Quotes About Doubt

There is no point in winning an argument if you know or suspect you are wrong.

We are on the road to producing a race of man too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.2.

When I used to bring up the prophecies here in small group that warned us that there would be blood in the church in the end times, I could see that there was a lot of doubt.

Es imposible demostrar que algo es cierto. Solo podemos descubrir que algo es falso y, así, acercarnos un poco más a la verdad.

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." ~ Mark Twain

I've never been convinced that the sun would come up without me barking.

Again and again the schools which form the twentieth century's elites throughout the West refer to their Socratic heritage. The implication is that doubt is constantly raised in their search for truth. In reality the way they teach is the opposite of a Socratic dialogue. In the Athenian's case every answer raised a question. With the contemporary elites every question produces an answer. Socrates would have thrown the modern elites out of his academy.

Nearly all the powerful people of this age are unbelievers, the best of them in doubt and misery, the most in plodding hesitation, doing as well as they can, what practical work lies at hand.

Hamlet could not possibly have been written by Hamlet.

Doubt is thus the space between reality and the application of an idea. It ought to be given over to the weighing of experience, intuition, creativity, ethics, common sense, reason and, of course, knowledge, in balanced consideration of what is to be done. The longer this stage lasts the more we take advantage of our intelligence.

Why do the same people who believe in those deities doubt the existence of darker spirits? I ask all of you, how can a person believe in the light but not the dark?

I think about those words a lot, and I think about their spirits too. If you believe in those sorts of things. I do and I don't believe. But mostly— mostly, mostly— I do.

Religion is a mixed blessing.

The audience that I try to reach are members of what I call the church alumni association. Now they are people who have not found in institutional religion a God big enough to be God for their world.

We then tried other coping devices, drugs, alcohol and even suicide. As the poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote: "God is dead and modern men (and women) gather nightly around the divine grave to weep."*

There is no such thing as absolute certainty, but there is assurance sufficient for the purposes of human life.

To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful, is the cause of half their errors.

In the present age—which has been described as "destitute of faith, but terrified at skepticism"—in which people feel sure, not so much that their opinions are true, as that they should not know what to do without them—the claims of an opinion to be protected from public attack are rested not so much on its truth, as on its importance to society.

Faith in God presents a fascinating conundrum. So many of us have faith, but when doubt and unbelief creep in, our faith is the first thing to be compromised.

The most significant challenge to stability is the perverse impulse toward freedom. You can't control this desire for freedom entirely with threats and punishments; it's more effective if you teach people to doubt the reality of their own perceptions. When the system is working correctly, they censor themselves.

When in doubt keep reading. A book will never die on you

She wanted to sit down, she wanted to turn back. She was afraid, and did not dare give in it it.