Quotes About Doubt

There are hearts into which even God cannot look without losing his innocence.

patíbulos, calabouços e masmorras só prosperam à sombra de uma fé - dessa necessidade de crer que infestou o espírito para sempre. O diabo empalidece comparado a quem dispõe de uma verdade, de sua verdade.

Quando non si hanno più illusioni su di sè, non se ne conservano sugli altri.

De cierto tipo de vigilias se desprende el cuestionar el nacimiento.

Noble gestures are always suspect. Each time, we regret having committed them. Something false about them, something theatrical, attitudinizing. It is true that we regret ignoble gestures almost as much.

We dismiss the skeptic, we speak of an "automatism of doubt," while we never say of a believer that he has fallen into an "automatism of faith." Yet faith is much more mechanical than doubt, which has the excuse of proceeding from surprise to surprise — inside perplexity, it is true.

What's wrong—what's the matter with you?" Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for. . . .

We all believe in many more things than we think, we harbour intolerances, we cherish bloody prejudices, and, defending our ideas with extreme means, we travel the world like ambulatory and irrefragable fortresses. Each of us is a supreme dogma to himself; no theology protects its god as we protect our self; and if we assail this self with doubts and call it into question, we do so only be a pseudo-elegance of our pride: the case is already won.

Getting up with my head full of plans, I would be working, I was sure of it, all morning long. No sooner had I sat down at my desk than the odious, vile, and persuasive refrain: "What do you expect of this world?" stopped me short. And I returned, as usual, to my bed with the hope of finding some answer, of going back to sleep.

He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one.

The book which, after demolishing everything, fails to demolish itself will have exasperated us to no purpose.

Getting up with my head full of plans, I would be working, I was sure of it, all morning long. No sooner had I sat down at my desk than the odious, vile, and persuasive refrain: "What do you expect of this world?" stopped me short. And I returned, as usual, to my bed with the hope of finding some answer, of going back to sleep...

What's wrong--what's the matter with you?' Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for....

But we are fundamentally, biologically unsuited to "understand.

When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.

I feel I am free but I know I am not.

The only part of the planet where existence seemed to have some justification is tainted with gangrene.

The things that we have expressed we believe a little less in. Why? Because they detach themselves from you. In that sense, really the fact of writing is a kind of profanation. Because the things in which you believe fully, from the moment you have said them, they mean less to you.

The flayed man as theoretician of detachment...The convulsionary as skeptic...

The prayers of a wretch I might accept, but no one else's, not even a saint's.

Sloth is a somatic scepticism, the way the flesh doubts.

Nothing procures so many crowns for the monk as discouragement.

How right it was to begin the day, as men once did, with a prayer, a call for help! Ignorant of whom to address ourselves to, we will end by groveling before the first cracked god to come along.

I may change my opinion on the same subject, the same event, ten, twenty, thirty times in the course of a single day. And to think that each time, like the worst impostor, I dare utter the word "truth"!