#certainty

There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun. ↗

— Sherwood Anderson

#future #ghosts #life #manhood #nothingness

That it's no good loving me because I'm never going to get married anyway and he'd just end up hating me later instead of sooner. ↗

— Suzanne Collins

#uncertainty #unloved #unrequited #love

It (trying to keep the law) grants you the power to judge others and feel superior to them. You believe you are living to a higher standard than those you judge. Enforcing rules, especially in its more subtle expressions like responsibility and expectation, is a vain attempt to create certainly out of uncertainty. And contrary to what you might think, I have a great fondness for uncertainty. Rules cannot bring freedom; they only have the power to accuse. ↗

— Wm. Paul Young

#control #control-freaks #god #law #law-and-gospel

Spending a weekend with Hitler would have been boring in the extreme, although you would have had a greater certainty in coming back alive. ↗

— Alan Bullock

#although #back #been #boring #certainty

What kind of husband would I be if I bet against my own marriage?' I smiled. 'The stupid kind. Didn't you listen to your dad when he told you not to bet against me? ↗

— Jamie McGuire

#certainty #humor #husband #husband-and-wife #love

The Resistance is a moral certainty, not a poetic one. The true poet never uses words in order to punish someone. His judgment belongs to a creative order; it is not formulated as a prophetic scripture. ↗

— Salvatore Quasimodo

#certainty #creative #formulated #his #judgment

Psychologists have set about describing the true nature of women with a certainty and a sense of their own infallibility rarely found in the secular world. ↗

— Naomi Weisstein

#certainty #describing #found #infallibility #nature

If I knew what to do I'd do more than write a song for you ↗

— Criss Jami

#confusion #love #lyrics #musician #poet

To try is to invite uncertainty. Where confidence goes, success usually follows. ↗

— Wayne Gerard Trotman

#confidence #doubt #positive-attitude #positive-thinking #positivity

You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded ↗

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

#uncertainty #attitude