Quotes About Doubt

I found Corso's book both interesting and compelling. A couple of times I asked myself if it could possibly be fiction, as was the case with The Life of Pi,8 the substitute book I had read the summer before. The answer was a firm no. I recognized too many names of military bases and generals to leave me in any doubt as to the book's authenticity.

The techniques of brainwashing are simple: isolate the victim, expose them to consistent messages, mix with sleep deprivation, add some form of abuse, get the person to doubt what they know and feel, keep them on their toes, wear them down, and stir well.

This is why, no matter how many times you reassure them, they can't accept your reassurance. Meanwhile, the black hole inside them never gets filled.

Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.

Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith

It is the expression of the anxiety of meaninglessness and of the attempt to take this anxiety into the courage to be as oneself. (139)

The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt. (190)

Le courage d'être s'enracine dans le Dieu qui apparaît quand Dieu a disparu dans l'angoisse du doute.

Faith includes both an immediate awareness of something unconditional and the courage to take the risk of uncertainty upon itself. Faith says "Yes" in spite of the anxiety of "No." Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality

Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.

Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful.

The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.

Where there is no longer any opportunity for doubt, there is no longer any opportunity for faith either.

We are nearly always longing for an easy religion, easy to understand and easy to follow; a religion with no mystery, no insoluble problems,no snags; a religion that would allow us to escape from our miserable human condition; a religion in which contact with God spares us all strife, all uncertainty,all suffering and all doubt; in short, a religion without a cross

That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

But hope is only man's mistrust of the clear foresight of his mind.

Skilled verse is the work of a profound skeptic.

That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.

Why should I poison my body for odds that terrible?

Knowing God CAN heal you is not the same as knowing God WILL heal you!

The fresh, pointed stab of living in the moment that shame can bring. Everything else fades away, no more boredom, no more doubt, no more worrying about the future, the past...just a drenching in self pity and the now. In that moment, everything was about me and my wrongness. It's sort of a baptism, when the floodgates of regret let loose.

Maybe he's not drunk. Maybe he's ill,' she said. 'He's drunk,' Otto said. 'Come along to bed.' 'How do you know?' 'Don't shout.' 'Can't you leave room for doubt? Maybe he's had an epileptic fit! A heart attack! You're so full of cunning, catching everyone out . . . the American form of wisdom! What if he is drunk! Isn't that bad enough!

People belong to each other only as long as they both believe. He stopped believing.

You make your life with someone and you love that person and you think it's enough. But it's never enough, is it? I couldn't say. I don't know anything about love anymore.