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certitude
in a sentence

show 71 more with this conextual meaning
  • Archaeology, then, does not supply us with certitudes, but rather with vague hypotheses. And in the shade of these hypotheses some artists are content to dream, considering them less as scientific facts than as sources of inspiration.   (source)
  • Their coming could have been predicted with the same certitude that astronomers today predict the outcome of the movements of stars.   (source)
  • How many will trade the promise of capitalism for the certitude of socialism?
  • As the doctor had generally instructed me, I was to "disinfect" her, treat her for anything she might have contracted en route to us, though of course without lab equipment and certain obvious symptoms it was impossible to tell anything with certitude.†   (source)
  • …as the gestalt: the blissful temper of the sunny June day, the ecstatic pomp of Mr. Handel's riverborne jam session, and this festive little room whose open windows admitted a fragrance of spring blossoms which pierced me with that sense of ineffable promise and certitude I don't recall having felt more than once or twice after the age of twenty-two—or let us say twenty-five—when the ambitious career I had cut out for myself seemed so often to be the consequence of pitiable lunacy.†   (source)
  • It was wonderful to be twenty-two and a little drunk, knowing that all went well at the writing desk, shiveringly happy in the clutch of one's own creative ardor and in that "grand certitude" Thomas Wolfe was always hymning—the certitude that the wellsprings of youth would never run dry, and that the wrenching anguish endured in the crucible of art would find its recompense in everlasting fame, and glory, and the love of beautiful women.†   (source)
  • There lay certitude; there, in the daily round.†   (source)
  • Try as I might, I couldn't stomach this brutal certitude.†   (source)
  • I watched him climb around like an alpinist of the mountains of his own brain, sturdy, and with his calm goggles and his blue glances of certitude.†   (source)
  • Yet they sensed him somehow and made way; in this too he seemed to be served by certitude, the blind and untroubled faith in the rightness and infallibility of his actions.†   (source)
  • There was a smell of wet grass and lilac, and the vast brooding symphony of the million-noted little night things, rising and falling in a constant ululation, and inhabiting the heart with steady unconscious certitude.†   (source)
  • I ought to have guessed that a person like her—a person who you could tell had a deep inner certitude of self which comes from being all of one piece, of not being shreds and patches and old cogwheels held together with pieces of rusty barbed wire and spit and bits of string, like most of us—I ought to have guessed that that kind of a person would not be surprised into answering a question she didn't want to answer.†   (source)
  • And Tarrou, Rieux, and their friends might give one answer or another, but its conclusion was always the same, their certitude that a fight must be put up, in this way or that, and there must be no bowing down.†   (source)
  • It was as though he had been merely waiting for the Player to move him again, because with that unfailing certitude he ran straight to the kitchen and into the doorway, already firing, almost before he could have seen the table overturned and standing on its edge across the corner of the room, and the bright and glittering hands of the man who crouched behind it, resting upon the upper edge.†   (source)
  • All the same, following the dictates of his heart, he has deliberately taken the victims' side and tried to share with his fellow citizens the only certitudes they had in common-love, exile, and suffering.†   (source)
  • This certitude was shown by the whole pack.†   (source)
  • And still the bull-dog, with grim certitude, toiled after him.†   (source)
  • This was the certitude she had been living with now for a time that she had ceased to measure.†   (source)
  • The clear certitude of his own immunity grew dim and to it succeeded a vague fear that his soul had really fallen unawares.†   (source)
  • Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again.†   (source)
  • And the girl talked, easing her pain in the certitude of my sympathy; she talked as thirsty men drink.†   (source)
  • Then one of the three enthusiasts he had seen just now, the author of the Apologia: "My argument was …. that absolute certitude as to the truths of natural theology was the result of an assemblage of concurring and converging probabilities …. that probabilities which did not reach to logical certainty might create a mental certitude."†   (source)
  • But a voice behind me, the unmistakable voice of Wolf Larsen, strong with the invincible certitude of the man and mellow with appreciation of the words he was quoting, aroused me.†   (source)
  • He broke into the long easy lope, and went on, hour after hour, never at loss for the tangled way, heading straight home through strange country with a certitude of direction that put man and his magnetic needle to shame.†   (source)
