Quotes & Sayings About Certainty And Doubt

Lieutenant Harry Kim was, without doubt, the most optimistic individual she had ever known. No matter how close the darkness came, his determination to overcome it and certainty that goodness would prevail was refreshing. Conlon — Kirsten Beyer

It can be a good thing if deeper theology, or philosophy, only makes one more uncertain. It may lead to a healthy doubt; he may throw his hands up saying, 'God, I just don't know anymore. If you're out there, I'm giving it all to you.' From there, after the surrender, he is allowing God himself, rather than theories, books, and documents, to take over and lead him into all truth. — Criss Jami

In terms of the game theory, we might say the universe is so constituted as to maximize play. The best games are not those in which all goes smoothly and steadily toward a certain conclusion, but those in which the outcome is always in doubt. Similarly, the geometry of life is designed to keep us at the point of maximum tension between certainty and uncertainty, order and chaos. Every important call is a close one. We survive and evolve by the skin of our teeth. We really wouldn't want it any other way. — George Leonard

God, how I ricochet between certainties and doubts. — Sylvia Plath

Existential anxiety of doubt drives the person toward the creation of certitude of systems of meaning, which are supported by tradition and authority. Neurotic anxiety builds a narrow castle of certitude which can be defended with the utmost certainty. — Paul Tillich

....let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end........Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith. — Robert Harris

My creativity isn't rooted in confidence. It grows from many things, no doubt, but chief among them is a deep, rebellious, and indeed almost hostile stance toward complacency- about anything. It feels like the enemy. And certainty? It closes doors. Ends discussions. Shuts other people out. — Robin Black

Night fell, the first I had spent not embracing a rock, and perhaps for this reason it seemed cruelly shorter to me. The light tended at every moment to erase Ayl, to cast a doubt on her presence, but the darkness restored my certainty she was there. — Italo Calvino

Knowledge breeds doubt, not certainty,
And the more we know the more uncertain we become. — A.J.P. Taylor

The most distinctive characteristic which differentiates mathematics from the various branches of empirical science, and which accounts for its fame as the queen of the sciences, is no doubt the peculiar certainty and necessity of its results. — Carl Gustav Hempel

We don't live in a world that suffers from doubt, but one that suffers from certainty, false certainties that compensate for the well of worldly anxieties and worries. — Les Back

Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well. — Brian Eno

How long will you say, "I will conquer the whole world
How long will you say, "I will conquer the whole world
and fill it with myself"?
Even if snow covered the world completely,
the sun could melt it with a glance.
A single spark of God's mercy
can turn poison into springwater.
Where there is doubt,
He establishes certainty. — Rumi

I think we lost Wiley. Somehow he was in a hit-and-run accident about two hours after you and I left. He was driving a car and he hit a bicycle. He was full of champagne, no doubt. A witness described him perfectly. She was shown Helmut Klopp's sketch and made a positive ID. It's all right there in the traffic division's log." "So your guy missed him coming out." "At one point he was talking to a traffic cop. It might have happened then." "But either way you don't know where Wiley is." "Not with an acceptable degree of certainty." "Is that something they teach you to say?" "It sounds sober and mature, and burdened down with technicalities." Reacher — Lee Child

He self-serving, doubt-quenching, certainty-seeking faith that these folks are choosing to pursue is not faith as it's taught in Scripture ... the faith that God's people are called to embrace is one that encourages people to wrestle with God, to not be afraid of questions, and to act faithfully in the face of uncertainty. — Gregory A. Boyd

You're proud of your ability to both believe and question everything. Secretly you think everyone does, but at some point they give in, surrender to the comfort of certainty. It's too much trouble, this endless jousting of belief and doubt, too tiring. Finally you suppose it will break you, yet strangely it's the only thing that keeps you going - though, true, at times you feel unbalanced, even somewhat mad. — Stewart O'Nan

