Quotes About Doubt

all I feel sure of are questions.

Don´t you ever get tired of believing, Madame? Don´t you ever want proof? Madame Manec rests a hand on Marie-Laure's forehead. The thick hand that first reminded her of a gardener's or a geologist's. You must never stop believing. That's the most important thing.

No," she says. "I want to believe that Papa hasn't been anywhere near it.

He translates one book of the Iliad, two of the Odyssey, plus an admirable slice of Plato's Republic. Five lines on an average day, ten on a good one, scribbled onto yellow legal pads in his crimped pencil-writing and stuffed into boxes beneath the dining table. Sometimes he believes his translations are adequate. Usually he decides they're terrible. He shows them to no one.

he could feel his hope wilting.

weaker moments, he

How do you ever know that you are doing the right thing?

Or maybe the stone was never real at all. Maybe it was all hoax, all story.

Don't you ever get tired of believing, Madame? Don't you ever want proof?" Madame Manec rests a hand on Marie-Laure's forehead. The thick hand that first reminded her of a gardener's or a geologist's. "You must never stop believing. That's the most important thing.

plains, I wondered about my friends, and my little bed, and the ewes I'd left behind in the field. I had traveled so far, and it was all so magnificent, yet… … still a needle of doubt pricked beneath my wing. A dark restlessness flickered within…

A week ago, it all seemed so secure. So settled.

There has always been a sliver of panic in him, deeply buried, when it comes to his daughter: a fear that he is no good as a father, that he is doing everything wrong. That he never quite understood the rules.

The war drops its question mark.

These numbers, they're more than numbers. Do you understand?" "But we are the good guys. Aren't we, Uncle?" "I hope so. I hope we are.

Several do math on their fingers. Then they raise their hands as one. "Can we see it?" "No." "Not even open the first door?" "No." "Have you seen it?" "I have not." "So how do you know it's really there?" "You have to believe the story." "How much is it worth, Monsieur? Could

And this feeling, permeating every waking minute, that he had made too many wrong decisions.

The wizard laughed. "Even if you grew wings, foolish fish, you could not fly to a place that is not real." "Wrong," I said, "it does exist. Even if you don't believe in it, I do. Otherwise what's it all been for?

trying and failing to summon the courage to go out.

Save yourself, the neighbors had told him. Save yourself. Joseph wonders if he is beyond saving, if the only kind of man who can be saved is the man who never needed saving in the first place.

How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing?

The lie rushes in to fill up the void left by truth in retreat. When people lose their faith in God, for example they do not then believe in nothing.... They commence believing in anything.

There were three main new schools of thought: the Epicureans, the Stoics and the Sceptics. On the whole, if an Epicurean said one thing, a Stoic would say the opposite and a Sceptic would refuse to commit himself either way.

Euphrosyne leant forward, clasping her hands, and said to me: 'Have you killed him?' The question vexed me. It would have been civil to accompany it, at all events, with an inquiry as to my own health.

From Pünd's experience, people who were so insistent on the truth were very rarely telling it.