Quotes About Doubt

This whole story doesn't make sense! Why would God create a perfect place and then allow the Devil in it, just to trick you? Why tell you not to do something when He could have just removed the tree, and so avoided the problem completely? - Cain

One thing he is grateful for: his mind is not so burdened as it had been with anger and self-pity and doubt and guilt and rage. The voices that whisper in his ear from time to time have fallen silent. He has only so much energy in his body and right now, all is concentrated on staying alive. So in a way, he finds some measure of peace. Or if not peace exactly, then --- stillness.

the anxiety of the unpredictable came only when you dealt with amateurs

Speed eliminates all doubt. Am I smart enough? Will people like me? Do I really look all right in this plastic jumpsuit?

If I could believe in myself, why not give other improbabilities the benefit of the doubt? I accepted the idea that an omniscient God had cast me in his own image and that he watched over me and guided me from one place to the next. The virgin birth, the resurrection, and the countless miracles -my heart expanded to encompass all the wonders and possibilities of the universe. A bell, though, that's fucked up.

Like most seasoned phonies, I roundly suspect that everyone is as disingenuous as I am.

I've often lost faith in myself, I've never lost it in my family

There's something about picking the psychic apart that I don't like. It's cynical and uninteresting.

Was it with a clear mind that she believed in us, or was it just the booze talking?

It is always necessary to jump up and down on the scaffold of knowledge to make sure it is solid. If you are skeptical about a scientific claim, then jump up and down on it as hard as you can until you expose a weakness or convince yourself that it is solid.

Jesucristo hoy no dudaría dos tertulias ni resistiría el escrutinio de sus andanzas por Galilea.

The cynic in Douglass left him saying, "Heaven help the poor slave, whose only hope for freedom is in the selfish hearts of such a people." 32

And as she locked the door behind her, a deeply hidden part of her wondered uneasily if she was locking the wolf into its cage . . . or herself safely outside it.

wanting soul life without the dark, warming intelligence of personal doubt is like expecting an egg without the brooding heat of the mother hen.

Doubt is poison. It leads to a loss of faith in yourself, and in all that's good and true.

He, too, had been glassed-in for a long time, by choice. Now and then he had lifted a hammer to shatter through to something, but he had never struck the blow because he didn't know what he wanted on the other side of the glass.

What if his words had the effect of polio on me? WHat a terrible disease that must be if it could kill God in a man.

When I was your age, I lived in bed, racked with polio. I asked myself every day, 'Where is God? Where is God? Where is God?' God never came. It wasn't God who saved me—it was medicine. Reason is my prophet and it tells me that as a watch stops, so we die. It's the end. If the watch doesn't work properly, it must be fixed here and now by us.

If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" then surely we are also permitted doubt.

If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe?

We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer...then surely we are also permitted doubt.

The boundaries are not to be blurred. I was sent off, struck by his harshest thunderbolt, excommunication. In his eyes I am no longer a man of the cloth. But I yet feel the Lord's hand holding me up.

As soon as I got close to starting anything, I was beset by questions and hesitations. What I was about to do was so important, so significant, that it always required further consideration. My spontaneity would fizzle. I would put off my oeuvre for another day. Tomorrow at eight thirty I would start, for sure. Meanwhile, in joyful anticipation of this, I would go for a walk and then read.

Now he realized that this matter of faith was either radically to be taken seriously or radically not to be taken seriously. He stared at the crucifix, balancing between utter belief and utter disbelief.