Quotes About Doubt

Spotting the same car three times could have been a coincidence. Kim Kardashian's boobs could be real, too, and that's about as likely.

On David Hume] Although he never admitted to being an atheist as such, he was clearly and unquestionably the most vividly elegant skeptic of them all.

Fear, of course, was always, and in the end only, about itself. (45)

It's not so much that you've lost your faith in time as that time has lost its faith in you

Fundamentalism—the intellectual style, not the religious movement—is the strong disinclination to take seriously the notion that you might be wrong.

Sixth, fundamentalism, properly understood, is not about religion. It is about the inability to seriously entertain the possibility that one might be wrong. In individuals such fundamentalism is natural and, within reason, desirable. But when it becomes the foundation for an intellectual system, it is inherently a threat to freedom of thought.

I felt lack of inspiration. What is it at the end I was trying to achieve? Is it a promotion? Is it validation? Is it a great piece of work on TV? It kind of lost its meaning.

The liberation of the human mind," H. L. Mencken once wrote, "has been best furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe—that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms.

There is nothing like absolute certainty in the whole field of our knowledge," writes Popper.

Faith is not certainty. It is the courage to live with uncertainty.

This is the question of questions for biblical faith. Paganism then, like secularism now, had no such doubt. Why should anyone expect justice in the world? The gods fought. They were indifferent to mankind. The universe was not moral. It was an arena of conflict. The strong win, the weak suffer, and the wise keep far from the fray. If there is no God or (what amounts to the same thing) many gods, there is no reason to expect justice. The question does not arise.

I am not sure," he said to the moon and the sea and his cigarette, "I am not at all sure how much I can take of this.

Do you trust me?' the skull said. ... 'Yes,' I said. 'Sort of.' 'Then break the bloody glass.

Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.

You can sit up here, feeling above it all while knowing you're not, coming to the lonely conclusion that the only thing you can ever really know about anyone is that you don't know anything about them at all.

Do you believe in God?" "Not really," he said. "No." "Then why do we come here?" He sucked thoughtfully on his Tums tablet and put his arm around me, draping me under his musty woolen prayer shawl, and then shrugged. "I've been wrong before," he said.

coming to the lonely conclusion that the only thing you can ever really know about anyone is that you don't know anything about them at all.

It's hard to imagine your heart simply stopping, but at the same time, it's hard to believe that it didn't give up years ago.

I whispered to Dad during Rosh Hashanah services, "Do you believe in God?" "Not really," he said. "No." "Then why do we come here?" He sucked thoughfully on his Tums tablet and put his arm around me, draping me under his musty woolen prayer shawl, and then shrugged. "I've been wrong before," he said. And that pretty much summed up what theology there was to find in the Foxman home.

I don't have a career, I don't have a family, and I don't know what to do next. I've been so determined to escape anything permanent, and now I just feel like I'm nowhere. And what if that's the permanent thing by default?

If we ever stopped to think about the infinite number of ways we could be undone, we'd never leave our bedrooms.

I may not beleive in God, but I believe in guilt and no one wants to dick around with eternity, even if it isn't there.

I was as sure as I could humanly be, and still, I failed. So what do you think your chances are if you've already got serious doubts?

Everybody has goals, aspirations or whatever, and everybody has been at a point in their life where nobody believed in them.