Quotes About Doubt

But … something's wrong about this, " said Mary Anne."Something … I know what it is. Remember when we were first starting the club and we were deciding whether to invite Stacey to join? We didn't know her, so we asked her all sorts of things about the baby-sitting she did in New York. We wanted a club of good baby-sitters. Dedicated baby-sitters. Do you know anything about Janet and Leslie, Kristy?

He loves me, he loves me not

She sounded pretty certain. I wasn't so confident.

I kept second-guessing my decision. Half the time, I'd wanted to call every BSC member and say, Just kidding! The other half, I'd felt this sense of relief. Yes, relief. It was faint, but it was definitely there.

No. Here we can see why Pascal's wager, Kierkegaard's leap of faith, and other epistemological ponzi schemes won't do.

Despite the beauty of our world and the scope of human accomplishment, it is hard not to worry that the forces of chaos will triumph—not merely in the end but in every moment.

Las mentiras de los teóricos de la conspiración suscitan dudas sobre la honradez de quienes denuncian injusticias, aun cuando estén diciendo la verdad.

Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about.

every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which it has no evidence.

In places where scholars can still be stoned to death for doubting the veracity of the Koran, Gould's notion of a loving concordat between faith and reason would be perfectly delusional.

In the best case, notions of God's love and grace provide some relief—but the central message of these faiths is that each of us is separate from, and in relationship to, a divine authority who will punish anyone who harbors the slightest doubt about His supremacy.

Faith is like a pickpocket who loans a person his own money on generous terms.

we are confronted by people who hold beliefs for which there is no rational justification

Faith is like a pockpocket who loans a person his own money on generous terms.

VINCE: We'd never make it. We'd drive and we'd drive and we'd drive and we'd never make it. We'd think we were getting farther and farther away. That's what we'd think.

She keeps coming over to my table and asking me if everything's all right, as though I might be able to reassure her that the world is not coming to an end. "Yes," I tell her. "Everything's fine. It's just history running its course." She smiles sweetly and flees.

As my doubts about whether to move to the Balkans lingered, I devised a test for myself that I have used many times since. The test, as I put it then, was as follows: If I end up not making it as a journalist, will something else I learn in the process make it worth trying? I would come to call this the in trying for Y, the most I accomplish is X test, or the X test.

We need a voice from the outside because our own voices cannot be trusted.

our triumphant age of plenty is riddled with darker feelings of doubt, cynicism, distrust, boredom and a strange kind of emptiness

Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win

may, notwithstanding, be questioned whether, except his bible, he ever read a book entirely through. Late in life, if any man praised a book in his presence, he was sure to ask, "Did you read it through?" If the answer was in the affirmative, he did not seem willing to believe it.

APORIA  (APO'RIA) n.s. [a figure in rhetorick, by which the speaker shews, that he doubts where to begin for the multitude of matter, or what to say in some strange and ambiguous thing; and doth, as it were, argue the case with himself. Thus Cicero says, Whether he took them from his fellows more impudently, gave them to a harlot more lasciviously, removed them from the Roman people more wickedly, or altered them more presumptuously, I cannot well declare. Smith's Rhetorick.

Chi dubita di se stesso di rado sbaglia.

Well as you love her, I suppose the return of her Love for yours, which you seem not to doubt, will not be enough. Can the poor girl be a Countess without a confounded parcel of dross fasten'd to her petticoat, to make her weight in the other scale?