Quotes About Doubt

The great sickness and the grievous evil consist in this: that all the things that man finds written in books, he presumes to think of as true-and all the more so if the books are old.

Our greatest indulgence towards a man springs from our despair of him.

Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.

I had the pleasure of meeting that young man at the Patriarch's Ponds. He almost drove me mad myself, proving to me that I don't exist. But you do believe that it is really I?

What matters to us, the judgment of men? What have we to doubt, since we are pure before life?

A man desires praise that he may be reassured, that he may be quit of his doubting of himself; he is indifferent to applause when he is confident of success.

...skepticism can never provide firm ground under a man's feet. And perhaps, after all, we need firm ground.

I'm so good and so loving that men don't believe it.

If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be; if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all

It is necessary for men to be deceived in religion.

As a son of a man who pretended to be one thing for 33 years of my life and then was another thing, the questions of 'what is real' and 'what is not real' are very blurrily vivid to me.

A man cannot become an atheist merely by wishing it.

...self-consciousness is a man's worst enemy.

Men are most apt to believe what they least understand; and through the lust of human wit obscure things are more easily credited.

but the bravest man among us is afraid of himself

He must pull out his own eyes, and see no creature, before he can say, he sees no God; He must be no man, and quench his reasonable soul, before he can say to himself, there is no God.

Men will die upon dogma but will not fall victim to a conclusion.

All men would be cowards if they could.

Men always grow vicious before they become unbelievers.

A man's religion consists, not of the many things he is in doubt of and tries to believe, but of the few he is assured of and has no need of effort for believing.

Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say that he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe.

The man of faith who has never experienced doubt is not a man of faith.

Men never cling to their dreams with such tenacity as at the moment when they are losing faith in them, and know it, but do not dare yet to confess it to themselves.

Free man is by necessity insecure, thinking man by necessity uncertain.