Quotes About Skepticism

Never let a friendly fox into your hen-house. One day he's going to get hungry.

He believed nothing he was told and trusted no one.

Never let a friendly fox into your hen-house. One day he's going to get hungry.

If something seems to be too good to be true, Mary, it probably is.

But he said it couldn't have

The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.

As a scientific rationalist, Freud distrusts the manifest content of dreams.

But it is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it. Society

I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all.

The uneducated relatives of our patients—persons who are impressed only by the visible and tangible, preferably by such procedure as one sees in the moving picture theatres—never miss an opportunity of voicing their scepticism as to how one can do anything for the malady through mere talk. Such thinking, of course, is as shortsighted as it is inconsistent. For these are the very persons who know with such certainty that the patients merely imagine their symptoms. Words

Dupa cum se stie, in domeniul ocultismului este valabil principiul: cazurile negative nu dovedesc nimic.

Freud spunea candva referitor la religie: Intreaga afacere este atat de evident infantila, atat de departe de realitate, incat oricine cu o atitudine de simpatie si compasiune pentru omenire, va resimti o mare durere gandindu-se ca o majoritate a muritorilor, nu se va ridica niciodata deasupra acestei viziuni despre viata.

It all sounds much crazier now than it did at the time, but even back then I wasn't sure how Ann could possibly believe all this - though I never doubted she was in earnest. She was never not in earnest. And there was no touch of the hypocrite about her.

That's deep, he said with just a hint of mockery. You a psychologist? I told him I was a writer.

We thus combine unreasonable optimism about what people might be like, with unreasonable hatred of them when they are not like that (pp269)

For he has found that even his senses deceive him, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once. He puts to himself the objection that only madmen (who say that they are dressed in purple when they are naked, or that their heads are made of earthenware, or that they are pumpkins or made of glass -- madmen were evidently pretty colorful in the seventeenth century) deny the very obvious evidence of their senses.

Why was it, Mrs Pargeter mused, that the only people who said they were the last ones to spread gossip were always such arrant gossip-mongers?

Stát, který v??í, že není správné ?íst cizí dopisy, ?asem za?ne v??it i tomu, že jeho korespondenci také nikdo ne?te...

the hallmark of the Enlightenment was off to the races.

All around me the world lies like an immense hypothesis that I no longer verify.

All around me the world lies like an immense hypothesis that I can no longer verify.

No hay que creer en el Príncipe Azul. Los hombres no son más que unos pobres seres.» No parecerían enanos si no se les pidiera que fuesen gigantes.

The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything (subjectivism, absolute idealism, solipsism, skepticism: c.f. the Upanishads, the Taoists and Plato, who, all of them, adopt this philosophical attitude by way of purification). That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. That is why beauty and reality are identical. That is why joy and the sense of reality are identical.

The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil.