"Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions."

Certainty, Doubt, Neurosis, Problems

11

Create Your Own Wallpaper

Standard

Customized

"Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions."

Exlpore more Certainty quotes

"Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things."

Denis Diderot, French Editor

Certainty,

"The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind."

May Sarton, American Poet

Certainty, Mind

"We can say with certainty - or 90% probability - that the new industries that are about to be born will have nothing to do with information."

Peter Drucker, American Businessman

Certainty, Information, Nothing, Will

"The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle."

Hannah Arendt, German Historian

Certainty, Laws

"And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human."

William Gibson, American Writer

Certainty, Eyes

"I really think that living is the process of going from complete certainty to complete ignorance."

Richard Dreyfuss, American Actor

Certainty, Ignorance, Living

"You can safely appeal to the United Nations in the comfortable certainty that it will let you down."

Conor Cruise O'Brien, Irish Politician

Certainty, Nations, United, Will

"If a man fights his way through his doubts to the conviction that Jesus Christ is Lord, he has attained to a certainty that the man who unthinkingly accepts things can never reach."

William Barclay, Scottish Theologian

Certainty, Christ, Conviction, Man

"When we deal with questions relating to principles of law and their applications, we do not suddenly rise into a stratosphere of icy certainty."

Charles Evans Hughes, American Judge

Certainty, Law, Principles, Questions

"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, British Historian

Certainty, Extreme, Weekend

Explore more quotes by Thomas Szasz

"It is easier to do one's duty to others than to one's self. If you do your duty to others, you are considered reliable. If you do your duty to yourself, you are considered selfish."

Duty, Self

"There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography."

Psychology, Autobiography

"Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility."

Man, Men, Guilt, Mind, Now

"If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; if God talks to you, you are a schizophrenic."

God, Talk

"A teacher should have maximal authority, and minimal power."

Power, Authority

"When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him."

Time,

"The system isn't stupid, but the people in it are."

People,

"No further evidence is needed to show that 'mental illness' is not the name of a biological condition whose nature awaits to be elucidated, but is the name of a concept whose purpose is to obscure the obvious."

Nature, Purpose, Illness, Name

"Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence."

Intelligence, Courage, Thinking

"Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum."

Age, Adulthood, Childhood, Old