Life Certainty Quotes & Sayings

Optimism hopes for the best without any guarantee of its arriving and is often no more than whistling in the dark. Christian hope, by contrast, is faith looking ahead to the fulfillment of the promises of God, as when the Anglican burial service inters the corpse 'in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.' Optimism is a wish without warrant; Christian hope is a certainty, guaranteed by God himself. Optimism reflects ignorance as to whether good things will ever actually come. Christian hope expresses knowledge that every day of his life, and every moment beyond it, the believer can say with truth, on the basis of God's own commitment, that the best is yet to come. — J.I. Packer

I'm looking at the ruins of my own existence and knowing, with a sickening certainty, that my old home and my old life have been truly destroyed. — K.C. Finn

I probably continue to hope that I will encounter something down there, that if I go down inside and simply wait, it will be possible for me to encounter a certain something. Not that I expect it to restore my life to me. No, I am far too old to hope for such things. What I hope to find is the meaning of the life that I have lost. By what was it taken away from me, and why? I want to know the answers to these questions with absolute certainty. And I would go so far as to say that if I could have those answers, I would not mind being even more profoundly lost than I am already. Indeed, I would gladly accept such a burden for whatever years of life may be left to me. — Haruki Murakami

There is no shame here. The places where we still fear are simply the places we have yet to fully receive God's love. Only by his grace and in his love can we let our fear go. Let go and receive. Receive his dreams. Receive his love. It is an exchange of fear for desire. It is an exchange of death for life. There is no fear in love. And I can tell you this with certainty: God does not want you to live in fear. And he does want you to live. Don't be afraid. Just believe. — Stasi Eldredge

Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65] — Julian Barnes

Each moment of loss, she has come to believe, contains within it the possibility of a new life. When the unimaginable happens, and your life changes irrevocably, you may find along with the pain a kind of grace. And in the place of certainty and fear - the fear of losing what you had - you are left with something startling: a depth of empathy, a quivering sensitivity to the world around you, and the unexpected blessing of gratitude for what remains. — Christina Baker Kline

The is always much to be said for not attempting more than you can do and for making a certainty of what you try. But this principle, like others in life and war, has it exceptions. — Winston Churchill

As a new mother, I want to give my children the best start in life but millions of children affected with AIDS don't live with such certainty. We can all do something to give them a future worth living for. We can make a difference in a child's life by joining with UNICEF to ensure that mothers and children are given the treatment that they deserve, in order to live a life free from HIV and AIDS. — Claudia Schiffer

She opens her eyes, says: Stop lying. She says she hopes she'll never know anything, anything in the world, the way you do. She says: I don't want to know anything the way you do, with that death-derived certainty, that hopeless monotony, the same every day of your life, every night, and that deadly routine of lovelessness.
She says: It's day, everything is about to begin, except you, you never begin.
She goes back to sleep. You ask her why she sleeps, what weariness she has to rest from, what monumental weariness. — Marguerite Duras

Christ alone, of all the philosophers, magicians, etc., has affirmed eternal life as the most important certainty, the infinity of time, the futility of death, the necessity and purpose of serenity and devotion. He lived serenely, as an artist greater than all other artists, scorning marble and clay and paint, working in the living flesh. In other words, this peerless artist, scarcely conceivable with the blunt instrument of our modern, nervous and obtuse brains, made neither statues nor paintings nor books. He maintained in no uncertain terms that he made ... living men, immortals. — Vincent Van Gogh

I, too, have had my revelation. I do not compare it with yours. It has no identifiable source. It is an inner conviction that has grown from a small thought to a large certainty that there is other life in the universe, that to prove its existence is the most gloriously human thing man can do, that to communicate with it would make this vast, incomprehensible place in which man lives, this unexplored forest of the night, a friendlier, happier, more wonderful, more exciting, holier place in which to be. — James Edwin Gunn

In the end, it was such a simple, small thing. He had felt flashes of it before in his life, the absolute certainty. But the truth was that he'd kept walking away from it. It was a far more terrifying idea to imagine how much control he really had over how his life turned out. Easier to believe that he was a gallant ship tossed by fate than to captain it himself. — Maggie Stiefvater

There's only one certainty in life: how you come into the world. Where you go from there is up to you. — Katie Kacvinsky

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. — Stanislav Grof

Love," he said, "is always a risk, isn't it? I've always thought that there were no certainties in life, but I was wrong. Love is a certainty. And love always gives more than it takes. — Patricia Briggs

