Quotes About Skepticism

I have likewise heard it stated, that one boy fell a-kicking the coffin on his way to the grave, who is still living and lifelike, and that a girl, as the doctors were cutting her up, threw herself off the table. I cannot vouch for the truth of these singular and cruel incidents, although I heard them related as facts; but with regard to my own case there can be no dispute.

My uncle once told me to read the poets, to love them, and to use them—but never to trust them.

There's as much crookedness as you want to find. There was something Abraham Lincoln said - he'd rather trust and be disappointed than distrust and be miserable all the time. Maybe I trusted too much.

I told you all this so that you understand that if someone says that something is so, that does not prove that it is so.

All in all, I am not surprised that the people who want to unravel the social contract start with young adults. Those who are urged to feel afraid, very afraid, have both the greatest sense of independence and the most finely honed skepticism about government.

The hefty price for accepting information uncritically is that we go through life unaware that what we've accepted as impossible may in fact be quite possible.

You never know anything until you've proved it right." "Nonsense. You can't order life mathematically," retorted the Judge. "Most of the time you 'know' things without factual evidence." "I'm Coleridge's 'thought-benighted skeptic,'" said Ellery unhappily. "I question everything. Sometimes I even question the results of my own thinking. My mental life is very involved.

One woman, a Harvard-educated lawyer, learned to carry a Bally bag when going to certain exclusive shops. Like a sorceress warding off evil with a wand, she would hold the bag in front of her to rebuff racial assumptions, in the hope that the clerk would take it as proof that she could be trusted to enter.

Life has lots of genuine-sounding simulated answers waiting to be snatched up by gullible takers.

Nasceu com boceta? Vai ser enganada. Traída, humilhada.

I am for the most part so convinced that everything is lacking in basis, consequence, justification, that if someone dared to contradict me, even the man I most admire, he would seem to me a charlatan or a fool.

He detested objective truths, the burden of argument, sustained reasoning. He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one. Others are a dialectician's invention.

I have recommended you the dignity of skepticism: yet here I am, prowling around the Absolute. Technique of contradiction? Remember, rather, what Flaubert said: "I am a mystic and I believe in nothing".

No one has lived so close to his skeleton as I have lived to mine: from which results an endless dialogue and certain truths which I manage neither to accept nor to reject.

Românul îÅŸi zeflemiseÅŸte propria lui condiÅ£ie ÅŸi se risipeÅŸte într-o autoironie facil? ÅŸi steril?.

Sa petreci o seara intreaga langa un om care traieste in minciuna,care e un gunoi dar nu stie (sau nu crede) ca este,o asemenea seara iti lasa un dezgust care a doua zi te bantuie si-ti strica ziua.

Bluntly: my rebellion is a faith to which I subscribe without believing in it.

Orice om care nu moare de foame este suspect.

Pentru om, viaÈ›a nu e un absolut. De aceea, niciun om, întrucât nu e numai animal, nu g?seÈ™te o mulÈ›umire în faptul însuÈ™i al vieÈ›ii, în faptul de a tr?i. Pentru animal, viaÈ›a e totul; pentru om, ea este un semn de întrebare.

A philosopher is saved from mediocrity only by skepticism or mystique, these two forms of despair in the front of knowledge. Mystique is an escape from knowledge, and skepticism is knowledge without hope. In both kinds world is not a solution.

patíbulos, calabouços e masmorras só prosperam à sombra de uma fé - dessa necessidade de crer que infestou o espírito para sempre. O diabo empalidece comparado a quem dispõe de uma verdade, de sua verdade.

Noble gestures are always suspect. Each time, we regret having committed them. Something false about them, something theatrical, attitudinizing. It is true that we regret ignoble gestures almost as much.

We dismiss the skeptic, we speak of an "automatism of doubt," while we never say of a believer that he has fallen into an "automatism of faith." Yet faith is much more mechanical than doubt, which has the excuse of proceeding from surprise to surprise — inside perplexity, it is true.

You're against everything that's been done since the last war," said the very up-to-date lady. "You've got the wrong date: I'm against everything that's been done since Adam.