Quotes About Doubt

more exasperating is that there is no way to educate or inform people who, when in doubt, will make stuff up.

So you'll never guess who I heard from," said Kelly. "Who would that be?" "Not 'whom'?" asked Kelly, her face momentarily clouded by doubt. "No, my dear. It's a subject, not an object. At least in my question.

We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than the most up-to-date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. Only out of radical skeptics, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need.

I may be the wrong person for my life.

We want a little light to live by. A start somewhere. Little steps for little feet. Or even something commanding, scriptural or mighty. I myself am discouraged to finding a hot lead on the Altogether. Like every child of the century deluded enough to keep his head out of the noose, I expect God's Mercy in the end. Nevertheless, I frequently feel that anybody's refusal to commit suicide is a little fey. Walking about as though nothing were wrong is just too studied for the alert

Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.

His voice, the very sound of rolling eyes.

Because certainty isn't the same as truth. It just means you're really, really deluded.

The question is there, whther we answer it or not.

I realize that such doubts will strike many people as outrageous, but that is because almost everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten into regarding the reductive research program as sacrosanct, on the ground that anything else would not be science.

The evolutionary story leaves the authority of reason in a much weaker position. … Evolutionary naturalism implies that we shouldn't take any of our convictions seriously, including the scientific world picture on which evolutionary naturalism itself depends.

If you can't prove that anything exists outside you own mind, is it all right to go on believing in the external world anyway?

There may or may not be an external world, and if there is it may or may not be completely different from how it seems to you—there's no way for you to tell. This view is called skepticism about the external world.

That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not.

It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.

All the tales of miracles, with which the Old and New Testament are filled, are fit only for impostors to preach and fools to believe.

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

People in general know not what wickedness there is in this pretended word of God. Brought up in habits of superstition, they take it for granted that the Bible is true, and that it is good; they permit themselves not to doubt of it , and they carry the ideas they form of the benevolence of the Almighty to the book which they have been taught to believe was written by his authority. Good heavens! it is quite another thing, it is a book of lies, wickedness, and blasphemy.

He prays dictatorially. When it is sunshine, he prays for rain, and when it is rain, he prays for sunshine. He follows the same idea in everything that he prays for; for what is the amount of all his prayers, but an attempt to make the Almighty change his mind, and act otherwise than he does? It is as if he were to say—- thou knowest not so well as I.

I have now gone through the Bible, as a man would go through a wood with an axe on his shoulder, and fell trees. Here they lie; and the priests, if they can, may replant them. They may, perhaps, stick them in the ground, but they will never make them grow.

A multiplication of beliefs acts as a division of belief; and in proportion as anything is divided, it is weakened.

When it is revealed to me, I will believe it to be revelation; but it is not and cannot be incumbent upon me to believe it to be revelation before; neither is it proper that I should take the word of man as the word of God, and put man in the place of God.

There never yet was any truth or principle so irresistibly obvious, that all men believed it at once.