As a species, tragedy dwells within us all. We push it to the back of our thoughts, but it is never so far gone that it cannot return, crashing and writhing into our souls: a rogue wave overturning a boat on a calm day. Tragedy is never more than a breath away. We hide from its certainty and go about our lives as though time can be wasted. Somewhere deep inside ourselves we know that we tell ourselves lies. We know that someday everything we love will be gone. — Logan Kain

Of the hundreds of religions and philosophies ever entertained by the mind of man, each considered by the convinced holder to be the only valid one, only at the very most one can be accurate. . . Just as obvious should be the possibility, if not likelihood, if not certainty, that none of those hundreds of religions accurately depicts How Life Works. — Thomas Daniel Nehrer

We say that we often see animals in our dreams, but we forget that almost always we are ourselves animals therein, deprived of that reasoning power which projects upon things the light of certainty; on the contrary we bring to bear on the spectacle of life only a dubious vision, extinguished anew every moment by oblivion, the former reality fading before that which follows it as one projection of a magic lantern fades before the next as we change the slide. — Marcel Proust

In the human life time is but an instant, and the substance of it a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of certainty. And, to say all in a word, everything that belongs to the body is a stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream and vapor, and life is a warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after- fame is oblivion. What then can guide a man? One thing and only one, philosophy. — Marcus Aurelius

he encouraged them to explore their doubts, ask their questions, and express themselves honestly. Many people crave certainty. They don't want to have to think, agonize, or grapple with life's difficult questions for themselves. Instead they want dogma. They want guaranteed answers. — Brian D. McLaren

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? — Elizabeth Gilbert

Like Dvoretsky, I think that (all other things being equal), the analytical method of studying chess must give you a colossal advantage over the chess pragmatist, and that there can be no certainty in chess without analysis. I personally acquired these views from my sessions with Mikhail Botvinnik, and they laid the foundations of my chess-playing life. — Garry Kasparov

There are many levels of life which we cannot see and know, yet which certainly exist. There is a larger world, vast enough to include immortality ... Our spiritual natures belong to this larger world ... If death is apparently an outward fact, immortality is an inner certainty. — Manly Hall

The brigadier I knew has left his bombed-out face, leaving me alone with the clock, shelves of handsome books nobody ever reads, and one certainty: that whatever I do with my life, however much power, wealth, experience, knowledge, or beauty I'll accrue, I, too, will end up like this vulnerable old man. When I look at Brigadier Reginald Philby, I'm looking down time's telescope at myself. M — David Mitchell

When we started, I was delivering meals to people in Atlanta. We were a direct-care organization. And it was - people needed meals, they needed transport, they needed medication, they needed buddy systems. They had a death sentence. There was AZT, and that was just prolonging the agony, basically. Now people, of course, if they are on antiretrovirals, they face a lifetime of health, basically. I mean, it doesn't - it's I would say in the 99 percent certainty bracket that if you are on that medication, you will have a healthy life. — Elton John

Like the body craves oxygen, the mind is desperate for certainty. It believes that without a safe foothold on reality, it will die.
But the fascinating thing is that the illusion of certainty is exactly the opposite of safety because it hardens and narrows the vision to make everything fit its own scope. Then when new information arrives which would be its ally, the mind pushes it away in favor of the leaky life raft to which it clings, sinking all the while beneath the waves of change.
In fact, the only antidote for this is to embrace 'I don't know' so deeply that a powerful, dynamic safety emerges. This is like learning to surf so well that a tsunami wave shows up as a challenge to test our mastery. — Jacob Nordby

No Belle, you're wrong. No one will ever make me feel the way I do with you. I know this with the certainty that the sun will set today and rise again tomorrow. The kind of certainty that when the moon rises and the stars blink in the sky that they'll all still look way too dim to me. They'll always look too dim because you are the brightest star in my life and, without you, everything else seems cloudy. I only seem to see things clearly when you're around and I know all of that because you are my soul — Jessie Lane

In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden instant "now," even having lived such a moment before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happier moment to come. Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is still young, carry on with the belief that everything could only get worse: If a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happiest moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful, more so. — Orhan Pamuk

We must content ourselves with the mystery, the absurdity, the contradictions, the hostility, but also the generosity that our environment offers us. It's not much, but it's always better than the deadly, defeatist certainty of the paranoid. — Philip K. Dick

