Quotes About Doubt

When he came home that night he was in a very somber mood, having begun to see at last how those might be right who had laughed at him for his faith in America.

No easy matter to stick to the conviction that your point of view is right and that all the people about you are wrong. That is the way not merely with pioneers of thought, with heroes, saints, and martyrs, but also with lunatics and "nuts," of whom there are millions in the world. When one of these "nuts" succeeds in persuading the greater part of a great nation that he is right, the five per cent have to stop and ask themselves: "How come?

Where savage beasts in forest midnight roam, Seeking in sorrow for each other's joy. Even while he was helping to win a war, Lanny hated that war and all others; he hated the lies he had to tell fully as much as those he had to hear. He was a man with a divided mind, and this put him at a disadvantage with men like these Nazis, who were never troubled with doubts and had consigned all scruples to the dustbin of history.

no use to say it, for people didn't want to believe it and they knew how to believe what they chose.

Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing absurdity.

We should have known from the first day that the country wasn't for us, and we should have taken our courage in both hands and gone back home.

There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.

Rigid ranking based on minuscule differences misleads rather than informs. Rounding and approximation is superior to unwarranted and unnecessary precision. Doubt, caution, and incessant questioning are in order—but so is the insistence on quantifying the complex realities of the modern world. If we are to understand many unruly realities, if we are to base our decisions on the best available information, then there is no substitute for this pursuit.

You can't prove a negative. I can't prove there are no such thing as vampires any more than you can prove you're not a lesbian.

Everybody keeps saying be satisfied with Jesus's love, and he will give us our daily bread. I keep waiting, but we never get any bread, so I have to go out and do things for myself.

I've never known a tranquil atheist. Don't they always look like they just sat on a tack?

And must I now begin to doubt - who never doubted all these years? My heart is stone, and still it trembles. The world I have known is lost in the shadows. Is he from heaven or from hell? And does he know, that granting me my life today, this man has killed me, even so. - Javert

Are you afraid of the good you might do?

I think, therefore I doubt.

Grantaire, earthbound in doubt, loved to watch Enjolras soaring in the upper air of faith. He needed Enjolras. Without being fully aware of it, or seeking to account for it himself, he was charmed by that chaste, upright, inflexible and candid nature.

There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God.

Among all these passionate hearts and all these undoubting minds there was one skeptic. How did he happen to be there? From juxtaposition. The name of this skeptic was Grantaire, and he usually signed with this rebus: R. Grantaire was a man who took good care not to believe in anything.

His whole life was now summed up in two words: absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog.

A phenomenon often seen. A sceptic adhering to a believer; that is as simple as the law of the complementary colours. What we lack attracts us. Nobody loves the light like the blind man...

Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.

Above all, you can believe in Providence in either of two ways, either as thirst believes in the orange, or as the ass believes in the whip.

When those we love are in question, our prudence invents every sort of madness.

It is sad to tell, but after having tried society, which had caused his misfortune, he tried Providence which created society, and condemned it also.

He doubted everything with an air of superiority--a great power in the eyes of the weak.