A Quote by Charles William Eliot

All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgments of probabilities, and not on certainties.

Charles William Eliot

Quote Topics

Beliefs Business Judgments

Quote Author

Charles William Eliot
American - Educator
March 20, 1834 - August 22, 1926

All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgements of probabilities, and not on certainties.

Charles William Eliot

Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they're never really certainties

Murray Gell-Mann

Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they're never really certainties.

Murray Gell-Mann

There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is impossible.

Jack Vance

Our attitudes, opinions, beliefs and judgments are, simply put, our attitudes, opinions, beliefs and judgments. They are not universal truths.

Robert J. White

Genes work with probabilities; they don't work with certainties. So most things that you're looking at with these genetic tests, it's not like you're condemned to automatically get the disease or the syndrome. There's a lot of factors in play there.

Sam Kean

One influential philosophical position about the use of probability in science holds that probabilities are objective only if they are based on micro-physics; all other probabilities should be interpreted subjectively, as merely revealing our ignorance about physical details. I have argued against this position, contending that the objectivity of micro-physical probabilities entails the objectivity of macro-probabilities.

Elliott Sober

Our beliefs are not just estimates of probabilities. They are also the instruments that guide our actions.

John Ortberg

Cross-cultural reality testing forces people to examine both their own and others' understandings of reality. Most people simply assume that the way they look at things is the way things really are, and judge other cultures' views of reality before understanding them. These judgments are based on ethnocentrism, which closes the door to further understanding and communication. Furthermore, ethnocentric judgments keep missionaries from examining their own beliefs and values to determine which of them are based on biblical foundations and which on their cultural beliefs.

Paul G

In the present moment, you are beyond all definition. This means that you are no longer defined by the pain and limitations of the past. You are no longer defined by your judgments, opinions or beliefs nor are you defined by the judgment, opinions or beliefs of others.

Leonard Jacobson

We turn pain into suffering by adding on all kinds of beliefs, interpretations and judgments to it.

Brenda Shoshanna

Ordinarily logic is divided into the examination of ideas, judgments, arguments, and methods. The two latter are generally reduced to judgments, that is, arguments are reduced to apodictic judgments that such and such conclusions follow from such and such premises, and method is reduced to judgments that prescribe the procedure that should be followed in the search for truth.

Andre-Marie Ampere

For me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle.

Pico Iyer

...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

The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.