...true death, my friend and counselor, who was never again going to allow me to act like such a coward...He was not going to allow me to put off until tomorrow what I should be enjoying today. He was not going to let me flee from life's battles, and he was going to help me fight the good fight. Never again, ever, was I going to feel ridiculous about doing anything. Because he was there, saying that when he took me in hand to travel with me to other worlds, I should leave behind the greatest sin of all: regret. With the certainty of his presence and the gentleness of his face, I was sure that I was going to be able to drink from the fountain of life. — Paulo Coelho

I believe that the day one stops being spiritual, one ends up being religious. I live by the adage that the only certainty in life is death. We should, therefore, learn to live for the day and be content. — Ashwin Sanghi

We may be touched by the most powerful of suppositions--even to a certainty--as we stand in the rose petals of the sun and hear a murmur from the wind no louder than the sound it makes as it dozes under the bee's wings. This, too, I suggest, is the weather, and worthy of report. — Mary Oliver

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

Slowly, she made her way out of the water and stood for a moment on the shore, looking out at the vast expanse of the briny deep. She smiled. This had been her baptism, she reckoned, and with a certainty in her soul that could only come from God Himself, she knew that she would begin her life anew. — Paula W. Millet

Jeevan was crushed by a sudden certainty that this was it, that this illness that Hua was describing was going to be the divide between a before and an after, a line drawn through his life. p20 — Emily St. John Mandel

We all return. It is this certainty that gives meaning to life and it does not make the slightest difference whether or not in a later incarnation we remember the former life. What counts is not the individual and his comfort, but the great aspiration to the perfect and the pure which goes on in each incarnation. — Gustav Mahler

There are lots of reasons why a woman stays with a man, even when she's given up on changing him and can predict with certainty the shape that the rest of her life with him is going to take. — A.S.A Harrison

I learned the most important lesson of my life: that the extraordinary is not the birthright of a chosen and privileged few, but of all people, even the humblest. That is my one certainty: we are all the manifestation of the divinity of God. — Paulo Coelho

The more I've learned in my life, the more acutely I've felt my hunger and blindness, and at the same time the closer I've felt to the end of hunger, the end of blindness. At times I've felt myself to be clinging onto the rim - of what I can hardly say without the risk of sounding ridiculous - only to slip and find myself deeper in the hole than ever. And there, in the dark, I find again in myself a form of praise for all that continues to crush my certainty. — Nicole Krauss

Christian hypocrites who pretend to hate life and love death. He may talk about the soul-what he is after is the girl Love means suffering-those who love drag a chain with them. To her it was not a belief but a certainty Trifling incident gains importance when undue emphasis is laid. — Georg Ebers

My work means that we have lived in different parts of the world and in each there has always been something to be afraid of. Gangsters, extremist political groups Right and Left tossing bombs into restaurants, hijacks, holdups, a city plumb on the line of an earthquake fault. We have long had a compact, with ourselves, with life; life is dangerous. We live with that; in the one certainty that fear is the real killer. — Nadine Gordimer

Certainty shuts down possibilities and keeps us small. — L.R.W. Lee

I have spent a lifetime looking for remedies to all manner of life's problems
personal, social, political, global. I am deeply suspicious of those who offer simple solutions and statements of absolute certainty or who claim full possession of the truth. Yet I have grown equally skeptical of those who suggest that all is too nuanced and complex for us to learn any lessons, that there are so many sides to every thing that we can pursue knowledge every day of our lives and still know nothing for sure. I believe we can recognize truth when we see it, just not a first and not without ever relenting in our efforts to learn more. This is because the goal we seek, and the good we hope for, comes not as some final reward but as the hidden companion to our quest. It is not what we find, but the reason we cannot stop looking and striving, that tells us why we are here. — Madeleine K. Albright

Passion. It can be used to describe the beauty of an earth-shaking meeting between two people, but it isn't just that. It's there in the excitement of the unexpected, in the desire to do something with real fervour, in the certainty that one is going to realise a dream. Passion sends us signals that guide us through our lives. — Paulo Coelho

Life to the great majority is only a constant struggle for mere existence, with the certainty of losing it at last. — Arthur Schopenhauer

I realized that there are no certainties in life. You can't manipulate fate. — Bethenny Frankel

The certainty of a God giving meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds. — Albert Camus