I am convinced that it is impossible to expound the methods of induction in a sound manner, without resting them upon the theory of probability. Perfect knowledge alone can give certainty, and in nature perfect knowledge would be infinite knowledge, which is clearly beyond our capacities. We have, therefore, to content ourselves with partial knowledge-knowledge mingled with ignorance, producing doubt. — William Stanley Jevons

There was little comfort, this voice inside him said, in discovering a mystery at the wellspring of his life so banal his unremarkable mind could readily fathom it. Better, perhaps, to die in doubt, knowing there was some revelation still unfound, than to pursue and possess such a wretched certainty. — Clive Barker

Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possiblities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what the may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familar things in an unfamilar aspect — Bertrand Russell

The character of the faith that allows us to be transformed by suffering and darkness is not doubt-free certainty; rather, it is tenacious obedience. — John Ortberg

The fundamental biological variant is DNA. That is why Mendel's definition of the gene as the unvarying bearer of hereditary traits, its chemical identification by Avery (confirmed by Hershey), and the elucidation by Watson and Crick of the structural basis of its replicative invariance, are without any doubt the most important discoveries ever made in biology. To this must be added the theory of natural selection, whose certainty and full significance were established only by those later theories. — Jacques Monod

To be creative you must set aside both certainty and doubt. — Pearl Zhu

I don't know," [my father] said, after clearing his throat. "But I know that he loves you." ... Twenty years later, I'm convinced it is the most important thing my father ever told me ... I used to think that the measure of true faith is certainty. Doubt, ambiguity, nuance, uncertainty - these represented a lack of conviction, a dangerous weakness in the armor of the Christian soldier who should "always be ready with an answer." ... Doubt is a difficult animal to master because it requires that we learn the difference between doubting God and doubting what we believe about God. The former has the potential to destroy faith; the latter has the power to enrich and refine it. — Rachel Held Evans

Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences. — Bertrand Russell

Science is the outcome of being prepared to live without certainty and therefore a mark of maturity. It embraces doubt and loose ends. — A.C. Grayling

We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified - how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don't know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know. — Richard Feynman

A testimony is a most precious possession because it is not acquired by logic or reason alone, it cannot be purchased with earthly possessions, and it cannot be given as a present or inherited from our ancestors. We cannot depend on the testimonies of other people. We need to know for ourselves. President Gordon B. Hinckley said, 'Every Latter-day Saint has the responsibility to know for himself or herself with a certainty beyond doubt that Jesus is the resurrected, living Son of the living God. — Dieter F. Uchtdorf

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. — Thomas Szasz

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. — Saul D. Alinsky

Imam Ali(as) said, " The body experinces six different states: health, sickness, death, life, sleep, and wakefulness, and so does the spirit. Its life is its knowledge and its death is ignorance; its sickness is doubt whereas its health is certainty; its sleep is negligence and its wakefulness is consiousness. — Ali Ibn Abi Talib

Male appreciation hardened his features from doubt to certainty. Boobs, the best negotiation strategy of them all. She thanked the Lord and her genetics for her great rack. — Kate Meader

In their purest form myths, not unlike tragedy, are perhaps the most important moment in the troubled history of Mexican civilization. The cement of dreams, the architecture of language, made of images and rhythms which respond to and harmonize with each other through time and space, their wisdom is not of that which can be measured on the scale of the everyday. They are concurrently religion, ritual, belief, phantasmagoria, and the primary affirmation of a human coherence, the coagulating strength of language against the anguish of death and the certainty of nothingness. Myths express life, despite the promise of destruction, of the weight of the inevitable. They are without any doubt the most durable monuments of men, in America as in the ancient world. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

The press and the public like certainty and affirmation of popular biases. But real science thrives on the capacity for doubt. — Wendy Kaminer

Over the proof that someone can be both certain and wrong. In my mind, I began to reserve judgment even on the revelations of the goddess. I cultivated the word probably. Was the temple swept? Yes, probably. But perhaps not. The goddess was eternal and just and immune to all lies, probably. We were her beloved and chosen, probably. But perhaps we weren't. I became very aware of the division between truth and certainty. I began to doubt. And once I was on that path, there was no hiding it. — Daniel Abraham

The orator persuades by moral character when his speech is delivered in such a manner as to render him worthy of confidence; for we feel confidence in a greater degree and more readily in persons of worth in regard to everything in general, but where there is no certainty and there is room for doubt, our confidence is absolute. — Aristotle.

