Quotes About Doubt

The idea that a book can advise a woman how to capture a man is touchingly naive. Books advising men how to capture a woman are far less common, perhaps because few men are willing to admit to such a difficulty. For both sexes, I recommend a good novel, offering scenarios you might learn from, if only because they reflect a lot of doubt.

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.

Would it be possible that I should not in any degree succeed? I can scarcely think so. Ah delusive hope, how much further wilt thou lead me?

When I lost the Wimbledon 2012 final, I didn't know if I'd ever win a slam.

Every time I win a tournament I have to think that there is something wrong with modern chess.

Now, whether my not asking for good things to happen to me is subconsciously intended to win me brownie points with God is something I can't answer. But I do feel the need to give thanks and also not to feel hypocritical by asking for things when I have doubts that God would answer me.

Look at the way teams play against Arsenal. They don't believe they can win. They don't believe.

I can be a real pessimist. You know that when you win an Oscar, and you walk offstage, and your first thought is: 'Oh God, I've peaked.'

The belief that the good in American society will finally win out... I don't believe any more.

Doubt comes in at the window when inquiry is denied at the door.

I'm not sure I know how to make music anymore. Maybe you're given a window into things for a time, and beyond that maybe it goes away. Why should you expect it to stay?

There are guys you give the benefit of the doubt if they hold you up a little bit longer than normal, and you have that list of guys you kind of know are going to be a problem when you get there. The window of being patient with them is a lot shorter.

Is it honest for me to go and sit there on communion day and drink the wine and eat the bread while feeling it all to be mummery?

I knew with The West Wing that that wasn't going to be for very long, that I was just the red herring.

Most pilots learn, when they pin on their wings and go out and get in a fighter, especially, that one thing you don't do, you don't believe anything anybody tells you about an airplane.

There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.

By the time I had got to college, I had begun to read and had decided that most of what Christians believed could not be credible. So I became a philosophy major at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.

The conclusion that I have come to is that actually, no religion, whether it's Islam, Christianity or any idea based on scripture or texts, is a religion of 'anything,' really.

Never take anything for granted.

The first thing I've learned is to trust nobody.

It felt like the first thing, but when I first started out, I got a job adapting a book by Russell Banks called 'Rule Of The Bone.' I didn't do a very good job. I didn't really know what I was doing in general, let alone how to adapt a book.

The first thing that was intimidating was when I started rehearsing to play Riff in the London company. That first day of rehearsal, I thought, 'Oh my God, I'm never going to learn this. I'm too slow.'

The hardest thing about being an unpublished writer is that there's always that voice in your head that asks if you're really being a fool. You might just really stink and not know it. You have to have a lot of blind faith in the process. You have to like it so much that you're going to do it anyway.

Listening to your instincts, while being the easiest, can also be the hardest thing to do.