Quotes About Doubt

I'm sure I must have sounded like a fool and a borderline psychotic most of that year, when I talked to people who thought they knew who and where they were at the time ... but looking back, I see that if I wasn't Right, at least I wasn't Wrong, and in that context I was forced to learn from my confusion ... which took awhile, and there's still no proof that what I finally learned was Right, but there's not a hell of a lot of evidence to show that I'm Wrong either.

There is no such thing as paranoia. Your worst fears can come true at any moment.

Whatever else might be said about Nixon—and there is still serious doubt in my mind that he could pass for Human—he is a goddamn stone fanatic on every facet of pro football.

Once they let you get away with running around for ten years like a king hoodlum, you tend to forget now and then that about half the people you meet live from one day to the next in a state of such fear and uncertainty that about half the time they honestly doubt their own sanity.

Some of them carry paralytic rabies, but it is hard to know which ones.

There is no such thing as paranoia. Your worse fears can come true at any moment.

Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception.

Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.

That would require faith. I do not beliebe in faith. I believe it exists but I do not believe it works. I don't know what the rules are here; I can't risk throwing everything away on a long shot.

Bond again walked round the room. This time he carefully inspected the walls and the neighbourhood of the bed and the telephone. Why not take the room? Why would there be microphones or secret doors? What would be the point of them?

Twenty years ago I might have hired a professional listener, but somewhere along the way I had lost faith in the talking cure. A genteel fraud in my view.

She was like a bride-to-be who begins to feel her sickening qualms as the day approaches, and dares not speak her mind because so many preparations have been made on her behalf the happiness and convenience of so many good people would be put at risk.

She thought of Robbie at dinner when there had been something manic and glazed in his look. Might he be smoking the reefers she had read about in a magazine, these cigarettes that drove young men of bohemian inclination across the borders of insanity?

Was he pretending to be jealous to conceal the fact that he was?

In fact, as I get older, I begin to feel that actually what we need more in the world is doubt; more skepticism, less crazed certainty. . . . People who know the answer and are going to impose it on everybody else, I think, are terrifying people.

Without faith, how open and beautiful and terrifying the world must have seemed

Rationalism is a blind faith.

Everyone loved a good reader. And he'd always loved being a great reader - until recently. Maybe it was just part of getting older, or maybe it was being a librarian, or just being here, but lately he'd found he was becoming suspicious of his own love of books. All that reading - it had started to seem wrong, worthless almost, without purpose.

Why the rifle? Everybody knows you can't shoot." Who were these everybodies and would they like to stand in front of me, preferably within ten feet, so I could discuss this issue in greater detail.

I trusted her about as far as I could throw her. I was strong and she was small, but it still wasn't very far.

There are only two things that can screw this up for us: you and me. Then we're doomed for sure.

He said, 'Yeah, but will I get chicks? In truckloads?

I'm a rat,'' Robert said. ''I'm not going into a reptile's mouth.'' Oh boy. Fine time to develop phobias

When in doubt and in need of information, find a snitch and squeeze him.