Every patient reacts a little differently, both biologically and psychologically. The only constant in cancer is inconstancy; the only certainty is a future of uncertainty, a truism for all of modern life but one made vivid by life-threatening illness. — Jonathan Alter

PRETTY LITTLE LIARS works as a metaphor for our central human experience: we have no way to objectively know about anything, no way to move forward with certainty, and yet move forward we must. We stumble through life, trying to find our own way, not knowing whom to listen to, whom to trust, whom to suspect, what to believe. But in that process we discover our most authentic selves. — Norman Buckley

But no one can predict of a certainty what will happen. And none of it will change how I intend to spend the rest of my life. I will live it on my terms. And you ... you can have all of me or nothing. I won't be an invalid any longer. Not even if it means losing you. — Lisa Kleypas

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. — Sam Harris

In short, is American life of the future to be characterized by freedom or by servitude, strength or weakness? The answer must be clear and unequivocal if we are to avoid the pitfalls toward which we are now heading with such certainty. In many respects it is not to be found in any dogma of political philosophy but in those immutable precepts which underlie the Ten Commandments. — Douglas MacArthur

It seemed perfectly possible that, in spite of my certainty of my own genius, I might die of some illness, or perhaps even in a street accident, before I had ever glimpsed the meaning of life. My moods of happiness and self-confidence convinced me that I had a "destiny" to become a famous writer, and to be remembered as one of the most important thinkers of the century. — Colin Wilson

Although we may trust God's promises for life after death and the certainty of a heavenly home, we must still face the reality of death. — Billy Graham

My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers - even the answers they themselves believed. I don't know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being "politically conscious" - as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Men, and governments, must act to the best of their ability. There is no such thing as absolute certainty, but there is assurance sufficient for the purposes of human life. — John Stuart Mill

I know that no one has ever looked at me this way. I know that this connection is not just one-sided, that she feels it too. I know that I scare her and fascinate her as much as she scares and fascinates me. I know that sooner or later I will fuck her, that she will enjoy it. That I will enjoy it. And somehow, with certainty that exceeds every other fact that I've come to accept in this space of seconds, I know that my life will never be the same again. — Laurelin Paige

Give us that calm certainty of truth, that nearness to Thee, that conviction of the reality of the life to come, which we shall need to bear us through the troubles of this. — Henry Ward Beecher

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. — Richard Russo

Hope is not a feeling of certainty that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have a meaning. — Vaclav Havel

But he needed to be certain before committing to something so - the word, certain, arrested his thoughts. A person can't be absolutely certain about anything, not certainty in the sense of a mathematical proof. He wasn't certain about Kate. He saw her, observed her, wanted to be with her. Somehow, he just knew. For reasons already set in his heart, the way he was wired, Josh knew Kate was a person he wanted in his life. She was the proof. Would it be the same way with God? — H.L. Wegley

Mind your mind, mind your time and mind your life! Life is just once and the real certainty or uncertainty that can make you lose it is always uncertain; until you understand this well, you shall never neither understand how well to live your life each moment of time and leave indelible footprints, big or small, that shall please God nor shall you ever know how well to live and leave noble and indelible footprints worth not just talking about, but emulating. Mind your mind, mind your time and mind your life! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

My Tom died as babies do, gently and without complaint. Because they have been such a little time with us, they seem to hold to life but weakly. I used to wonder if it was so because the memory of Heaven still lived within them, so that in leaving here they do not fear death as we do, who no longer know with certainty where it is our spirits go. This, I thought, must be the kindness that God does for them and for us, since He gives so many infants such a little while to bide with us. — Geraldine Brooks

The statistics of life out there and the statistics of intelligent beings and advanced civilization is a certainty, the way I look at it. that It has not been accepted, because we've been in an anthropocentric era. — Story Musgrave

That tide of insecurity would come in and out over the years, sometimes stranding me for a while but occasionally lifting me just beyond what I thought I could accomplish. Either way, it would wash over the same bedrock certainty: ultimately, I know myself. At each stage of my life, I've had a pretty clear notion of my needs and of what I was ready for. — Sonia Sotomayor

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. — Sarah Dessen

How incredibly far our lives drift from where we knew with all certainty they would go. How little today resembles what yesterday thought it would look like. — Jim Beaver

