Quotes about doubt

I have a number of questions. If I had half as many answers, I’d be in great shape.

Doubt is a form of pessimism that acts as an agent, which is sent to hinder prosperity on its materilization journey.

When others in doubt, your strong belief steers.

Every mental act is composed of doubt and belief,but it is belief that is the positive, it is beliefthat sustains thought and holds the world together.

It's true not because it's beyond doubt, but because we believe it to be true. We make it true. We are safe as long as no one can disprove us

I believe despite my doubts, belief gives me power reason takes away

On any given morning, I might not be able to list for you the facts I know about God. But I can tell you what I wish to commit myself to, what I want for the foundation of my life, how I want to see. When I stand with the faithful at Holy Comforter and declare that we believe in one God . . . I am saying, Let this be my scaffolding. Let this be the place I work, struggle, play, rest. I commit myself to this.

Doubt is your intellectual conscience pleading with you to be honest with yourself.

I hear talk of that slippery slope, and my heart catches for a beat. But there is the musky truth I'm standing in that I can't deny, and it tastes of so much holy. That old way, the narrow line, I see now that was a slippery, saccharine surface where my soul could gain no purchase. For the first time, my feet feel sure beneath me, and that sense is twining its way up from my ankles, racing toward my knees, my thighs, my secret places, my heart. It's in my blood now, and I can't deny it. I can't

Take care,' said Delaura. 'Sometimes we attribute certain things we do not understand to the demon, not thinking they may be things of God that we do not understand.''Saint Thomas said it, and I will be guided by him,' said the Abbess: '"One must not believe demons even when they speak the truth.

Doubt is the act of challenging our beliefs. . . . This is an active, investigative doubt: the kind that inspires us to wander onto shaky limbs or out into left field; the kind that doesn't divide the mind so much as multiply it, like a tree in which there are three blackbirds and the entire Bronx Zoo. This is the doubt we stand to sacrifice if we can't embrace error—the doubt of curiosity, possibility, and wonder.

It's okay not to know all the answers. It's better to admit our ignorance than to believe answers that might be wrong. Pretending to know everything closes the door to finding out what's already there.

Every time we let ourselves believe for unworthy reasons, we weaken our powers of self-control, of doubting, of judicially and fairly weighing evidence. We all suffer severely enough from the maintenance and support of false beliefs and the fatally wrong actions which they lead to, and the evil born when one such belief is entertained is great and wide.

To believe something and not live is like making fun of your abilities. You cannot be really trusted if you can dream and doubt its possibility.

Never let your mind imprison your achievements by imposing disbelief on you.

I am an infidel today. I do not believe what has been served to me to believe. I am a doubter, a questioner, a skeptic. When it can be proved to me that there is immortality, that there is resurrection beyond the gates of death, then will I believe. Until then, no.

William James used to preach the 'will to believe.' For my part, I should wish to preach the 'will to doubt' ... what is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite.

Your purpose is God’s success. You can’t pay for what God want to be done. It’s God’s business; it’s his farmland, so when he said he’ll provide the rain, don’t doubt it!

To believe with certainty, somebody said, one has to begin by doubting.

Most people desperately desire to believe that they are a part of a great mystery, that Creation is a work of grace and glory, not merely the result of random forces colliding. Yet each time that they are given but one reason to doubt, a worm in the apple of the heart makes them turn away from a thousand proofs of the miraculous, whereupon they have a drunkard's thirst for cynicism, and they feed upon despair as a starving man upon a loaf of bread.

Belief and doubt are living attitudes, and involve conduct on our part. Our only way, for example, of doubting, or refusing to believe, that a certain thing is, is continuing to act as if it were not.

Embracing doubt is sometimes threatening, as we fear losing our faith if we explore our doubts. Following that thought, if one loses one’s faith, then as some religions dictate, that individual cannot enter heaven. Since heaven is the reward of an earthly existence, doubt becomes the enemy of this reward.

You might say “no, you will never do that, that’s not you, not who I know, not who I thought you were”, and I will say "watch me".

Doubt keeps us from believing things can get better.

We both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an hour, which keeps believing nimble.

