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1 " So tonight I reach for my journal again. This is the first time I’ve done this since I came to Italy. What I write in my journal is that I am weak and full of fear. I explain that Depression and Loneliness have shown up, and I’m scared they will never leave. I say that I don’t want to take the drugs anymore, but I’m frightened I will have to. I am terrified that I will never really pull my life together. In response, somewhere from within me, rises a now-familiar presence, offering me all the certainties I have always wished another person would say to me when I was troubled. This is what I find myself writing on the page:I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long. I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it—I will love you through that, as well. If you don’t need the medication, I will love you, too. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and Braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me. Tonight, this strange interior gesture of friendship—the lending of a hand fromme to myself when nobody else is around to offer solace—reminds me of something that happened to me once in New York City. I walked into an office building one afternoon in a hurry, dashed into the waiting elevator. As I rushed in, I caught an unexpected glance of myself in a security mirror’s reflection. In that moment, my brain did an odd thing—it fired off this split-second message: “Hey! You know her! That’s a friend of yours!” And I actually ran forward toward my own reflection with a smile, ready to welcome that girl whose name I had lost but whose face was so familiar. In a flash instant of course, I realized my mistake and laughed in embarrassment at my almost doglike confusion over how a mirror works. But for some reason that incident comes to mind again tonight during my sadness in Rome, and I find myself writing this comforting reminder at the bottom of the page. Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a FRIEND… I fell asleep holding my notebook pressed against my chest, open to this most recent assurance. In the morning when I wake up, I can still smell a faint trace of depression’s lingering smoke, but he himself is nowhere to be seen. Somewhere during the night, he got up and left. And his buddy loneliness beat it, too. "
― Elizabeth Gilbert
2 " Oh, if only it were possible to find understanding,” Joseph exclaimed. “If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn’t there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?”The master had never heard him speak so fervently. He walked on in silence for a little, then said: “There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht - I can see that they already have begun. "
― Hermann Hesse , The Glass Bead Game
3 " If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything is tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn't there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?" Joseph Knect said to his Music Master " there is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend rather, you should long for perfection in yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived not taught "
4 " Who among us has not suddenly looked into his child's face, in the midst of the toils and troubles of everyday life, and at that moment " seen" that everything which is good, is loved and lovable, loved by God! Such certainties all mean, at bottom, one and the same thing: that the world is plumb and sound; that everything comes to its appointed goal; that in spite of all appearances, underlying all things is - peace, salvation, gloria; that nothing and no one is lost; that " God holds in his hand the beginning, middle, and end of all that is." Such nonrational, intuitive certainties of the divine base of all that is can be vouchsafed to our gaze even when it is turned toward the most insignificant-looking things, if only it is a gaze inspired by love. That, in the precise sense, is contemplation...Out of this kind of contemplation of the created world arise in never-ending wealth all true poetry and all real art, for it is the nature of poetry and art to be paean and praise heard above all the wails of lamentation. No one who is not capable of such contemplation can grasp poetry in a poetic fashion, that is to say, in the only meaningful fashion. The indispensability, the vital function of the arts in man's life, consists above all in this: that through them contemplation of the created world is kept alive and active. "
5 " The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place. "
6 " See, the sad thing about a guy like you is, in 50 years you're gonna start doin' some thinkin' on your own and you're going to come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life: one, don't do that, and two, you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library! "
― Matt Damon , Good Will Hunting
7 " Responsibility I believe accrues through privilege. People like you and me have an unbelievable amount of privilege and therefore we have a huge amount of responsibility. We live in free societies where we are not afraid of the police; we have extraordinary wealth available to us by global standards. If you have those things, then you have the kind of responsibility that a person does not have if he or she is slaving seventy hours a week to put food on the table; a responsibility at the very least to inform yourself about power. Beyond that, it is a question of whether you believe in moral certainties or not. "
