Life & Wisdom Quote by May Sarton

Certainty is a kind of stage magic: the hand that points so confidently in one direction practically forces you to look the other way. May Sarton’s line catches that twitch of the mind, the instant recoil that happens when someone declares a final answer. The phrasing “the minute” is key. She isn’t talking about careful doubt arriving after reflection; she’s naming a reflex, an almost bodily counter-thought that springs up the moment language hardens into a verdict.

As a poet, Sarton understands that words don’t just convey ideas, they summon their shadows. “Utters” matters too: certainty becomes suspect the moment it’s performed in public, when it turns from private conviction into a claim on reality. That shift invites contradiction, not because the speaker is necessarily wrong, but because absolutes are brittle. They imply the world is closed, finished, settled. The mind, attuned to complexity and contradiction, pushes back to keep the door open.

The subtext is less “never believe anything” than “beware the ego disguised as clarity.” A declared certainty can be a defense against fear, ambiguity, or grief; the “opposite” that arrives is the psyche refusing to be pacified. In Sarton's era and milieu - mid-century literary culture shaped by psychoanalysis, modernist ambivalence, and political dogmatisms that demanded loyalty - the line reads like an ethical posture. It favors attentive, revisable truth over the comforting theater of being right.