She couldn't believe what she did then. Before she could stop herself, she leaned up on tiptoes, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him on the mouth. Her lips brushed over his for the barest of seconds, but it was still a kiss, and when she came to her senses and dared to pull away and look at him, he had the most curious expression on his face.
Brodick knew she regretted her sponatenity, but as he stared into her brilliant green eyes, he also knew, with a certainty that shook him to the core, that his life had just been irrevocably changed by this mere slip of a woman. — Julie Garwood

But at that moment she had known, with a certainty she would never feel about anything else in her life, that it was right, that she wanted this man in her life. Something inside her said, He understands. What it's like to be different. — Celeste Ng

And it would be a spare life he would be certain to lead as a schoolteacher in some urban location. But he had a serenity that came with the choice of the life he wanted to live. And this serenity and certainty I have seen only among those who have the armour of books close by. — Michael Ondaatje

when the uncertainty is known, certainty is guaranteed. Until we unravel the uncertainties of our lives, we shall always be uncertain with the life we live — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Perhaps my sense of reality is not very highly developed, perhaps I lack a sound and reassuring instinct for the solid facts of our earthly existence; I can't always tell memories from dreams, and often I mistake dreams, coming to life again in colours, smells, sudden associations, with the eerie secret certainty of a past life from which time and space divide me no differently and no better than a light sleep in the early hours. — Annemarie Schwarzenbach

In a novel you always knew the moment when something Happened, when someone Changed. But real life was full of gradual, piecemeal, continuous transformation. It was full of accidents and undefineables, and things that just happened on their own. The only certainty was 'It's complicated,' whether or not unicorns tolerated your touch. — Scott Westerfeld

There are few times when we know with absolute certainty we are going to do something for the last time. Life has a way of moving in circles, bringing us back to places we didn't expect
and taking us away from those we do. There are too many times we don't pay close enough attention, and moments are lost in our assumption we'll have another chance. — Megan Hart

Yet never once in his life had he experienced the unshakable certainty that he and he alone had arrived at a decision. He always had the sense that fate had forced him to decide things to suit its own convenience. On occasion, after the momentary satisfaction of having decided something of his own free will, he would see that things had been decided beforehand by an external power cleverly camouflaged as free will, mere bait thrown in his path to lure him into behaving as he was mean to. The only things that he had decided for himself with complete independence were the kind of trivial matters which, on closer inspection, revealed themselves to require no decision making at all. — Haruki Murakami

Death is a certainty, an inevitable realization, the only thing that we know will befall us. There are no exceptions, no surprises: all paths lead to it. Everything we do is a preparation for it, a preparation that we begin at birth, whimpering with our foreheads against the ground. We never move farther away from death, only closer. But if it is a certainty, then why are we surprised when it comes? If this life is a short passage that lasts only an hour or a day, then why do we fight to prolong it one more day or hour? Worldly life is treacherous, eternity is better.3 — Mesa Selimovic

The motives behind scientism are culturally significant. They have been mixed, as usual: genuine curiosity in search of truth; the rage for certainty and for unity; and the snobbish desire to earn the label scientist when that became a high social and intellectual rank. But these efforts, even though vain, have not been without harm, to the inventors and to the world at large. The "findings" have inspired policies affecting daily life that were enforced with the same absolute assurance as earlier ones based on religion. At the same time, the workers in the realm of intuition, the gifted finessers - artists, moralists, philosophers, historians, political theorists, and theologians - were either diverted from their proper task, while others were looking on them with disdain as dabblers in the suburbs of Truth. — Jacques Barzun

I don't know what to do," he said. "No harm in that. I've never known what to do," said Rincewind with hollow cheerfulness. "Been completely at a loss my whole life." He hesitated. "I think it's called being human, or something. — Terry Pratchett

You can never rightly judge another person's life because as a person, you only know the truth, with certainty, of your own experiences. — Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

You had to form for yourself a lucid language for the world, to overcome the battering of experience, to replace everyday life's pain and harshness and wretched dreariness with - no not with certainty but with an ignorance you could live with. Deep ignorance, but still a kind that knew its limits. The limits were crucial. — Gregory Benford

In my life, the only certainty is to be uncertain. I'm an unbeliever who believes in skepticism. I'm only sure about being unsure. — Christopher Hitchens

The only certainty is that we never know what tomorrow holds. We live for today, life is short, so let's enjoy it together while we can. — Jinxx

All writers
all beings
are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force ... All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land.. — Janet Frame

