Quotes About Doubt

Even the basic facts of Dmitri Shostakovich's life are often contested, as a glance through the end notes of this book attests. How do we reconstruct the story of someone who lived in a period in which everyone had an excuse to lie, evade, accuse, or keep silent?

Except we don't know if Shostakovich actually meant what he said in this article. We don't even know if it was by him. Especially later in his life, the regime would send Shostakovich articles already written and tell him just to sign his name at the bottom.

As one Shostakovich biographer put it, "Testimony is a realistic picture of Dmitri Shostakovich. It just isn't a genuine one.

O Diabo, invejoso, fez o homem confundir fé com religião e amor com casamento.

When the Führer predicted a quick victory over England, implying Spain could wait not longer if it wanted to share in the triumph, Franco doubted the scenario, before adding that even if the Germans were to capture London, the British would continue fighting from Canada.

Instead he discouraged his cabinet from proposing any idea that might cause him to doubt his instincts, which were, he insisted, always right.

I am an optimist who worries a lot.

Was this a real story, Sparrow had wondered, or was it something like the book of records, an imagines survival?

I had a wild thought there, beneath that sky. I will eat these herbs. Then whatever is truly in me, let it be out, at last. I brought them to my mouth. But my courage failed. What was I truly? In the end, I could not bear to know.

What was I truly? In the end, I could not bear to know.

Perhaps one day even I will be famous. Perhaps more famous than you." "I doubt it.

I would like to say that all the while I waited to break out, but the truth is, I'm afraid I might have floated on, believing those dull miseries were all there was, until the end of days.

And when I do say to she: 'Bain't Prior Bog of Bumset as good a church-lord as any old Saint?' she's answer to I is allus the same: 'Bog be Bog and Bumset be Bumset,' she do say, 'but when thee do pray to They Above, 'tis a very different style of Holy Man thee dost need for thee's pass to Salvation!

I'm sceptical about the reality of everything; even about the reality of Nature. Sometimes I think that there are several Natures ... several Universes, in fact ... one inside the other ... like Chinese boxes ...

History is full of people who thought they were right -- absolutely right, completely right, without a shadow of a doubt. And because history never seems like history when you are living through it, it is tempting for us to think the same.

For perhaps the first time in my life I appreciated the corrosive effects of total uncertainty.

I just don't know. Maybe I'm good, but that goddamn scale would hesitate a long time before tilting that way.

It sounded sort of strange, but I guess I believed you. You said if X has something valuable and Y comes along and takes it away from him, and there is absolutely no way in the world X can ever get it back, then you come along and make a deal with X to get it back, and keep half. Then you just Ã¢â'¬Â¦ live on that until it starts to run out. Is that the way it is, really?

These are our realities, and, like our ancestors of fifty thousand years ago, if we--as a species rather than as an individual--are uninformed or careless, or indifferent to the Facts (emphasis mine), then survival as a species is in serious doubt. ~~John D. MacDonald, Reading for Survival. c. 1987

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself but undoubting about the truth. This has been exactly reversed … We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.5

If only I still had faith in words.

Dim as the borrowed beams of moons and stars To lonely, weary, wandering travelers, Is Reason to the soul; and, as on high Those rolling fires discover but the sky, Not light us here, so Reason's glimmering ray Was lent, not to assure our doubtful way, But guide us upward to a better day.

The intellectual support for UNBELIEF is about as stable as the stock market.

In 'The Allure of Hope,' Jan says, Eve was convinced that God was withholding something from her. Not even the extravagance of Eden could convince her that God's heart is good.