#certainty

Inquiry is fatal to certainty. ↗

— Will Durant

#fatal #inquiry

If art made you think, then this was Art. Staring at the ball, made of layers and layers of cloth, I wondered about the glass marble at its heart. What if you wanted to reach that marble? Make sure it was still whole? You'd have to remove the layers. You'd have to risk breaking the ball for a chance at freeing it. Fear, knowledge, certainty - you'd have to be willing to let them all go. ↗

— Justina Chen

#certainty #fear #risks #taking-chances #art

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. ↗

— Mark Helprin

#cities #imagination #justice #mankind #imagination

But just as we can all agree on what is red, even if we will never know if we each see it in the same way, so we can all agree - can’t we? - that no matter how confident we may appear to others, inside we are all sobbing, scared and uncertain for much of the time. Or perhaps it’s just me. Oh God, perhaps it really is just me. Actually it doesn’t really matter, when you come to think of it. If it is just me, then you are reading the story of some weird freak. You are free to treat this book like science fiction, fantasy or exotic travel literature. Are there really men like Stephen Fry on this planet? Goodness, how alien some people are. And if I am not alone, then neither are you, and hand in hand we can marvel together at the strangeness of the human condition. ↗

— Stephen Fry

#life #uncertainty #inspirational

No one knows for sure about the future. But if you feel reluctant to plan something about it, then someone with guts would define it for you. ↗

— Toba Beta

#certainty #define #definition #future #guts

I never imagined it wouldn't work out for me. I had that absolute certainty in myself that has seen me through, I think, and my parents were absolutely behind me all the way. ↗

— Ewan McGregor

#absolutely #behind #certainty #had #i

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

— Pliny the Elder

#certainty #matters #nothing #only #these

Mystery is gone to the certainty of technological principles. So the real terror, the real aggression against life comes in the form of the pursuit of our technological happiness. ↗

— Godfrey Reggio

#aggression #certainty #comes #form #gone

I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are. ↗

— Jose Saramago

#always #appreciated #because #cliches #copies

The Supreme Court has a very light backlog. They leave a lot of splits among the circuits, a lot of uncertainty. And I think they ought to work a lot harder. ↗

— Arlen Specter

#circuits #court #harder #i #i think