Quotes About Doubt

yet may it not be that these questions are idle, and we who are putting them to you mere childish dreamers, hedged round with error and doubt?

It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.

No one is fully saved, and no one is fully lost.

One cannot even say that one believes in the perception of the real. Belief only intervenes after a preexisting doubt, and thus it is the imaginary that we truly believe in, because our beliefs lack some support. I do not believe in this chair I see: the chair is simply there, that is all. Perception does not await proof in order to grasp an object; it is prior to careful observation. In this sense, perception, like the imagination, precedes all premises.

All writers who are unprejudiced and open to the future know what they do not want better than what they do want.

Se demander si le mode est réel, ce n'est pas entendre ce que l'on dit.

I don't need faith.

A true realist, if he is not a believer, will always find in himself the strength and ability not to believe in miracles, and if a miracle stands before him as an irrefutable fact, he will sooner doubt his own senses than admit the fact.4

do not want to believe in God. Therefore, I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation arising to evolution. —George Wald, Chemist and Nobel Prize winner for medicine

Wieso seid ihr stärker als die Wahrheit

Well-informed cynicism is only another mode of conformity.

Can you imagine a life with no fear? What if faith, not fear, was your default reaction to threats?

The web of hypocrisy of today hangs on the frontiers of two domains, between which our time swings back and forth, attaching its fine threads of deception and self-deception. No longer vigorous enough to serve morality without doubt or weakening, not yet reckless enough to live wholly to egoism, it trembles now toward the one and now toward the other in the spider-web of hypocrisy, and, crippled by the curse of halfness, catches only miserable, stupid flies.

Our athiests are pious people.

To the believer, truths are a settled thing, a fact; to the freethinker, a thing that is still to be settled.

Everything is a spook

But, even granted that doubts, raised in the course of time against the tenants of the Christian faith, have long since robbed you of faith in the immortality of your spirit, you have nevertheless left one tenant undisturbed, and still ingenuously adhere to the one truth, that the spirit is your better part, and that the spiritual has greater claims on you than anything else

Think doubt and fail, think victory and succeed

As for justice, who has once seen it done?

But I've been walking through the night and the dayTill my eyes get weary and my head turns grey,And sometimes it seems maybe God's gone away,Forgetting the promise that we heard him say—And we're lost out here in the stars—

afraid of making

The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.

It's not for me - religion. It seems like a redundancy for a poet.

No amount of saying 'I love you' and 'I trust you' makes it true when it isn't.