  • And all the while he had the immense temptation to do the unthinkable thing, not from the physical desire but because of a mental certitude.†   (source)
  • On the spot there came to me the added shock of a certitude that it was not for me he had come there.†   (source)
  • It was the very confidence that I might now defy him, as well as the positive certitude, by this time, of the child's unconsciousness, that made me go on.†   (source)
  • Can you say with certitude by whom the soul of your race was bartered and its elect betrayed—by the questioner or by the mocker?†   (source)
  • Now and then, though, a word, a sentence, would escape him that showed how deeply, how solemnly, he felt about that work which had given him the certitude of rehabilitation.†   (source)
  • He was splendidly muscled, a heavy man, and though he strode with the certitude and directness of the physical man, there was nothing heavy about his stride.†   (source)
  • Idle and embittering, finally, to argue, against his own dispassionate certitude, that the commandment of love bade us not to love our neighbour as ourselves with the same amount and intensity of love but to love him as ourselves with the same kind of love.†   (source)
  • For all his pragmatic certitude, it seemed as if he watched the play and movement of life in the hope of discovering something more about it, of discerning in its maddest writhings a something which had hitherto escaped him,—the key to its mystery, as it were, which would make all clear and plain.†   (source)
  • That reminder had as little effect on my practical certitude as I was conscious—still even without looking—of its having upon the character and attitude of our visitor.†   (source)
  • He could detect no trace of emotion in himself, and the final effect of a staggering event was that, unnoticed and apart from the noisy crowd of boys, he exulted with fresh certitude in his avidity for adventure, and in a sense of many-sided courage.†   (source)
  • Jim on the bridge was penetrated by the great certitude of unbounded safety and peace that could be read on the silent aspect of nature like the certitude of fostering love upon the placid tenderness of a mother's face.†   (source)
  • I quailed even though my certitude that she thoroughly saw was never greater than at that instant, and in the immediate need to defend myself I called it passionately to witness.†   (source)
  • I had sat down with a piece of work—for I was something or other that could sit—on the old stone bench which overlooked the pond; and in this position I began to take in with certitude, and yet without direct vision, the presence, at a distance, of a third person.†   (source)
  • His extended hand aimed at my breast like a pistol; his deepset eyes seemed to pierce through me, but his twitching lips uttered no word, and the austere exaltation of a certitude seen in the dusk vanished from his face.†   (source)
  • It was a pity to be obliged to reinvestigate the certitude of the moment itself and repeat how it had come to me as a revelation that the inconceivable communion I then surprised was a matter, for either party, of habit.†   (source)
  • They appeared to live in a crazy maze of plans, hopes, dangers, enterprises, ahead of civilisation, in the dark places of the sea; and their death was the only event of their fantastic existence that seemed to have a reasonable certitude of achievement.†   (source)
  • I see well enough now that I hoped for the impossible—for the laying of what is the most obstinate ghost of man's creation, of the uneasy doubt uprising like a mist, secret and gnawing like a worm, and more chilling than the certitude of death—the doubt of the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct.†   (source)
  • I discovered suddenly in his cringing attitude a sort of assurance, as though he had been all his life dealing in certitudes.†   (source)
  • Vronsky's life was particularly happy in that he had a code of principles, which defined with unfailing certitude what he ought and what he ought not to do.†   (source)
  • And as if he felt the impulse to celebrate his happy certitude by a bonfire, he got up to throw a couple of logs upon the already blazing hearth.†   (source)
  • This happy certitude had come sooner than Catherine expected, and she had regarded it, very naturally, as a priceless treasure.†   (source)
  • With some difficulty, after many turnings and new inquiries, they reached Prison Street; and the grim walls of the jail, the first object that answered to any image in Silas's memory, cheered him with the certitude, which no assurance of the town's name had hitherto given him, that he was in his native place.†   (source)
  • This time Mr. Raffles' slow wink and slight protrusion of his tongue was worse than a nightmare, because it held the certitude that it was not a nightmare, but a waking misery.†   (source)
  • Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude.†   (source)
  • And my first words were prompted by just that troubled incertitude.†   (source)
    standard prefix: The prefix "in-" in incertitude means not and reverses the meaning of certitude. This is the same pattern you see in words like invisible, incomplete, and insecure.
