Quotes About Doubt

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible.

There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.

And he felt dubious and discontented suddenly, and wondered whether he was really and truly successful as a human being.

We are not quite sure that the Sermon on the Mount is the Sermon for the mart. We are not sure, and an unsure place is an unsafe place* We must go on or go back. We must be more Christian or less.

To have the vice of scruple - to be an automaton of remorse.

I shall take the liberty of praying for you." – "Glad to hear it. But who will listen to you?

Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.

I'm always right. I'm quite uneasy at being always right so often.

It's better to be fooled than to be suspicious.

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all... My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul. My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is 'Lord, I disbelieve — help thou my unbelief.

Straight?" He trembled as he asked this supreme question. "Scudder? A little too smart to be straight.

The unbeliever has always such a very clear idea as to what Belief ought to be, I wish I had half his certainty.

It's better to be fooled than to be suspicious'—that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil.

Untrue; but then, so is most information.

I'm a holy man minus the holiness

Not even to herself dare she blame Helen. She could not assess her trespass by any moral code; it was everything or nothing. Morality can tell us that murder is worse than stealing, and group most sins in an order all must approve, but it cannot group Helen. The surer its pronouncements on this point, the surer may we be that morality is not speaking. Christ was evasive when they questioned Him. It is those that cannot connect who hasten to cast the first stone.

This solitude oppressed her; she was accustomed to have her thoughts confirmed by others or, at all events, contradicted; it was too dreadful not to know whether she was thinking right or wrong.

She was not a Christian in the accepted sense; she did not believe that God had ever worked among us as a young artisan.

Maurice e Clive] Voltaram a falar de teologia, com Maurice a defender a Redenção. Perdeu. Viu que não tinha qualquer noção da existência de Cristo ou da sua bondade, e talvez tivesse mesmo pena se tal pessoa existisse. O seu desagrado pelo Cristianismo cresceu e aprofundou-se. Em dez dias desistiu de comungar, em três semanas deixou de ir a todas as missas que podia. ----------------------------------------------- p.56, MAURICE, E.M. FORSTER

and laughed at his theories, and proved that no man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.

Not even that. It may be halfway in the wrong direction. I can't explain. I don't believe in all these fads, and yet I don't like saying that I don't believe in them.

I was afraid I wrote neither well enough nor ill enough for success.

When a man has no reason to trust himself, he trusts in luck.

If your faith is opposed to experience, to human learning and investigation, it is not worth the breath used in giving it expression.