― Noam Chomsky
8 " of the few certainties I've come across in life, one of them is that when a person says money is no object, the opposite is most likely true. Money is the only object—or will be. "
― James Anderson , The Never-Open Desert Diner (Ben Jones, #1)
9 " Mr. Welper, of the few certainties I've come across in life, one of them is that when a person says money is no object, the opposite is most likely true. Money is the only object—or will be. "
10 " Suppose that we could close our eyes today and see the real certainties and uncertainties of tomorrow, we would have never wished to open our eyes again for the real certainties and uncertainties of tomorrow never ends! "
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11 " The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity. "
― Christopher Hitchens , Arguably: Selected Essays
12 " ...we should all fortify ourselves against the dark hours of depression by cultivating a deep distrust of the certainties of despair. Despair is relentless in the certainties of its pessimism. But we have seen again and again, from our own experience and others', that absolute statements of hopelessness that we make in the dark are notoriously unreliable. Our dark certainties are not sureties. "
― John Piper , When the Darkness Will Not Lift: Doing What We Can While We Wait for God—And Joy
13 " It's a hypothesis. History won't take us far enough to confirm it. And our certainties never really hold water. One day you feel like dying and the next you realize all you had to do was go down a few stairs to find the light switch so you could see things a bit more clearly. "
― Anna Gavalda , Hunting and Gathering
14 " Questions, inside the larger mystery of sorrow, which contains us and our daily transit, and is large enough indeed to contain the whole shifting tidal theater where I make small constructions, my metaphors, my defenses. Against which I play out theories, doubts, certainties bright as high tide in sunlight, which shift just as that brightness does, in fog or rain. "
― Mark Doty , Heaven's Coast: A Memoir
15 " Enchantment frightens us for good reason. Whether it's enchantment of the ordinary kind or the magical kind, it may very well change us, and we may not be able to return to our old selves, to our old certainties and our easy understandings. Magical people seem to fear that less than the rest of us. They want to be enchanted and are quite willing to be changed forever as they go deeper and deeper into realms beyond everyday understanding. Most of us wouldn't mind a little more magic ourselves, if we could slip in and out of it. We too want to leave the brab realities of work-a-day life, experience the transcendent, to revel in endless possibility. But most of us have lost any belief in good magic. All that's left is a vague sence that evil is afoot and ready to draw nearer. The only magic most of us believe in is the scary stuff. "
― , Not In Kansas Anymore
16 " So the journey is over and I am back again where I started, richer by much experience and poorer by many exploded convictions, many perished certainties. For convictions and certainties are too often the concomitants of ignorance. Those who like to feel that they are always right and who attach a high importance to their own opinions should stay at home. When one is traveling, convictions are mislaid as easily as spectacles; but unlike spectacles, they are not easily replaced. "
― Aldous Huxley
17 " The melancholy comes over me, the dismal misery of not knowing where I am, or perhaps losing any sense of who I am, as if the mist is bringing about an evaporation of identity, all the certainties of the self leaching away into the cloud. "
― Simon Armitage , Walking Home: A Poet's Journey
18 " Xander, there are two certainties in life--death and truth. They will both pursue you to your grave. There is no escaping them. But we run from them anyway in hopes that somehow we can slip by unnoticed. In the end, one or both of them catch up. Running doesn't solve anything. "
― A.C. Williams
19 " He who knows the past well can best explain the present and can tell the probable certainties and uncertainties of the future better "
20 " Just because you feel lost doesn't mean that you're doing something wrong. Feeling certain that you are correct in every decision and situation is an addiction. If you think that the journey of self-discovery will bring you more solid facts and certainties about yourself and the world, you will be frustrated. The more you see, the more lost you will feel. That is natural. The more you discover of yourself, the more confused you will become. This is natural. The wiser you get, the more you will see that there are many paths walked by just as many people, and that just because yours is different from someone else's doesn't mean one of you is wrong. This is natural. Over time, you will develop humility, compassion, and a higher tolerance for confusion. If you allow the feeling of being lost to drive you into a search for absolute truths and correct answers, you may feel more secure when you get there, but in reality, you will be taking a step back. Allow yourself to be lost, and you will see so much more of the forest of your soul than if you beeline back for the trail. Explore. Get lost. Embrace the inevitability of confusion. "
― Vironika Tugaleva