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Certainty Quotes

Browse 1462 quotes about Certainty.

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Certainty Quotes

“This was my voice, but perfectly wise, calm and compassionate. This was what my voice would sound like if I’d only ever experienced love and certainty in my life. How can I describe the warmth of affection in that voice, as it gave me the answer that would forever seal my faith in the divine?”

IfsSoundVoiceAnswersForeverWiseDivineCalmAffectionCertaintyWarmthCompassionateSeals
Book:Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
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“She felt an enveloping happiness to be alive, a joy made stronger by the certainty that someday it would all come to an end. Afterward she felt a little foolish, and never spoke to anyone about it. Now, however, she knows she wasn't being foolish. She realizes that for no particular reason she stumbled into the core of what it is to be human. It's a rare gift to under stand that you life is wondrous, and that it won't last forever.”

KnowsHumansLittlesMadeEndsReasonLastsLife IsJoyFeltRealizingForeverAliveParticularStrongerFoolishCoreCertaintySomedaySpokesWondrous
Author:Steven Galloway
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“It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images.”

WorldGivingMindI CanRealFormCertainSoundSimpleColorStructureCloudsComplicatedStoresRationalCertaintyTwistedShifting
Book:The Collected Works of C.G. Jung: The structure and dynamics of the psyche
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“My mother has always been the point I calibrated myself against. In knowing where she was, I could always locate myself, as well. These months she'd been gone, I felt like I'd been floating, loose and boundaryless, but now that I knew where she was, I kept waiting for a kind of certainty to kick in. It didn't. Instead, I was more unsure than ever, stuck between this new life and the one I'd left behind.”

WellsKindMotherLeftFeltWaitingBehindsGoneKnowingMonthsStuckCertaintyKicksNew LifeFloatingLeft BehindUnsure
Author:Sarah Dessen
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“The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice.”

WorldBelieveHumansLightPainSpiritDarkDoubtInjusticeCrueltyCertaintyHuman SpiritInner LightRules For Radicals
Book:Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals
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“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

PeoplePeaceInterestInterestingBrainTalentFieldsEqualWeightDiedCertaintyBiologyCottonSmart PeopleScience PhysicsSweatshopsHidden TalentsCotton Fields
Book:The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
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“I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Father Tom had told me--that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.”

RealLightFatherDoubtMissingReturnOppositesCertaintyMessRememberedEmptinessTomsDiscomfortNoticing
Author:Anne Lamott
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“She thought of what it would be like to grow up without the one certainty that every baby deseved - when I'm hurt or cold or scared, someone will come and care for me - and how that absence could warp you so that you'd lash out at the people you loved, driving them away when all you wanted to do was pull them closer.”

PeopleWould BeCareWantedGrowsHurtGrowing UpBabyColdScaredAbsenceDrivingCertaintyLashesWarp
Book:Little Earthquakes
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“There should be a word for that brief period just after waking when the mind is full of warm pink nothing. You lie there entirely empty of thought, except for a growing suspicion that heading towards you, like a sockful of damp sand in a nocturnal alleyway, are all the recollections you'd really rather do without, and which amount to the fact that the only mitigating factor in your horrible future is the certainty that it will be quite short.”

ShouldMindFactsLyingGrowingAmountPeriodsEmptyWarmHorribleFactorsCertaintySandWakingSuspicionHeadingsRecollectionDampNocturnalAlleyways
Author:Terry Pratchett
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“It's clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty bumming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together. Like two solitary birds flying the great prairies by celestial reckoning, all of these years and lifetimes we have been moving toward one another.”

YearsKindLongHas BeensTwoTogetherMovingClearIgnoranceMetsLong TimeBirdLifetimeFlyingCertaintySolitaryCountyCelestialMindlessReckoningPrairieBird Flying
Author:Robert James Waller
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“The past and the future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, one’s dreams would have no meaning.”

WorldPersonsHas BeensSoulMomentsDreamHandsPastSunWrittenIncrediblesCertaintyThat MomentTwinsUnimportantEvokeAlchemistAlchemist Love
Book:The Alchemist - 10th Anniversary Edition
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“The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up.”

NeedsFeelsHeartRealMatterLightSeemsJoyLeftLinesDespiteCertaintySufficientHorizonGrayImperfectBrighterPhantomsRefills
Author:Richard Russo
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“There must be only three supreme values which govern a person's life: Reason, Purpose, and Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge--Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve--Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man's virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.”