Where is God when it hurts? We know one answer because God came to earth and showed us. You need only follow Jesus around and note how he responded to the tragedies of his day: large-scale tragedies such as an act of government terrorism in the temple or a tower collapsing on eighteen innocent bystanders; as well as small tragedies, such as a widow who has lost her only son or even a Roman soldier whose servant has fallen ill. At moments like these Jesus never delivered sermons about judgment or

I'm on a diet I plan to lose Guilt, Fear, Sin, and Doubt then I'll be confident enough to walk about.

We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than the one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character.

No one should be surprised at the difficulty of faith, if there is some part of his life where he is consciously resisting or disobeying the commandment of Jesus. Is there some part of your life which you are refusing to surrender at his behest, some sinful passion, maybe, or some animosity, some hope, perhaps your ambition or your reason? ... How can you hope to enter into communion with him when at some point in your life you are running away from him?

When I think of the years when I had no faith, what I am struck by, first of all, is how little this lack disrupted my conscious life. I lived not without God, nor wish his absence, but in a mild abeyance of belief, drifting through the days on a tide of tiny vanities — a publication, a flirtation, a strong case made for some weak nihilism — nights all adagios and alcohol as my mind tore luxuriously into itself. I can see now how deeply God’s absence affected my unconscious life, how under me al

Among us, on the other hand, 'the righteous man lives by faith.' Now, if you take away positive affirmation, you take away faith, for without positive affirmation nothing is believed. And there are truths about things unseen, and unless they are believed, we cannot attain to the happy life, which is nothing less than life eternal. It is a question whether we ought to argue with those who profess themselves ignorant not only about the eternity yet to come but also about their present existence, f

If we are ever in doubt what to do, it is a good rule to ask ourselves what we shall wish on the morrow that we had done.

An unpublished writer should doubt themselves. They should constantly wonder whether what they’re creating has merit. And then, having doubted, they should take up their pen and see if they can’t make it better.

The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.

Doubt, fear and regret are the three villains of success. However, if you close the door on the first two, you will never have to worry about meeting the third.

Forget the Past. Doubt the Future. Love the Present.

Friends are the real superheroes. They battle our worst enemies—loneliness, grief, anxiety, depression, fear, and doubt—every time they come around.

Part of me was afraid that if I raised my fist to the sky and demanded an answer now, I would hear a thundering and calloused, 'Because I said so," from God in heaven. And I may not ever want to speak to Him again.

By then I wasn't just asking questions; I was being changed by them. I was being changed by my prayers, which dwindled down nearer and nearer to silence, which weren't confrontations with God but with the difficulty--in my own mind, or in the human lot--of knowing what or how to pray. Lying awake at night, I could feel myself being changed--into what, I had no idea.

If you knew particularly what to do, it were not a spiritual exercise.

She prayed to God to give him at least a moment so that he would not go without knowing how much she had loved him despite all their doubts, and she felt an irresistible longing to begin life with him over again so that they could say what they had left unsaid and do everything right that they had done badly in the past. But she had to give in to the intransigence of death.

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation p

You used to give yourself over to endless sessions of doubt. You would claim to be an expert on the subject. But doubting would tire you so much that you would end up doubting doubt itself. I saw you one day at the end of an afternoon of solitary speculation. You were unmoving and petrified. Running several kilometers in a deep forest full of ravines and pitfalls would have exhausted you less.

I know what it's like to sleep in fear, to starve myself to be worthy, to be ashamed of my voice, to want to sleep forever. To question why I deserve to live.

Two things I ask of my God today. That my faith be hoisted high like a kite up in the sky and my fear be buried deeply like a carcass into the soil.

Science have imagination, most people doubt about that. This word "Doubt" makes a lot of stuff interesting.

Why doubt thyself? Believe in your abilities.

Be skeptic, be doubtful, be rebellious towards every single dogma of the society. Only then there will be hope of progress for humanity.

Why is hard to believe than to doubt?

Once I was everything, now I'm nothing.You won't only doubt yourself, you doubt life.

People will say,"there's heaven and hell", and they take it so serious that they look so sorrowful with penitence. I would rather ask them to show me the route that leads to heaven or hell.

Your doubt survives by stuffing itself with your confidence.

Never doubt in the darkness what God has given us in the light.

More often than you might think, teaching science is inseparable from teaching doubt.

It is better to doubt that a concept is stupidly flying under your head than profoundly flying over your head.

