Quotes about Certainty

Doubts can produce positive side-effects - if you work toward resolving them.

Aslan's instructions always work; there are no exceptions.

The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance.

We are required to "bet our life" that the visible world, while real, is not reality itself.

No, you don't have to certain about anything you're not certain about. In fact, certainty is not something you can choose, anyway. Certainty and uncertainty are not things that are under the will.

Everyone has been certain and wrong. Certainty is a psychological state that you can work up. You see a lot of this in religious groups. They are trying to work up certainty, but that is a terrible mistake. When you convey knowledge, you are giving people things they can test and find to be true in reality.

Knowledge strengthens faith, sometimes by allowing us to grasp an item of faith in such a way that it also becomes an item of knowledge. Knowledge also can and often has laid a foundation for faith. We do often believe things because we have come to know them, and that is an ideal condition of belief.

Tension is living in the gap between certainty and uncertainty. We always begin with what we know, and are irresistibly drawn to what we don't know. We are inveterately curious. We are wired to grow, and all growth stretches us beyond our comfort level. Comfort is the absence of tension; growth requires a swim in murky, dangerous waters... Tension is the medium which we breathe everyday.

We live by the assumption that what's good for us is good for the world. And this is based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what's good for us.

that adult trait of being convinced of anything by an assumption of silent superiority

Belief creates the actual fact.

I will assume for the present---until next year---that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.