May the love in your heart overshadow any sorrows, and may you always know with a deep inner certainty, how loved you truly are. — Jodi Livon

The certainty that life cannot be long, and the probability that it will be much shorter than nature allows, ought to awaken every man to the active prosecution of whatever he is desirous to perform. It is true, that no diligence can ascertain success; death may intercept the swiftest career; but he who is cut off in the execution of an honest undertaking has at least the honour of falling in his rank, and has fought the battle, though he missed the victory. — Samuel Johnson

Certainty is one of the weakest positions in life. Curiosity is one of the most powerful. Certainty prohibits learning, curiosity fuels change. — Liz Wiseman

In practice, some come to see easily, some with difficulty. But whatever the case, never mind. Difficult or easy, the Buddha said not to be heedless. Just that
don't be heedless. Why? Because life is not certain. Wherever we start to think that things are certain, uncertainty is lurking right there. Heedlessness is just holding things as certain. It is grasping at certainty where there is no certainty and looking for truth in things that are not true. Be careful! They are likely to bite you sometime in the future! — Ajahn Chah

The offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can't give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don't know anything like enough yet; that I haven't understood enough; that I can't know enough; that I'm always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn't have it any other way. — Christopher Hitchens

I cling to the beauty and strength of nature and all wild creatures with a passion born of certainty that only through them can i retain my perspective about life and my own part in it. — Virginia McKenna

Faith is a quiet certainty that there is both a higher purpose to life and a higher power that oversees that purpose. Faith is knowing that we do not have to go it alone during our darkest hours and, even when we feel utterly victimized and weak, there is still something brighter, purer, and more potent than anything we can imagine that cares enough to reach out and offer a shoulder for us to lean upon. The object of faith takes many forms and many names, but the universal truth is faith itself. — Michelle Belanger

God, Abby, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, he said as he stared out the bay window onto the lake. The serene morning calm of the water was laughing at his riptide of emotions. In all his life, he'd never been as tortured as he was now. Rip his limbs apart, whip his back raw, waterboard him, anything but this. Because this ... this was far worse. It was her pain. Her torture that was destroying his sanity. He had no control over it. He couldn't stop it.
He hated that he wasn't strong enough to withstand this. Most of all, he hated that he cared so much about her.
Cause he knew.
He knew one certainty in all this.
She had managed to touch a piece of his ice-cold heart. And it wasn't letting him go. — Cindy Paterson

The thing is, there is no certainty in this life - in one second your entire world could shift. I'm not saying it will, but I am living proof that It can. We never prepare for tragedy and that's a good thing but my god what's it's taught me is how little we appreciate what we have or some cases once had. — Nikki Rowe

In our contemporary social and intellectual plight, it is nothing less than shocking to discover that those persons who claim to have discovered an absolute are usually the same people who also pretend to be superior to the rest. To find people in our day attempting to pass off to the world and recommending to others some nostrum of the absolute which they claim to have discovered is merely a sign of the loss of and the need for intellectual and moral certainty, felt by broad sections of the population who are unable to look life in the face. — Karl Mannheim

Happiness is a perceptual reality, not an absolute certainty. — Debasish Mridha

The almost biological certainty that the more often you checked your cell phone, the more likely you were to find that one wondrous message or notification that would improve your entire life. — Courtney Maum

My mother has made choices in her life, as we all must, and she is at peace with them. I can see her peace. She did not cop out on herself. The benefits of her choices are massive-a long, stable marriage to a man she still calls her best friend; a family that has extended now into grandchildren who adore her; a certainty in her own strength. Maybe some things were sacrificed, and my dad made his sacrifices, too-but who amongst us lives without sacrifice? — Elizabeth Gilbert

There's only one certainty in life. A strong man stands above and conquers all! — Akira Toriyama

For true liberation, you do not need to fight. You simply have to change your thoughts and drift away from conformity, comfort, security, and certainty of life and embrace and enjoy the possibilities and magnificence of the uncertainty of life. — Debasish Mridha

What we've established (in San Diego) with my growing family is hard to re-create. It's hard to up and re-create that. I know that moves are part of life. But that certainty is fair to say that (not being sold on moving to Los Angeles) is part of it. The good thing is I'm not under contract in a year where we'd potentially be in Los Angeles. — Philip Rivers

The only certainties in life are death and taxes. — Mark Twain