This capacity for objectivity and absoluteness amounts to an existential - and "preventive" - refutation of the ideologies of doubt: if a man is able to doubt, it is because there is certainty; likewise the very notion of illusion proves that man has access to reality. It follows that there are necessarily some men who know reality and who therefore have certainty; and the great spokesmen of this knowledge and certainty are necessarily the best of men. For if truth were on the side of doubt, the individual who doubted would be superior not only to these spokesmen, who have not doubted, but also to the majority of normal men across the millennia of human existence. If doubt conformed to the real, human intelligence would be deprived of its sufficient reason, and man would be less than an animal, for the intelligence of animals does not doubt the reality to which it is proportioned. — Frithjof Schuon

God transcends and encompasses conservatism and liberalism, certainty and doubt, simplicity and complexity, Divinity and humanity, crucifixion and resurrection. — Amos Smith

Things happen, and nothing is for sure, but you just have to keep going, believing that one day, you'll find something that is. — A.J. Darkholme

There are no problems without consciousness ... , in what way does consciousness arise? Nobody can say with certainty; but we can observe small children in the process of becoming conscious. Every parent can see ; if they pay attention. And this is what we are able to observe: when the child recognizes someone or something - when [they] "know" a person or a thing - then we feel that child has consciousness. That, no doubt, is also why in Paradise it was the tree of knowledge which bore such fateful fruit."
Carl Jung
Modern Man in Search of a soul
1933 — C. G. Jung

Doubt is the heart of the matter. Abolish all doubt, and what's left is not faith, but absolute, heartless conviction. You're certain that you possess the Truth -- inevitably offered with an implied uppercase T -- and this certainty quickly devolves into dogmatism and righteousness, by which I mean a demonstrative, overweening pride in being so very right, in short, the arrogance of fundamentalism. — Graham Greene

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. — Henry Wade

Living with doubt ... is almost always more profitable than living with certainty.
People don't like doubt, so they pay money and give up opportunities to avoid it.
Entrepreneurshi p is largely about living with doubt. If you need reassurance, you're giving up quite a bit to get it. On the other hand, if you can get in the habit of seeking out uncertainty, you'll have developed a great instinct. — Seth Godin

You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit and if I can't figure it out, then I go on to something else, but I don't have to know an answer, I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is so far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me. — Richard Feynman

In fact, certainty exists in very different modes. The kind of certainty afforded by a verification that has passed through doubt is different from the immediate living certainty with which all ends and values appear in human consciousness when they make an absolute claim. But the certainty of science is very different from this kind of certainty that is acquired in life. Scientific certainty always has something Cartesian about it. It is the result of a critical method that seeks only to allow what cannot be doubted. This certainty, then, does not proceed from doubts and their being overcome, but is always anterior to any process of being doubted. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

When a fool sees himself as he is, then he is a fool no longer; and when a wise man learns of his own wisdom, then he becomes a fool." This caused me great trouble, for it seemed mere word play. But after many years I have come to this conclusion: that only in certainty is there moral danger. Doubt is the gift we must cherish, for it forces us to question our motives constantly. It guides us to truth. — David Gemmell

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. — Anne Lamott

But we couldn't see to form a chain of doubt between each other's eyes. And her voice had a vibrant certainty that made believing her feel liberating and obvious. — Miranda July

