Truth is confirmed by inspection and delay; falsehood by haste and uncertainty.
~By Tacitus ~
If you don't think you want to go on a train and read the paper every day and work from nine to six at night, there was something about the uncertainty when I was younger which was very attractive.
~By Ron Silver ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing.
~By Robert Burns ~
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 have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.
~By Jorge Luis Borges ~
No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.
~By George Eliot ~
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 ~
Investors don't like uncertainty.
~By Kenneth Lay ~
The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.
~By Bertrand Russell ~
Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions.
~By Thomas Szasz ~
When we deal with questions relating to principles of law and their applications, we do not suddenly rise into a stratosphere of icy certainty.
~By Charles Evans Hughes ~
And for mathematical science, he that doubts their certainty hath need of a dose of hellebore.
~By Joseph Glanvill ~
We often call a certainty a hope, to bring it luck.
~By Elizabeth Bibesco ~
Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.
~By Karl Von Clausewitz ~
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 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 ~
A liberal knows that the only certainty in this life is change but believes that the change can be directed toward a constructive end.
~By Henry A. Wallace ~
Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.
~By Ashley Montagu ~
Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
~By Will Durant ~
Certainty is the mother of quiet and repose, and uncertainty the cause of variance and contentions.
~By Edward Coke ~
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 ~
Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.
~By Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. ~
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 ~
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 ~
We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.
~By Blaise Pascal ~
Could we have prevented in 100% certainty? I don't think anything is that certain. However, we would have had a very, very good chance for preventing it.
~By Sibel Edmonds ~
Step by step a powerful and enterprising race has driven them back from the Atlantic to the West until at last there is scarcely a spot of ground upon which the Indians have any certainty of maintaining a permanent abode.
~By Nelson A. Miles ~
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 ~
The 21st Century has begun as an era of uncertainty, with a heightened focus on security and public safety.
~By Gavin Newsom ~
It is far better to foresee even without certainty than not to foresee at all.
~By Henri Poincare ~
Markets are constantly in a state of uncertainty and flux and money is make by discounting the obvious and betting on the unexpected.
~By George Soros ~
The American people want us to stop spending. And so let's just give them some certainty. Let's extend the tax - the existing tax cuts. And then let's give some more tax breaks to small businesses and large. And then maybe the American people will have some confidence.
~By John McCain ~
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
~By Ursula K. Le Guin ~
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 ~
So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
~By Ted Nelson ~
Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.
~By William Osler ~
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 ~
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
~By Erich Fromm ~
Uncertainty is the worst of all evils until the moment when reality makes us regret uncertainty.
~By Alphonse Karr ~
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 ~
All that's left now is purely poetic work, putting more life into individual places, as I've made so sure of the fundamental mood and dimension of expression that it won't leave me groping around in uncertainty any more.
~By Oskar Kokoschka ~
In these matters the only certainty is that nothing is certain.
~By Pliny the Elder ~
But teleological considerations can lead no further than to a belief and a hope. They do not give certainty.
~By Christian Lous Lange ~
If you develop the absolute sense of certainty that powerful beliefs provide, then you can get yourself to accomplish virtually anything, including those things that other people are certain are impossible.
~By William Lyon Phelps ~
Uncertainty is the refuge of hope.
~By Henri Frederic Amiel ~
I used to be scared of uncertainty; now I get a high out of it.
~By Jensen Ackles ~
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 ~
To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.
~By Bertrand Russell ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
To counter the avoidance of intellectual challenge and responsibility, we must reduce the domination of certainty in education.
~By William Glasser ~
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 ~
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 ~
To believe with certainty we must begin with doubting.
~By Stanislaus I ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.
~By Jacob Bronowski ~
Faith means living with uncertainty - feeling your way through life, letting your heart guide you like a lantern in the dark.
~By Dan Millman ~
The uncertainty of the danger belongs to the essence of terrorism.
~By Jurgen Habermas ~
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 ~
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.
~By Timothy Garton Ash ~
We can say with certainty - or 90% probability - that the new industries that are about to be born will have nothing to do with information.
~By Peter Drucker ~
I really think that living is the process of going from complete certainty to complete ignorance.
~By Richard Dreyfuss ~
The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding.
~By Rem Koolhaas ~
Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing.
~By William Congreve ~
Certainty? In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.
~By Benjamin Franklin ~
For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.
~By Vincent Van Gogh ~
There's a certain kind of scepticism that can't bear uncertainty.
~By Rupert Sheldrake ~
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 ~
Never Have Your Dog Stuffed is really advice to myself, a reminder to myself not to avoid change or uncertainty, but to go with it, to surf into change.
~By Alan Alda ~
A woman's guess is much more accurate than a man's certainty.
~By Rudyard Kipling ~
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 ~
We regard it as a certainty that the earth, enclosed between poles, is bounded by a spherical surface.
~By Nicolaus Copernicus ~
Fear comes from uncertainty. When we are absolutely certain, whether of our worth or worthlessness, we are almost impervious to fear.
~By William Congreve ~
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.
~By Joseph Glanvill ~
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 ~
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 ~
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
~By Voltaire ~
Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.
~By Francois de La Rochefoucauld ~
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 ~
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 ~
You can safely appeal to the United Nations in the comfortable certainty that it will let you down.
~By Conor Cruise O'Brien ~
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 ~
When I tested for Billy Budd, I had that kind of confidence that comes with the certainty that you're not going to get something. I was very rough around the edges.
~By Terence Stamp ~
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 ~
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 ~
The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.
~By May Sarton ~
For all of its uncertainty, we cannot flee the future.
~By Barbara Jordan ~
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 ~
One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.
~By Thomas Carlyle ~
As a painter today you have to work without that essential platform. But if one does not deceive oneself and accepts this lack of certainty, other things may come into play.
~By Bridget Riley ~
I'm a scientist, not a theologian. I don't know if there is a God or not. Religion requires certainty.
~By James Lovelock ~
From this bestial view that the human mind consists of only sense certainty, pleasure and pain, Locke developed an equally bestial theory of the nation. Man originally existed in a State of Nature of complete liberty.
~By Robert Trout ~
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