Quotes About Doubt

And my grandfather... was forever knocked into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve. Permanent alteration: a hole.

Africa, have you seen it? No? Then is it truly there?...And the past, did it happen? And the future, will it come? Believe in your own eyes and you'll get into a lot of trouble'.

It is hard for a person of no faith like myself to comprehend the moment when faith dies in the human heart. The kneeling believer who suddenly understands that there is no reason to pray because nobody's listening.

Maybe, according to my insula, this is the way things are these days in America: that for some of us, the world stopped making sense. Anything can happen. Here can be there, then can be now, up can be down, truth can be lies. Everything's slip-sliding around and there's nothing to hold on to. The whole thing has come apart at the seams.

He wanted, for example, to investigate why one should hold fast to a religion not because it was true but because it was the faith of one's fathers. Was faith not faith but simple family habit? Maybe there was no true religion but only this eternal handing down. And error could be handed down as easily as virtue. Was faith no more than an error of our ancestors?

The true story is there's no true story any more. There's no true any more that anyone can agree on.

Unwilling wholly to abandon the project for which his wife had died, unable to maintain any longer the absolute belief which the enterprise required, Muhammad Din entered the station wagon of scepticism.

Human beings who turn away from God lose love, and certainty

All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own," said Birbal, "and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none." The first minister and the emperor were standing at

I disapprove of certainties, said Virgil Jones. They limit one's range of vision. Doubt is one aspect of width.

Montgomery Clift in I Confess?

I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.

What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief. Doubt.

All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own," said Birbal, "and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.

It was curious that so avowedly godless a person should keep trying to write about faith.

And to prove to himself the non-existence of God, he now stood in the dining-hall of the city's most famous hotel, with pigs falling out of his face.

I'm beginning to understand why people get religion. Just to have something solid that doesn't change into a slippery snake without a word of warning.

Here in America, the only words that didn't exist, the only unspeakable words, were "I'm not sure about any of this. I'm having second thoughts.

and as he aged and the world became less real he began to doubt his own beliefs, so that by the time he saw the God in whom he had never been able to believe or disbelieve he was probably expecting to do so.

The fact that my continuous and public rejection of Christianity does not worry me in the least should suggest to you just how inadequate I think your reasons for being a Christian are.

You are using your own moral intuitions to authenticate the wisdom of the Bible - and then, in the next moment, you assert that we human beings cannot possibly rely upon our own intuitions to rightly guide us in the world.

If faith is what you have to go on, if faith is the link between your beliefs and the world at large, your beliefs are very likely to be wrong. Beliefs can be right or wrong. If you believe you can fly, that belief is only true if indeed you can fly. Somebody who thinks he can fly, and is wrong about it, will eventually discover there's a problem with his view of the world.

The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.

Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction.