Quotes About Doubt

What is the heart of the story? What's the hook? What's the setting? What is the primary action that drives the story? What is the emotional core? What are the external conflicts (the world is coming to an end!) What are the internal conflicts (torn between two lovers) What is the driving emotional force? (revenge, love) Will they succeed? (introduce doubt)

God prefers a good atheist to a wicked believer.

There are reasons to doubt that what we call the laws of physics necessarily apply everywhere in the universe—or that they were applicable to every time in its history.

There is no proof great enough to prevent doubt. Ir you base your belief on proof, sooner or later you will sink!

People who demand signs never believe them when they come.

No; he could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.

My father was right. There is no client as scary as an innocent man.

Well, did he do it?" She always asked the irrelevant question. It didn't matter in terms of the strategy of the case whether the defendant "did it" or not. What mattered was the evidence against him -- the proof -- and if and how it could be neutralized. My job was to bury the proof, to color the proof a shade of gray. Gray was the color of reasonable doubt.

I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.

All your life people will tell you things. And most of the time, probably ninety-five percent of the time, what they'll tell you will be wrong.

Absence of proof is not proof of absence.

Sato, perhaps naively, believed

You shame me. Of course, you are right. At the final moment, He will awake and rebuke the storm. Then He will turn to us and ask us why we had so little faith.

And yet. . . and yet, the ancient scar of Adam within his nature dragged him inexorably back, again and again, to this desire for certainty.

Answers are temporary things, Anne", he had said. "There will always be more questions.

It is very difficult", he said aloud. "It is very difficult for a man to believe that God loves him, if he does not know the love of another human being.

Books were another form of fog, dipping down to infiltrate and insidiously undermine the authoritative, official version, showing it up for the sham it was. He knew the stories were all made up, the characters puppets, the outcome predetermined, so why did they seem more real than reality? And why was no one else shocked by this gleeful scandal?

People get it wrong and think it's about being good enough, when in reality it's about being lost and not knowing it.

A man who is certain he is right is almost sure to be wrong.

It isn't action, he suspects, that usually lands a thief in prison. It's hesitation.

That is the way of it among heretics. They start questioning one doctrine and end up questioning everything. No wonder they used to burn them.

Of this his head was convinced, however doubtful his bowels.

No, she's in Spain, too, they're all in Spain, there's no one here... Am I in Spain? No, I'm not in Spain, dear, I'm in agony. That's where I am.

I can't help feeling sceptical about the Bible's claim that God made man in his own image...He could have achieved that by creating a couple of mirrors; or a closed-circuit television.