  • There was no incertitude as to facts—as to the one material fact, I mean.†   (source)
  • She looked round with an air of incertitude, and advanced towards the stairs.†   (source)
  • Your words relieve me from a state of incertitude.'†   (source)
  • Clennam's surprise was not so absorbing but that he took his resolution without any incertitude.†   (source)
  • Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood.†   (source)
  • Because of his fluctuating incertitude as to whether this observation had or had not been already made by him to Stephen or by Stephen to him.†   (source)
  • By what reflections did he, a conscious reactor against the void of incertitude, justify to himself his sentiments?†   (source)
  • That as a competent keyless citizen he had proceeded energetically from the unknown to the known through the incertitude of the void.†   (source)
  • His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit.†   (source)
  • And romantic it certainly was—the fog, like the grey shadow of infinite mystery, brooding over the whirling speck of earth; and men, mere motes of light and sparkle, cursed with an insane relish for work, riding their steeds of wood and steel through the heart of the mystery, groping their way blindly through the Unseen, and clamouring and clanging in confident speech the while their hearts are heavy with incertitude and fear.†   (source)
  • He affirmed his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding syllogistically from the known to the unknown and a conscious rational reagent between a micro and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void.†   (source)
  • What were they now but cerements shaken from the body of death—the fear he had walked in night and day, the incertitude that had ringed him round, the shame that had abased him within and without— cerements, the linens of the grave?†   (source)
  • She feared nothing, but she was checked by the profound incertitude and the extreme strangeness—a brave person groping in the dark.†   (source)
  • Wherefore this craving for incertitude, this clinging to fear, as if incertitude and fear had been the safeguards of her love.†   (source)
  • No reply was returned by his companion, since none could be given; and when Venn left, a few minutes later, Clym had passed from the dullness of sorrow to the fluctuation of carking incertitude.†   (source)
  • But then Oak was not racked by incertitude upon the inmost matter of his bosom, as she was at this moment.†   (source)
  • Here, too, he was disappointed; and then all was afloat, in the painful incertitude of doubt and conjecture.†   (source)
  • I took up the two packages and gave the bread to the little girl, the woman all iron-gray behind the counter, watchingus with cold certitude.†   (source)
  • Somethingamong dusty shelves of ordered certitudes long divorced from reality, desiccating peacefully, as if abreath of that air which sees injustice done "Two of these, please, ma'am.†   (source)
  • …and the latest English fashions in pronunciation are almost instantaneously imitated, at least by a minority, in New York; and on the other hand the English, by so constantly having the floor, force upon us, out of their firmer resolution and certitude, a somewhat sneaking respect for their own greater conservatism of speech, so that our professors of the language, in the overwhelming main, combat all signs of differentiation with the utmost diligence, and safeguard the doctrine that…†   (source)
  • But where it is said, "In the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die," it must needs bee meant of his Mortality, and certitude of death.†   (source)
  • Another place which seems to make for a Naturall Immortality of the Soule, is that, where our Saviour saith, that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are living: but this is spoken of the promise of God, and of their certitude to rise again, not of a Life then actuall; and in the same sense that God said to Adam, that on the day hee should eate of the forbidden fruit, he should certainly die; from that time forward he was a dead man by sentence; but not by execution, till almost a thousand years…†   (source)
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