“The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty.”
“All great discoveries… are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents.”
Source: Winter's Tale
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Mark Helprin 22
US author, journalist, commentator 1947Related quotes

As quoted in Wisdom for the Soul : Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (2006) by Larry Chang, p. 597

“Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.”
p. 114 http://books.google.com/books?id=qCDpAAAAIAAJ&q=%22Fame+is+a+vapor+popularity+an+accident+the+only+earthly+certainty+is+oblivion%22&pg=PA114#v=onepage
Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)

Book I, v, 8
The Advancement of Learning (1605)
Source: The Advancement Of Learning
Context: The two ways of contemplation are not unlike the two ways of action commonly spoken of by the ancients: the one plain and smooth in the beginning, and in the end impassable; the other rough and troublesome in the entrance, but after a while fair and even. So it is in contemplation: If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.

“I've never made a discovery myself, unless by accident.”
Quoted in Sally Helgeson, "Every Day", Bookletter, Vol. 3, No. 8 (6 December 1976), p. 8
Context: I've never made a discovery myself, unless by accident. If you write glibly, you fool people. When I first met Asimov, I asked him if he was a professor at Boston University. He said no and … asked me where I got my Ph. D. I said I didn't have one and he looked startled. "You mean you're in the same racket I am," he said, "you just read books by the professors and rewrite them?" That's really what I do.

“The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.”
As quoted in "Special Section: They Are Fated to Succeed" in TIME magazine (2 January 1978) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,915860,00.html
1970s

“To believe with certainty we must begin with doubting.”
No. 61.
Maxims and Moral Sentences