Tennessee Williams Quotes

Guessing a thing ain't knowing a thing.

Even though there are no ways of knowing for sure, there are ways of knowing for pretty sure.

Suspecting and knowing are not the same.

I owe it to myself and to historic truth to declare that some circumstances … are founded only in conjecture and analogy.

Nobody really knows everything, and they can only assume.

Knowing and assuming are two different things.

We are quite at ease in this no man's land of ignorance and doubt and dispute, absorbed in the ambiguities of trying to reach truth by mixing fact with invention.

A thousand probabilities don't make one fact.

There is only one thing about which I am certain, and that is that there is very little about which one can be certain.

But is all this true?" said Brutha. Didactylos shrugged. "Could be. Could be. We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork." "You mean you don't KNOW it's true?" said Brutha. "I THINK it might be," said Didactylos. "I could be wrong. Not being certain is what being a philosopher is all about.

Who never doubted, never half believed. Where doubt is, there truth is - it is her shadow.

I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure - that is all that agnosticism means.

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

Any truth is better than indefinite doubt.

It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will rise.

I can't predict the future.

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

A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.

We'd all like to be certain of what we know, but I think the most important question is to ask yourself do you really know what you know?

'Belief' means something that you do not know. You want to assume and bring a certainty to something that you do not know. That means you are concretising your ignorance. There is no need to believe anything.

Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.

Which country is real, mine or the teacher's? My wish is that we might progressively lose our confidence in what we think we believe and the things we consider stable and secure, in order to remind ourselves of the infinite number of things still waiting to be discovered.

Certainty is no guarantor of correctness.

A great deal more is known than has been proved.

All knowledge degenerates into probability.