"Well then! it was the end; his ruin was complete. Even if he mended the cables and lit the fires, where would he find men? Another fortnight's strike and he would be bankrupt. And in this certainty of disaster he no longer felt any hatred of the Montsou bandits; he felt that all had a hand in it, that it was a general agelong fault. They were brutes, no doubt, but brutes who could not read, and who were dying of hunger. — Emile Zola

Could I have made mistakes? One does not build cities if one is guided by doubt. But can one govern in absolute certainty? I know that my beliefs have elevated me, just as I know that the things I have rejected would have destroyed me. But the city ... it is collapsing before my ... have I become so convinced by my own beliefs that I have stopped seeing the truth? Perhaps. But Atlas is out there, and he aims to destroy me, and destroy my city. To question is to surrender. I will not question. — Andrew Ryan

Neither one of us could really articulate how we felt until I heard Lamott referencing Paul Tillich and telling the audience, "The opposite of faith is not doubt - it's certainty." Steve and I didn't leave religion because we stopped believing in God. Religion left us when it started putting politics and certainty before love and mystery. — Brene Brown

In everything that was to follow, everyone claimed to have insight into what the Prophet thought and what he wanted. Yet in the lack of a clear and unequivocal designation of his successor, nobody could prove it beyond any shadow of doubt. However convinced they may have been that they were right, there were always those who would maintain otherwise. Certainty was a matter of faith rather than fact. — Anonymous

Whatever doubt might rise, he knew that he was right. But the rightness was an intellectual rightness and the doubt emotional. — Clifford D. Simak

There has to be certainty and there has to be clarity. There can't be ambiguity, .. This has to be certain, clear in all respects from all the parties so nobody is in any doubt about what the future holds. — Tony Blair

Something has happened to me, I can't doubt it any more. It came as an illness does, not like an ordinary certainty, not like anything evident. It came cunningly, little by little; I felt a little strange, a little put out, that's all. Once established it never moved, it stayed quiet, and I was able to persuade myself that nothing was the matter with me, that it was a false alarm. And now, it's blossoming. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I know very little with anything approaching certainty. I know that I was born, that I exist, and that I will die. For the most part, I can trust my brain's interpretation of the data presented to my senses: this is a rose, that is a car, she is my wife. I do not doubt the reality of the thoughts and emotions and impulses I experience in response to these things. . . . Yet apart from these primary perceptions, intuitions, inferences, and bits of information, the views that I hold about the things that really matter to me--meaning, truth, happiness, goodness, beauty--are finely woven tissues of belief and opinion. — Stephen Batchelor

It had been so long since we were a family that I had almost forgotten the joy that came with having one. All the small and large moments, many that I had taken for granted while they were occuring, no doubt bolstered by the certainty that there would be many more.
Yet such endearing and memorable engagements in life are promised to no one. They come and go and one has to be aware that there is no assurance they will ever come again. It made me tremble to think what I had lost. — David Baldacci

Even the written evidence offered by the executioners tells us that. And it ended with Anastasia not being buried with the rest of her family." Yakov paused. "The DNA experts can speculate all they want, but they still can't say with absolute certainty that any of the bones later found belonged to her. I doubt they ever will." I felt dazed. "How can I know that your version of events is true? — Glenn Meade

For instantly, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away. — Augustine Of Hippo

The problem with certainty is that it is static; it can do little but endlessly reassert itself. Uncertainty, by contrast, is full of unknowns, possibilities, and risks. (65) — Stephen Batchelor

When faith simplifies things that need to remain complex, instead of giving us strength to live with complexity, when it gives us answers where none exist, instead of helping us appreciate the sacredness of living with questions, when it offers certainty when there needs to be doubt, and when it tells us that we have arrived when we should be searching-then there is a problem with that faith. — Brad Hirschfield

If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics ... — Roger Bacon

Certainty sees things in restrictive, protective, aggressive ways, and thus isn't seeing at all. — Jerry Saltz

I want to say to you: Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty. — John Patrick Shanley

All great discoveries," the elder Marratta had once said, "are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents." At — Mark Helprin

