quotations about doubt
My soul's poisonous doubt is all-consuming. My soul is like the dead sea, over which no bird can fly; when it gets halfway, it sinks down spent to its death and destruction.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD
Either/or
Doubt is death's plenipotentiary, its longest and wittiest shadow.
ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI
A Defense of Ardor
Can that which is the greatest virtue in philosophy, Doubt (called "the father of inventions" by Galileo), be in religion what the priests term it, the greatest of sins?
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Who never doubted never half believed
Where doubt there truth is -- 'tis her shadow.
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
Festus
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
"The Triumph of Stupidity,", Mortals and Others
I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.
ALEISTER CROWLEY
The Book of Lies
When in doubt, take a deep breath and keep moving.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Guilty Pleasures
To sit down in doubt is either to abdicate the highest powers of a reasonable being, or to admit an enemy that will use them as instruments of torture. Except for souls of little intellectual activity, or wholly steeped in sense, this sitting down in doubt is like sitting down in a train that is moving out of the station with the steam up and no engine-driver, or in a boat that is drifting out of harbor into a stormy sea.
ANONYMOUS
"Victims of Doubt,", Catholic World, Jan. 1867
Doubt is the pinprick in the life raft.
RANSOM RIGGS
Library of Souls
He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne'er believe, do what you please.
If the sun and moon should doubt
They'd immediately go out.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Auguries of Innocence
Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous.
G.C. LICHTENBERG
"Notebook F,", Aphorisms
Doubt is one of the main paths on the highway to failure.
RICK PITINO & BILL REYNOLDS
Success Is a Choice
To be once in doubt is once to be resolv'd.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Othello
Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
London Observer, Feb. 19, 1989
Doubt comes to the door in darkness, pretending to be alone and in need of your compassionate ear. But if you let him in, he'll bring his friends.
JULIA CAMERON
Walking in This World
Doubt comes in at the window when inquiry is denied at the door.
BENJAMIN JOWETT
Scripture and Truth
Christ never failed to distinguish between doubt and unbelief. Doubt is can't believe; unbelief is won't believe. Doubt is honesty; unbelief is obstinacy. Doubt is looking for light; unbelief is content with darkness.
HENRY DRUMMOND
How to Learn How
Doubt is a sentinel on the watch-tower of the brain, charged with the duty of sounding an alarm, whenever its enemies--superstition, falsehood, ignorance and unreason--attempt to invade the citadel of truth.
HENRY M. TABER
Faith or Fact
The moment one comes into contact with others, doubt is bound, sooner or later, to penetrate the armor of unquestioning repetition. The first reaction of communities to such doubts is to try to exterminate it by repression, varying from hard glances and ostracism to the burning of the doubter. But these methods of the Bastille, the Inquisition, and the fires of Smithfield, cannot succeed while the cause of the doubt, the actual diversity of belief in the world remains.
MORRIS R. COHEN
The New Republic, Oct. 26, 1921
Doubt is the beginning of wisdom. Doubt is the precursor of inquiry; inquiry leads to Evidence; Evidence is the foundation of Knowledge; and Knowledge is the parent of Liberty and Power. Concerning skeptics a philosophical writer once remarked, "That they are men who pick holes in the fabric of Knowledge wherever it is weak and faulty; and when these places are properly mended, the whole of the building becomes more firm and solid than it was before."
ANDREW JACKSON DAVIS
The Present Age and Inner Life