Pastoral Resources

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.

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.

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.

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.

In these matters the only certainty is that nothing is certain.

The only certainty is that nothing is certain.

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

Certainty? In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

And for mathematical science, he that doubts their certainty hath need of a dose of hellebore.

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.

To counter the avoidance of intellectual challenge and responsibility, we must reduce the domination of certainty in education.

For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.

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.

For those with ambition, reality is more of a creation than an unalterable certainty.

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?

A bird in hand is a certainty. But a bird in the bush may sing.

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.

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.