Out of the element of participation follows the certainty of faith; out of the element of separation follows the doubt in faith. And each is essential for the nature of faith. Sometimes certainty conquers doubt, but it cannot eliminate doubt. The conquered of today may become the conqueror of tomorrow. Sometimes doubt conquers faith, but it still contains faith. Otherwise it would be indifference. — Paul Tillich

Lord Jesus, we praise you for your victory over death and your grace. In our moments of doubt and worry, remind us of the certainty of the resurrection, until we see it with our own eyes. Amen. — Northwestern Publishing House

Believing is not the same as knowing. Believing is second-hand knowledge, whereas knowing is first-hand experience. When your action comes from a level of belief, there is fear, doubt and restlessness behind such action. When your action comes from a level of knowing, there is conviction, certainty and calm behind such action. — Yogi Kanna

Living by faith isn't living with certainty. It's trusting God in spite of unanswered questions and unresolved doubts. — Rick Warren

We proceed by doubt, by trial and error, by resisting the impulse to lunge after certainty. — William Deresiewicz

TEN GUIDEPOSTS FOR WHOLEHEARTED LIVING 1. Cultivating authenticity: letting go of what people think 2. Cultivating self-compassion: letting go of perfectionism 3. Cultivating a resilient spirit: letting go of numbing and powerlessness 4. Cultivating gratitude and joy: letting go of scarcity and fear of the dark 5. Cultivating intuition and trusting faith: letting go of the need for certainty 6. Cultivating creativity: letting go of comparison 7. Cultivating play and rest: letting go of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as self-worth 8. Cultivating calm and stillness: letting go of anxiety as a lifestyle 9. Cultivating meaningful work: letting go of self-doubt and "supposed to" 10. Cultivating laughter, song, and dance: letting go of being cool and "always in control — Brene Brown

At sixteen, he was cursed with all the certainty of youth, unleavened by any trace of humor or self-doubt, and wed to the arrogance that came so naturally to those born blond and strong and handsome. — George R R Martin

When prayer removes distrust and doubt and enters the field of mental certainty, it becomes faith; and the universe is built on faith. — Ernest Holmes

There is no permanence in doubt; it incites the mind to closer inquiry and experiment, from which, if rightly managed, certainty proceeds, and in this alone can man find thorough satisfaction. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I hoisted myself onto my elbows. "Yeah, well, if I ever come back as a Grigori, then I'll kick your ass."
"You'll come back, and you'll be a Grigori." He spoke with such certainty it made me smile. "I doubt very greatly, however, that you'll kick my ass. But me and my ass will enjoy your efforts. — Jessica Shirvington

Finnick!" Something between a shriek and a cry of joy. A lovely if somewhat bedraggled young woman
dark tangled hair, sea green eyes
runs toward us in nothing but a sheet. "Finnick!" And suddenly, it's as if there's no one in the world but these two, crashing through space to reach each other. They collide, enfold, lose their balance, and slam against a wall, where they stay. Clinging into one being. Indivisible.
A pang of jealousy hits me. Not for either Finnick or Annie but for their certainty. No one seeing them could doubt their love. — Suzanne Collins

There are two modes of knowledge: through argument and through experience. Argument brings conclusions and compels us to concede them, but it does not cause certainty nor remove doubts that the mind may rest in truth, unless this is provided by experience. — Roger Bacon

Bertrand Russell writes that the painful thing about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision. — Rollo May

Since Christ Himself said in reference to the bread: "This is My Body," who will dare remain hesitant? And since with equal clarity He asserted: "This is My Blood," who will dare entertain any doubt and say that this is not His Blood? ... You have been taught these truths. Imbued with the certainty of faith, you know that what seems to be bread is not bread but the Body of Christ, although it seems to be bread when tasted. You also know that what seems to be wine is not wine but the Blood of Christ although it does taste like wine. — Cyril Of Jerusalem

