Quotes About Doubt

philosophers will forever wrangle about the true nature of science as a prelude to their dream of the final knockdown argument which will silence all doubt and opposition to their own favorite utopia.

has amounted at times to a crisis of confidence in the police, especially

I don't profess any religion; I don't think it's possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words 'spiritual' or 'spirituality.' [Interview, The New Yorker, Dec. 26, 2005]

I don't profess any religion; I don't think it's possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words 'spiritual' or 'spirituality.' [ Interview, The New Yorker, Dec. 26, 2005 ]

I thought you'd say it might be a trap.' 'It might be trap,' he said. 'It doesn't feel like a trap.' 'Well it wouldn't, would it? Not if it was a good trap.

Oenone had found the chapel by accident, and was not certain what kept drawing her back to it. She was not a Christian. Few people were anymore, except in Africa, and on certain islands of the outermost west. All she knew of Christians was that they worhsipped a god nailed to a cross, and what on earth was the use of a god who went around letting himself get nailed to things?

We find everywhere in this world the traces of a revealed God and of a hidden God; revealed enough to strengthen our faith, concealed enough to try our faith.

One thing I knew about the novelist's task: when in doubt, write; when empty, write; when afraid, write. Nothing is more impenetrable than the blank page. The blank page is the void, the absence of sense and feeling, the white light of literary death.

By then it was more of an observation than a decision; it was less a matter of abandoning the faith than waking up to the fact that it had disappeared, quietly leaked away, as if there had been a small hole in my tank all along.

Modern developments in both logic and physics (quantum physics) have cast doubt on the universality of at least two of these so-called laws, giving support to the Port Royals' contention that logic is merely the refinement of clear thinking in aid of argumentation, or rhetoric.

It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously," Daniel Kahneman noted, "but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true."17

but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.

Call me an "optimistic skeptic.

Doubt is not a fearful thing," Feynman observed, "but a thing of very great value.

Uncertainty is real," Byers writes. "It is the dream of total certainty

Quit pretending you know things you don't and start running experiments.

But you don't know how to read anymore! When you open a book, you do it in the faith and assurances that you are already master of what it contains and that the author has written only so you may prove him wrong!

I rejected the church for a time because I found so little grace there. I returned because I found grace nowhere else.

Fourteenth-century men seemed to have regarded their doctor in rather the same way as the twentieth-century men are apt to regard their priest, with tolerance for someone who was doing his best and the respect due to a man of learning but also with a nagging and uncomfortable conviction that he was largely irrelevant to the real and urgent problems of their lives.

Ik weet dat dit net is gebeurd, ik ben niet gek, en toch lijkt het me onwaarschijnlijk.

He says that for me things are simple, that everything will be fine, that I will get out of it, it's already written, that there's nothing to worry about, the world will greet me with open arms. Whereas for him there's a barrier, an impenetrable wall, forbidding him to deviate from what has been predetermined.

Aquí, si para la mayoría Dios es un ser lejano que vive en los libros y entre el incienso, el Diablo es un vecino al que muchos creen haber visto un día u otro.

Anyone who does not acknowledge the darkness in his nature will succumb to it...the lamp of conviction needs to be shaded by doubt, or it burns with a blinding light.

The whole thing seems absurdly easy - so easy that you ought to smell a rat.