Quotes About Doubt

History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.

Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.

I've never understood how God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion by faith—it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe.

Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness, but I don't argue with it—especially as I am rarely in a position to prove that it is mistaken.

Never appeal to a man's better nature. He may not have one.

All right, all right, have it your own way! I can't prove I'm right—so I must be wrong. Men!

All revelations are personal, that's why all revelations are suspect.

Me, I had never been sure – only thing I was sure of was that Dr. Chan would not himself sit on a target. But he might not warn his old mother.

Religion is a solace to many people and it is even conceivable that some religion, somewhere, really is Ultimate Truth. But in many cases, being religious is merely a form of conceit.

Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness

Maybe the whole world held together only when you kept your attention centered on it and believed in it. If you let discrepancies creep in, you began to doubt and it began to go to pieces.

He could not afford to believe anything that he was told, or that he read, or that was implicitly assumed to be true about the world around him. No, he could not believe any of it, for the sum total of what be had been told and read and been taught in school was so contradictory, so senseless, so wildly insane that none of it could be believed unless he personally confirmed it.

The capacity of humans to believe in what seems to me highly improbable

Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help.

How can I be sure? I'm a doctor, not a fortune-teller.

Zaslechl jsem, že bývaly bojové jednotky, s nimiž jejich kaplan nebojoval, ale nedokázal jsem si pÃ…â"¢edstavit, jak by to mohlo fungovat. Myslím tím, jak m?že kaplan žehnat n??emu, co nechce sám dÄ›lat?

Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.

Wishing to prove oneself right is the usual motive for scholarship.

From the Sufi: Mullah Nasrudin once entered a store and asked the proprietor, "Have you ever seen me before?" "No," was the prompt answer. "Then," cried Nasrudin, "how do you know it is me?

As Charlie Chaplin said once in a morbid context, Numbers sanctify. The more I pile up such monstrosities, the more likely it is that some readers will start to believe them.

Certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude.

That's what makes you unhappy," Marcie said. "You ask too many questions.

If you think you know what the hell is going on, you're probably full of shit.

Later, alas, when Mr. Wright learned that other patients did not respond so favorably to Krebiozen, and that doctors had begun to consider the chemical worthless against cancer, he became depressed and worried. His tumors began growing again, he returned to his bed, and he died.