ThinkingMenMindMeanPersonsSelfReasonPurposeValuesChoicesThreeJusticeExistenceConsciousnessVirtueAchieveSelf EsteemHonestyPrideIntegrityToolsRelationIndependenceWorthySupremeEsteemCertaintyRationalityCompetentHonesty Integrity
Author:Ayn Rand
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“It is clear that we must trust what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.”

KnowsWayTryingLittlesReasonGrowsDifficultClearAliveCostSolitudeCertaintyOppositionAbandonSolitary
Author:Rainer Maria Rilke
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“I was the subject of an experiment in love. I lived my life under her gaze, undergoing certain trials for her so that she would not have to undergo them for herself. But, how are our certainties forged, except by the sweat and tears of other people? If your parents don't teach you how to live; you learn it from books; and clever people watch you learn from your mistakes.”

PeopleIfsBookCertainParentMistakeWatchesTeachSubjectsTearsCleverTrialsExperimentsCertaintySweatForgedLearn From Your MistakesSweat And Tears
Author:Hilary Mantel
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“This surpassed the fear of death. Death would be a mercy if it would make the feeling stop, the uncontrollable panic mingling with the mind-scrambling certainty of something sinister approaching, something with no need to hurry, something that would not be so kind as to let him die. The fear was palpable, suffocating, irresistible.”

IfsNeedsMindKindFeelingsWould BeDiesMercyCertaintyPanicFear Of DeathIrresistibleSinisterUncontrollableSuffocatingMingling
Book:Rise of the Evening Star
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“Why do people resist [engines, bridges, and cities] so? They are symbols and products of the imagination, which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we would not have the wherewithal to challenge certainty, and we could never rise above ourselves.”

PeopleWorldForceImaginationChallengesJusticeCitiesProductsHistoricalSymbolsCertaintyBridgesEnginesImperfectRise AboveMomentumImperfect World
Book:Winter's Tale
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“Love, I thought to myself abstractedly. Not 'This is love' or 'Is this love?' Not a sentence, not a certainty, not a thought with moving parts or direction. Just love, all of it, as it is. Whether it's enough or not. Wthether it's real or we're making it up. However shoddy it gets, or bent out of shape. It's still extraordinary. However foolish, however vain. However badly it ends. Love.”

StillsRealEndsEnoughMovingShapesExtraordinarySentencesFoolishCertaintyVainBentMoving Parts
Author:Julian Gough
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“Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular-an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain.”

ThinkingDoeTwoUniverseCuttingPureSeasonsLeavingCirclesBoundariesCertaintyImpulseClockAcknowledgeLightningInwardImaginativeContradictoryHere And Now
Book:Sexing the Cherry
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“I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know. This painless birth, like an unsolicited proof, gives me untold pleasure, and with neither toil nor certainty but the joy of frank astonishment I follow the pen that is guiding and supporting me.”

KnowsWantGivingMightJoyPleasureTeachingBirthPaperGive MeSentencesProofCertaintyWitnessSpitePensFrankSheetsToilAstonishmentPainless
Author:Muriel Barbery
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“People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power. The only thing we should respect in a person’s faith is his desire for a better life in this world; we need never have respected his certainty that one awaits him in the next.”

PeopleWorldNeedsShouldPersonsDesireNextStrongThis WorldEvidenceConvictionCertaintyOur SocietyHallsBetter LifeHarborsMargins
Book:The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
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“It is terribly important to realize that the leap of faith is not so much a leap of thought as of action. For while in many matters it is first we must see then we will act; in matters of faith it is first we must do then we will know, first we will be and then we will see. One must, in short, dare to act wholeheartedly without absolute certainty.”

KnowsFirstsImportantMatterActionRealizingAbsolutesDareCertaintyLeapWholeheartedlyLeap Of FaithAbsolute Certainty
Book:Credo
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“The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he usurped for himself over the cow and the horse.”

MenGivingFactsSeemsOrderCoursesWrittenCreaturesHorseFishesCertaintyGrantsVeganCowsDominionGenesisSanctifyFowlUnbearable Lightness Of Being
Author:Milan Kundera
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“There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessness–like how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness, and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistake–he could no longer get at.”

WayFeelsPersonsLongFeelingsFeltMistakeAliveLonelinessComfortableCertaintyEnjoymentNeglectNothingnessWorthlessMeaninglessness
Author:Tao Lin
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