I pray that we have the courage to shatter certainty, and to recognize that truth is scattered like refracted light among us all, reflected by each of us distinctly and differently, and incomplete in the scope of any one of us - and that we delight, therefore, in discovering one another, and in searching ever onward with one another.
His reports, especially from Greece, have blended concise global analysis with sympathetic news from the frontline, revealing angry and scared people staring into a bleak future amid the wreckage of shattered certainties.
Do whatever you want," inevitably launches into a litany of unsolicited advice guaranteed to shatter whatever certainty you have left.
By first inviting the reader to consider the apparent indubitability of best-case scenarios of sensory deception and then using the dream of sitting by the fire to shatter this certainty, Descartes is appealing to his readers' imagination and previous experience and assuming that they, like him, will have had many such dreams themselves.
Nollywood films depict families whose faith has been shattered, whose certainties have been undermined.
Islamist terrorism and the emergence of Russia as an authoritarian great power, together with American troubles in Iraq, have shattered the certainties of the 1990s.
The side-by-side photographs, the was and is, shatter that certainty.
The young – those under 35, let's say – have embraced the virtues of a tolerant, easy-going, multicultural society; many of those over 65, especially in the big cities, feel dispossessed, their old cultural certainties shattered; those in between – me and Paxman aside, perhaps – are just about swimming with the tide, or at least keeping our thoughts to ourselves.
Plato lays out all of this in his Allegory of the Cave, as one solitary individual comes to the shattering realization that everything his culture has taught him -- its absolutes and certainties, its sacred truths and orthodoxies -- is a lie.
