Wise Quotes about Certainty

How is it that one rails against that
which is nearly a certainty?
- Mary Anne Radmacher

In the midst of the flurry - clarity.
In the midst of the storm - calm.
In the midst of divided interests - certainty.
In the many roads - a certain choice.
- Mary Anne Radmacher

The third certainty of life, after death and taxes,
is that nothing will work out the way you want.
Life is fully as bad as you think it is.
Choose to live joyfully anyway.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

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

If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house
with the conscious design of doing me good,
I should run for my life.
- Henry David Thoreau

Nearly all men can stand adversity,
but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
- Abraham Lincoln

Nearly everything you do is of no importance,
but it is important that you do it.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

The proper office of a friend is to side with you
when you are in the wrong.
Nearly anybody will side with you when you are in the right.
- Mark Twain

In truth, politeness is artificial good humor,
it covers the natural want of it,
and ends by rendering habitual a substitute
nearly equivalent to the real virtue.
- Thomas Jefferson

A great architect is not made by way of a brain
nearly so much as he is made by way
of a cultivated, enriched heart.
- Frank Lloyd Wright

We have nearly complete misunderstanding between
people of different faiths in Lake Wobegon,
and that's probably one reason why we get along so very well.
It's when you are trying to convince another person to think
the same way that you do that there is
friction and trouble between people.
But when you feel that the other person is
dumber than dirt, too dumb for words -
why waste your breath - you get along pretty well.
There's no bond between people that's quite so strong as
when people each feel slightly superior towards the other one.
- Garrison Keillor

The only thing necessary for evil to triumph
is for enough good men to do nothing.
- Edmund Burke

Tolerance is the first principle of community;
it is the spirit which conserves
the best that all men think.
- Helen Keller

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right.
Men will believe what they see.
- Henry David Thoreau

Wise men put their trust in ideas
and not in circumstances
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Many men go fishing all of their lives
without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
- Henry David Thoreau

When men are easy in their circumstances,
they are naturally enemies to innovations.
- Joseph Addison

Truth is the property of no individual
but is the treasure of all men.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men are not prisoners of fate,
but only prisoners of their own minds.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.
Mere tolerance has given place to a sentiment of brotherhood
between sincere men of all denominations.
- Helen Keller

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men
who walked through the huts comforting others,
giving away their last piece of bread...
They offer sufficient proof that everything
can be taken from a man but one thing:
to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances,
to choose one's own way.
- Viktor E. Frankl

Men in general judge more from
appearances than from reality. All
men have eyes, but few have
the gift of penetration.
- Niccolo Machiavelli

I do not believe in a fate that
falls on men however they act;
but I do believe in a fate
that falls on them unless they act.
- The Buddha

Men of lofty genius,
when they are doing the least work,
are most active.
- Leonardo da Vinci

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste
that they hurry past it.
- Soren Kierkegaard

Men occasionally stumble over the truth,
but most of them pick themselves up
and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
- Winston Churchill

Men are disturbed not by things,
but by the view which they take of them.
- Epictetus

Man becomes great exactly in the degree
in which he works for the welfare of his fellow-men.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

Men and women are not prisoners of fate,
but only prisoners of their own minds.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The problems of the world cannot possibly
be solved by skeptics or cynics
whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities.
We need men who can dream of things that never were.
- John F. Kennedy

Who never walks save where he sees
men's tracks, makes no discoveries.
- J. G. Holland

Trust men and they will be true to you;
treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed,
for if you merely offend them, they take vengeance,
but if you injure them greatly, they are unable to retaliate,
so that the injury done to a man
ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared.
- Niccolo Machiavelli

To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.
- Abraham Lincoln

In the long run, men hit only what they aim at.
Therefore, they had better aim at something high.
- Henry David Thoreau

The reason why men do not obey us,
is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking.
There is an almost universal quest
for easy answers and half-baked solutions.
Nothing pains some people more than having to think.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Shallow men believe in luck.
Strong men believe in cause and effect.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only good luck many great men ever had was
being born with the ability and determination to overcome bad luck.
- Channing Pollock

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation
and go to the grave with the song still in them.
- Henry David Thoreau

There are times, sir, when men of good conscience
cannot blindly follow orders.
- Captain Picard, STAR TREK: The Next Generation

Great men or men of great gifts
you shall easily find,
but symmetrical men never.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Women must try to do things as men have tried.
When they fail their failure must be
but a challenge to others.
- Amelia Earhart

There is a good ear, in some men,
that draws supplies to virtue
out of very indifferent nutriment.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

For those men who, sooner or later, are lucky enough
to break away from the pack, the most intoxicating moment
comes when they cease being bodies in other men's command
and find that they control their own time,
when they learn their own voice and authority.
- Theodore H. White

Achievement seems to be connected with action.
Successful men and women keep moving.
They make mistakes, but they don't quit.
- Conrad Hilton

The majority of men meet with failure
because of their lack of persistence
in creating new plans to take
the place of those which fail.
- Napoleon Hill

Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour
when every one has to throw off his mask?
Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked?
Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight
in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it?
I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others
that at last their true nature could not reveal itself;...
In every man there is something which to a certain degree
prevents him from becoming perfectly transparent to himself;
and this may be the case in so high a degree,
he may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life
which extend far beyond himself that he almost cannot reveal himself.
But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love,
and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all.
- Soren Kierkegaard

Every optimist moves along with progress and hastens it,
while every pessimist would keep the worlds at a standstill.
The consequence of pessimism in the life of a nation
is the same as in the life of the individual.
Pessimism kills the instinct that
urges men to struggle against poverty,
ignorance and crime, and dries up
all the fountains of joy in the world.
- Helen Keller

I look only to the good qualities of men.
Not being faultless myself,
I won't presume to probe into the faults of others.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason
if we dig deep in our history and remember
that we are not descended from fearful men,
not from men who feared to write, to speak,
to associate and to defend causes
which were for the moment unpopular.
- Edward R. Murrow

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.
Talent will not;
nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not;
unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not;
the world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
- Calvin Coolidge

I have three precious things which I hold fast and prize.
The first is gentleness;
the second is frugality;
the third is humility, which keeps me from putting myself before others.
Be gentle and you can be bold;
be frugal and you can be generous;
avoid putting yourself before others
and you can become a leader among men.
- Lao Tzu

Every kind of peaceful cooperation among men
is primarily based on mutual trust
and only secondarily on institutions
such as courts of justice and police.
- Albert Einstein

Men kick friendship around like a football,
but it doesn't seem to crack.
Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him,
that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men,
and when he devotes himself helpfully
to all life that is in need of help.
- Albert Schweitzer

The revelation of thought takes men
out of servitude into freedom.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Wisdom Quotes