
~By William Congreve ~
We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.
~By Blaise Pascal ~
The only certainty is that nothing is certain.
~By Pliny The Elder ~
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.
~By Henry Wade ~
A bird in hand is a certainty. But a bird in the bush may sing.
~By Bret Harte ~
For all of its uncertainty, we cannot flee the future.
~By Barbara Jordan ~
You can safely appeal to the United Nations in the comfortable certainty that it will let you down.
~By Conor Cruise O'Brien ~
The substantial uncertainty about the path of asset price movements going forward necessarily reduces the case for altering policy in advance of the move.
~By Timothy Geithner ~
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
~By Ursula K. Le Guin ~
Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.
~By Dylan Thomas ~
Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.
~By Karl Von Clausewitz ~
Ideas which have been developed simultaneously or in immediate succession in the same mind mutually reproduce each other, and do this with greater ease in the direction of the original succession and with a certainty proportional to the frequency with which they were together.
~By Hermann Ebbinghaus ~
The uncertainty of the danger belongs to the essence of terrorism.
~By Jurgen Habermas ~
This implies that the laws governing organic cohesion, the organization leading from the part to the whole, represent a biological uncertainty, indeed an uncertainty of the first order.
~By Walter Rudolf Hess ~
Fear comes from uncertainty. When we are absolutely certain, whether of our worth or worthlessness, we are almost impervious to fear.
~By William Congreve ~
It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.
~By Richard P. Feynman ~
Certainty is the mother of quiet and repose, and uncertainty the cause of variance and contentions.
~By Edward Coke ~
I really think that living is the process of going from complete certainty to complete ignorance.
~By Richard Dreyfuss ~
I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.
~By Jose Saramago ~
If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.
~By George Byron ~
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.
~By Adam Smith ~
Many slaves on this continent are oppressed, and their cries have reached the ears of the Most High. Such are the purity and certainty of his judgments, that he cannot be partial in our favor.
~By John Woolman ~
Uncertainty is the refuge of hope.
~By Henri Frederic Amiel ~
The interval between the decay of the old and the formation and establishment of the new constitutes a period of transition which must always necessarily be one of uncertainty, confusion, error, and wild and fierce fanaticism.
~By John C. Calhoun ~
Uncertainty will always be part of the taking charge process.
~By Harold S. Geneen ~
Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.
~By Richard P. Feynman ~
One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.
~By Thomas Carlyle ~
Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.
~By Francois de La Rochefoucauld ~
So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
~By Ted Nelson ~
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!
~By Blaise Pascal ~
The glorious uncertainty of the law was a thing well known and complained of, by all ignorant people, but all learned gentleman considered it as its greatest excellency.
~By Richard Brinsley Sheridan ~
Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.
~By Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. ~
To allow all U.S. workers to put part of their earnings into private investment accounts would definitely erode the Social Security system and cause uncertainty for new investors.
~By Grace Napolitano ~
For any culture which is primarily concerned with meaning, the study of death - the only certainty that life holds for us - must be central, for an understanding of death is the key to liberation in life.
~By Stanislav Grof ~
The real effect of the WTC calamity has been depressed spirits, anxiety, and uncertainty among publishers, and of course those emotions are not restricted to publishers.
~By Richard Curtis ~
Quantum mechanics brought an unexpected fuzziness into physics because of quantum uncertainty, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
~By Edward Witten ~
There is no certainty; there is only adventure.
~By Roberto Assagioli ~
And for mathematical science, he that doubts their certainty hath need of a dose of hellebore.
~By Joseph Glanvill ~
The basic fault lines today are not between people with different beliefs but between people who hold these beliefs with an element of uncertainty and people who hold these beliefs with a pretense of certitude.
~By Peter L. Berger ~
It is far better to foresee even without certainty than not to foresee at all.
~By Henri Poincare ~
To counter the avoidance of intellectual challenge and responsibility, we must reduce the domination of certainty in education.
~By William Glasser ~
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.
~By Charles Baudelaire ~
I think that feeling that if one believed absolutely in any cause, then one must have the confidence, the self-certainty, to go through with that particular course of action.
~By Wole Soyinka ~
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
~By Voltaire ~
The action we take and the decisions we make in this decade will have consequences far into this century. If America shows weakness and uncertainty, the world will drift toward tragedy. That will not happen on my watch.
~By George W. Bush ~
Mystery is gone to the certainty of technological principles. So the real terror, the real aggression against life comes in the form of the pursuit of our technological happiness.
~By Godfrey Reggio ~
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.
~By George Boole ~
I believe the most solemn duty of the American president is to protect the American people. If America shows uncertainty and weakness in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy. This will not happen on my watch.
~By George W. Bush ~
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.
~By Vaclav Havel ~
I never imagined it wouldn't work out for me. I had that absolute certainty in myself that has seen me through, I think, and my parents were absolutely behind me all the way.
~By Ewan McGregor ~
Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things.
~By Denis Diderot ~
Without the element of uncertainty, the bringing off of even, the greatest business triumph would be dull, routine, and eminently unsatisfying.
~By J. Paul Getty ~
For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.
~By Vincent Van Gogh ~
We measure our days out in steps of uncertainty not turning to see how far we've come. And peer down the highway from here to eternity and reach out for love on the run.
~By Al Stewart ~
Uncertainty is the worst of all evils until the moment when reality makes us regret uncertainty.
~By Alphonse Karr ~
If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.
~By Henry David Thoreau ~
I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.
~By Jorge Luis Borges ~
Information is the resolution of uncertainty.
~By Claude Shannon ~
Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
~By Will Durant ~
I feel, sometimes, as the renaissance man must have felt in finding new riches at every point and in the certainty that unexplored areas of knowledge and experience await at every turn.
~By Polykarp Kusch ~
The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding.
~By Rem Koolhaas ~
The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.
~By Bertrand Russell ~
Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.
~By Ashley Montagu ~
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