But it was a happy and beautiful bride who came down the old, homespun-
carpeted stairs that September noon - the first bride of Green Gables, slender and shining-eyed, in the mist of her maiden veil, with her arms full of roses. Gilbert, waiting for her in the hall below, looked up at her with adoring eyes. She was his at last, this evasive, long-sought Anne, won after years of patient waiting. It was to him she was coming in the sweet surrender of the bride. Was he worthy of her? Could he make her as happy as he hoped? If he failed her - if he could not measure up to her standard of manhood - then, as she held out her hand, their eyes met and all doubt was swept away in a glad certainty. They belonged to each other; and, no matter what life might hold for them, it could never alter that. Their happiness was in each other's keeping and both were unafraid. — L.M. Montgomery

He was remembering the nights he'd sat upstairs with one or both of his boys or with his girl in the crook of his arm, their damp bath-smelling heads hard against his ribs as he read aloud to them from "Black Beauty" or "The Chronicles of Narnia". How his voice alone, its palpable resonance, had made them drowsy. These were evenings, and there were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, when nothing traumatic enough to leave a scar had befallen the nuclear unit. Evenings of plain vanilla closeness in his black leather chair; sweet evenings of doubt between the nights of bleak certainty. They came to him now, these forgotten counterexamples, because in the end, when you were falling into water, there was no solid thing to reach for but your children. — Jonathan Franzen

Now we have found that this is of paramount importance in order to progress. We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People — Richard Feynman

Faith, doubt, humility, and confidence - this is the stuff and substance of theology at its best. Swagger, smugness, and certainty - this is the stuff and substance of ideology at its worst. — Austin Fischer

Doubt is the stock in trade all philosophers as well as all scientific persons. Conversely, certainty is the cane that all religious fanatics and other zealots wield with outrageous righteousness. Only by allowing for doubt can we probe our ignorance. Doubt, therefore, is the essential seed of thought. — Kilroy J. Oldster

there is a type of flower that can bloom only in the desert of doubt. Faith that we elect to profess in the absence of certainty is an offering that is entirely free, unconditioned, and utterly authentic. Such a gesture represents our considered and chosen response to the universe, our assent to what we find beautiful and worthy and deserving of our risk. We — Terryl L. Givens

I did not imitate the skeptics who doubt only for doubting's sake, and pretend to be always undecided; on the contrary, my whole intention was to arrive at a certainty, and to dig away the drift and the sand until I reached the rock or the clay beneath. — Rene Descartes

Doubt is unsettling to the ego, and those who are drawn to ideologies that promise the dispelling of doubt by proffering certainties will never grow. In seeking certainty they are courting the death of the soul, whose nature is forever churning possibility, forever seeking the larger, forever riding the melting edge of certainty's glacier. — James Hollis

John felt grounded again. He remembered his favorite Bible story, the one about Peter getting out of the boat and walking on water. The big fisherman was walking along quite nicely until he looked at the waves and began to sink. As much as possible, John tried to live his life without looking at the waves. But when he did, when the lives of his grown children caused his faith to waver even a little, God always sent someone to illustrate the words of Christ: "You of little faith . . . why did you doubt?" John felt certain that in this, his most trying season yet, the Lord had sent Pastor Mark to fill that role. It was a certainty that kept his eyes where they belonged - off the waves and straight ahead to the outstretched arms of Jesus. — Karen Kingsbury

In fact, as I get older, I begin to feel that actually what we need more in the world is doubt; more skepticism, less crazed certainty ... People who know the answer and are going to impose it on everybody else, I think, are terrifying people. — Ian McEwan

Make an enemy of certainty and befriend doubt. When you can change your mind, you can change anything. — Kevin Ashton

All great discoveries ... are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents. — Mark Helprin

We must doubt the certainty of everything which passes through the senses, but how much more ought we to doubt things contrary to the senses, such as the existence of God and the soul. — Leonardo Da Vinci

Both doubt and certainty are as contagious as the common cold — Kathryn Schulz