Quotes About Doubt

she felt secure only in her terrible sense of insecurity.

We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.—Henry James

Long-haired preachers come out every night And they tell you what's wrong and what's right And when you ask them for something to eat They tell you in voices so sweet: You will eat by and by, in that glorious place in the sky Work and pray, live on hay, you will get pie in sky when you die. That's a lie!

This is our time, to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that, out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can.

And I would shrug and play the question off, unable to confess that I could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly, between faith and simple endurance; that while I believed in the sincerity I heard in their voices, I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won.

doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

I had nothing to escape from except my own inner doubt.

In the Catholic school, when it came time to pray, I would pretend to close my eyes, then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended.

Through them, I discovered a community of faith—that it was okay to doubt, to question, and still reach for something beyond the here and now.

Kyle was a good kid; he still cared about something. Would that be enough to save him?

I hadn't grown up in Compton, or Watts. I had nothing to escape from except my own inner doubt. I

Given the strong odor of imminent failure

I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place. We are a motley crew, distinguished not only by our inability to explain ourselves to those who are more certain of their beliefs than we are but in many cases by our distance from the centers of our faith communities as well.

As Eckhart, one of Otto's many sources, had asserted centuries earlier, referring to the Other as God, the religious seeker must set aside any idea about God as being good, wise, [or] compassionate.

The impasse was this: If I let myself speculate even tentatively about that something, if I acknowledged the possibility of a nonhuman agent or agents, some mysterious Other, intervening in my life, could I still call myself an atheist?

If there was one thing I understood about God, it was that he was not good, and if he was good, he was too powerless to deserve our attention.

It was doubtless true," she later wrote "that I was 'Weary of myself and sick of asking What I am and what I ought to be.

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who'd just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which... is at home at the moment.

People ask without wanting to know.

Sometimes I prayed for Baby Jesus to make me good, but Baby Jesus didn't.

Scientists are not like other people, sir. We cannot slam our portals. We have to follow evidence where it leads, even if no one likes that place. Even if it suggests that all we have ever believed might be mistaken.

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.

With these startling honesties glinting up at us from history's broken mirror, it strikes me that this is worth shouting from the rooftops: We could be wrong this time, again. The enemy may not be exactly what we think. It may be a force that resides in many quarters, including inside our skin, in our very words, the questions we frame, the things we love most, the things we can't live without. Our greatest dread may be our salvation.

Was it normal now for parents to operate in the dark? She never knew what was fair to ask.