Quotes About Doubt

How do I make more than a fumbling attempt to explain that faith is not legislated, that it is not a small box which works twenty-four hours a day? If I 'believe' for two minutes once every month or so, I'm doing well.

I get glimmers of the bad nineteenth-century teaching which has made Mother remove God from the realm of mystery and beauty and glory, but why do people half my age think that they don't have faith unless their faith is small and comprehensible and like a good old plastic Jesus?

I found myself earnestly explaining to the young minister that I did not believe in God, 'but I've discovered that I can't live as though I didn't believe in him. As long as I don't need to say any more than that I try to live as though I believe in God, I would very much like to come to church--if you'll let me.

It is not the vaccinationists but the antivaccinationists who generate zeal. People are zealous for a cause when they are not quite positive that it is true.

Nothing really important in life is in the realm of provable fact.

If my religion is true, it will stand up to all my questioning; there is no need to fear. But if it is not true, if it is man imposing strictures on God (as did the men of the Christian establishment of Galileo's day), then I want to be open to God, not to what man says about God.

I am grateful, too, to Lewis for having the courage to yell, to doubt, to kick at God with angry violence. This is part of a healthy grief not often encouraged. It is helpful indeed that C.S. Lewis, who has been such a successful apologist for Christianity, should have the courage to admit doubt about what he has so superbly proclaimed. It gives us permission to admit our own doubts, our own angers and anguishes, and to know that they are part of the soul's growth.

With my intellect I see cause for nothing but pessimism and even despair. But I can't settle for what my intellect tells me. That's not all of it.

I hope you don't mean that," I said finally. "But I do. Alicia represents our church. Therefore, I am against our church. But, like most thinking human beings, I feel the need of a god to worship and to go to for comfort and succor. Therefore I'm going to the devil.

I've gone out alone and bellowed in rage at God at the top of my lungs. But the fact that I bellow at him I suppose proves that I think he's there, doesn't it? Go ahead and be mad at God if you feel like it, Vicky. [...] But remember when you're yelling at God, what you're doing is saying, Do it MY way, God, not YOUR way, but MY way

Trust easily come by can vanish as easily.

didn't know whether or not she

They hung there, the jackets she had bought for him, the shirts that she took to the Chinese laundry each week, the shoes that she polished until they shone. 'Oh nonsense, I'm doing my own,' she had said the first time he protested, and he hadn't protested again. Of course she had done too much for him. But if she had done any less it would have ended long ago. Long before now. She felt a chill. Why did she think it was ending now?

For one thing nobody seemed to think that

53. 'We mainly suppose the experiential quality to be an intrinsic quality of the physical object'-this is the so-called systematic illusion of color. Perhaps it is also that of love. But I am not willing to go there-not just yet. I believed in you.

You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don't have enough doubts about them.

You can't concentrate on doing anything if you are thinking, "What's gonna happen if it doesn't go right?

they were not really afraid. They were just afraid of being afraid.

Incompetence annoys me. Overconfidence terrifies me.

I think when one's working, one works between absolute confidence and absolute doubt, and I got a huge dallop of each.

We start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.

Just think about how many times you have criticized someone else, in hindsight, for their failure to spot a liar. You should have known. There were all kinds of red flags. You had doubts. Levine would say that's the wrong way to think about the problem. The right question is: were there enough red flags to push you over the threshold of belief? If there weren't, then by defaulting to truth you were only being human.

But remember, doubts are not the enemy of belief; they are its companion.

Default to truth becomes an issue when we are forced to choose between two alternatives, one of which is likely and the other of which is impossible to imagine.