A Quote by Paul Tillich

Existential anxiety of doubt drives the person toward the creation of certitude of systems of meaning, which are supported by tradition and authority. Neurotic anxiety builds a narrow castle of certitude which can be defended with the utmost certainty.

Paul Tillich

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Paul Tillich
German - Theologian
August 20, 1886 - October 22, 1965

We live in a world in which data convey authority. But authority has a way of descending to certitude, and certitude begets hubris.

Bret Stephens

It is not doubt,is certitude that drives you mad.

Friedrich Nietzsche

...the reason for [this age's] anxiety and unrest is because in one direction, 'truth' increases in scope and quantity - via science and technology - while in the other, certainty and confidence steadily decline. Our age is a master in developing truths while being wholly indifferent to certitude. It lacks confidence in the good.

Soren Kierkegaard

I think we may very well, in many areas, get likelihood, but not certitude. We don't want certitude anyway, do we?

Frank Moore Cross

I try to make art which celebrates doubt and uncertainty. Which provokes answers but doesn't give them. Which withholds absolute meaning by incorporating parasite meanings. Which suspends meaning while perpetually dispatching you toward interpretation, urging you beyond dogmatism, beyond doctrine, beyond ideology, beyond authority.

Sherrie Levine

Certitude is not the test of certainty.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Learning to know anxiety is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known anxiety or by sinking under it. He therefore who has leaned rightly to be in anxiety has learned the most important thing.

Soren Kierkegaard

Certitude drives people mad.

Friedrich Nietzsche

For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial "doubt." This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious "faith" of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion.

Thomas Merton

Certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude.

Robert Anton Wilson

Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Belief Systems contradict both science and ordinary "common sense." B.S. contradicts science, because it claims certitude and science can never achieve certitude: it can only say, "This model"- or theory, or interpretation of the data- "fits more of the facts known at this date than any rival model." We can never know if the model will fit the facts that might come to light in the next millennium or even in the next week.

Robert Anton Wilson

... moral certainty is certainty which is sufficient to regulate our behaviour, or which measures up to the certainty we have on matters relating to the conduct of life which we never normally doubt, though we know that it is possible, absolutely speaking, that they may be false.

Rene Descartes

Surveillant anxiety is always a conjoined twin: The anxiety of those surveilled is deeply connected to the anxiety of the surveillers. But the anxiety of the surveillers is generally hard to see; it's hidden in classified documents and delivered in highly coded languages in front of Senate committees.

Kate Crawford

Freedom from care and anxiety of mind is a blessing, which I apprehend such people enjoy in higher perfection than most others, and is of the utmost consequence.

William Falconer

For the price of intelligence as we now know it is chronic anxiety, anxiety which appears to increase—oddly enough—to the very degree that human life is subjected to intelligent organization.

Alan Watts

A Quote by Paul Tillich

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