Quotes About Doubt

I'm blackening pages, but I don't know if it's writing.

I suffer from the Virgo disease: nothing I did was pure enough. I was never sure whether I wanted disciples or partisans. I was never sure if I wanted Parliament or a hermitage.

The mere fact that a very large number of people believe such a thing and that the world would be a better place if it were true, is no reason for believing that it is true.

Lei non crede in niente - disse il professore. - Oh sì, in qualche cosa. Forse in troppe, per i tempi che corrono.

Naturalmente... Ma sa com'è? Una volta, in un libro di filosofia, a proposito del relativismo, ho letto che il fatto che noi, ad occhio nudo, non vediamo le zampe dei vermi del formaggio non è ragione per credere che i vermi non le vedano... Io sono un verme dello stesso formaggio, e vedo le zampe degli altri vermi.

This God sounds rather suspicious to me," said Mopple.

No, little one, George's ghost won't come back. Human beings don't have souls. No soul, no ghost. Simple." "How can you say that?" protested Mopple. "We don't know whether humans have souls or not." "Every lamb knows that your soul is in your sense of smell. And human beings don't have very good noses." Maude herself had an excellent sense of smell, and often thought about the problem of souls and noses. "So you'd only see a very small ghost. Nothing to be afraid of.

That's easy," Russell said. "Because everybody else in this here place is crooked as a dog's hind leg. ...

You know that feeling. When you like a boy but then he starts to like you and you stop liking him.

Where belief tries to expel doubt, faith walks with it, offering no easy answers. Belief insists, while faith hopes and trusts. The one is demanded, the other freely given, and this freedom means that real faith is both difficult and stubborn. It involves an ongoing struggle, a continual questioning of what we think we know, a wrestling with issues and ideas. It goes hand-in-hand with doubt, in a never-ending conversation with it. And sometimes even in conscious defiance of it.

Especially the doubt, which is in many ways essential to real faith.

Seeds of doubt, once planted, will grow.

Falling in love isn't the problem" she murmured. "its the staying in love part that i don't have much faith in.

The promises of prayer are extraordinary, but for prayer to work as God promises it to work, it must be purged of self and doubt.

I don't know how I'm supposed to feel. I don't know what to do.' For steps, it's like driving around New York with a map of Boston.

Satan's goal is to tweak a lie so cleverly that it sounds reasonable, truthful, even right. Eve

Sometimes a society gets stuck. Sometimes these unquestioned ideas interfere, as the cost of questioning becomes too great. In these times, the hardest task for social or political activists is to find a way to get people to wonder again about what we all believe is true. The challenge is to sow doubt.

The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.

One does not learn anything except by believing something, and -- conversely -- if one doubts everything one learns nothing. On the other hand, believing everything uncritically is the road to disaster. The faculty of doubt is essential. But as I have argued, rational doubt always rests on faith and not vice versa. The relationship between the two cannot be reversed.

Since total skepticism about ultimate beliefs is strictly impossible, in that no belief can be doubted except on the basis of some other belief, indifference is always in danger of giving place to some sort of fanaticism that can be as intolerant as any religion has ever been.

Hope and experience take two different sides of an argument.

I may not be smart enough to debate you point-for-point on this, but I have the feeling about 60% of what you say is crap.

In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone's just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you've figured it out and done it, you'll never know whether you were right or wrong. You'll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn't.

And on and on, and it all sounded completely, horribly plausible. Any one of a thousand options promised - basically guaranteed - a rich, fulfilling, challenging future for him. So why did Quentin feel like he was looking around frantically for another way out? Why was he still waiting for some grand adventure to come and find him? The professors Quentin talked to about it didn't seem concerned at all. They didn't get what the problem was. What should he do? Why, anything he wanted to!