Doubt is the stock in trade all philosophers as well as all scientific persons. Conversely, certainty is the cane that all religious fanatics and other zealots wield with outrageous righteousness. Only by allowing for doubt can we probe our ignorance. Doubt, therefore, is the essential seed of thought.

Distrust won’t do good to you.But still if you ever do.Doubt you husband,Maybe doubt your wife.But never suspect,your kid’s father,or the mother of your child.

...even misplaced faith can help us gain knowledge. We try to be smart about where we put our faith and we adjust as we learn more.

One of the most important things one can do in life is to brutally question every single thing you are taught.

Faith and doubt cannot reside together. An iota of doubt is enough to taint the entire process, it is like a drop of red ink in water.

I doubted myself, and that made me doubt you. But you weren’t the problem. You were never the problem. I should have trusted you, but I didn’t, because I couldn’t trust myself.

We wish to be loved as we ourselves would love. Any other way makes as uncomfortable. We respond with doubt and suspicion. We misinterpret the signs. We do not understand the language. We accuse. We assert that the other person does not love us. But perhaps he merely loves us in some idiosyncratic way that we fail to recognize.

It was possible she might not have the right feeling after all, that she wasn't in love, wasn't in limerence, but was in some unnamed place alone.

Many in the church have turned their back on serious study, and have embraced an anti-intellectualism which refuses to learn anything from scholarship at all lest it corrupt their pure faith. It is time to end this standoff, and to reestablish a hermeneutic of trust (itself a sign of the gospel!) in place of the hermeneutic of suspicion which the church has so disastrously borrowed from the postmodern world.

When you trust and you lose— it is because you were wrong to trust and what you believed was merely a phantom. But when you doubt and you lose— it is because in your wanting so much not to be wrong, you lost something that was entirely beautiful for you. More is lost, in the end, by those who doubt. I would rather lose the phantom.

I see it on his face. I hear it when he talks. We look out at the world and we see the same thing: Not Fair. And the only difference between us is Ricky's out there trying to get even. And he knows not trust anybody and he got it straight from me. And he knows not to try and get work, and guess where he got that. He walks around like there's loose boards in the floor, and you know who laid that floor, I did.

She was as one who, in madness, was resolute to throw herself from a precipice, but to whom some remnant of sanity remained which forced her to seek those who would save her from herself.

Faith slips - and laughs, and rallies

A little credulity helps one on through life very smoothly — better than always doubting and doubting and seeing difficulties and disagreeables in everything.

The lights became stars, which became streaks in the grayspace, and then networks of fading shimmers

It isn't fair how I doubt him, and I wonder if he'll ever gather that my loss of faith extends further than I'd ever known it would, severing lines of trust and leveling my confidence like a city-flattening tornado.

Faith is the light that chases the darkness of doubt away." el

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

Once you reject fear, you will become the perfect candidate to receive and reflect Truth.

It is debatable whether blind faith is truly faith at all. Faith is the perceptive gray area where scientific facts meet an individual's experiential truths - the extreme of the former is left feeling in the dark whereas the latter is caught blinded by the light. By proper scientific method, it is intellectually dishonest for me to declare the existence of God with utmost certainty, but to my individual spirit, I would be intellectually dishonest to deny the existence of God even for a second. T

Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking. Would not that same uncluttered mind also see the attempts to reconcile science and religion by disparaging the reduction of the complex to the simple as attempts guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectual

Never say that you can't do something, or that something seems impossible, or that something can't be done, no matter how discouraging or harrowing it may be; human beings are limited only by what we allow ourselves to be limited by: our own minds. We are each the masters of our own reality; when we become self-aware to this: absolutely anything in the world is possible.Master yourself, and become king of the world around you. Let no odds, chastisement, exile, doubt, fear, or ANY mental virii pr

The ancients were afraid that if they went to the end of the earth they would fall off and be consumed by dragons. But once we understand that Christianity is true to what is there, true to the ultimate environment - the infinite, personal God who is really there - then our minds are freed. We can pursue any question and can be sure that we will not fall off the end of the earth.

We live by revelation, as Christians, as artists, which means we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds. The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget the questions, and we become smug like the Pharisee who listed all his considerable virtues, and thanked God that he was not like other men.Unamuno might be describing the artist as well as the Christian as he writes, "Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, wit

I think that when in doubt about the truth of an issue, it's safer and in better taste to select the least numerous of the adversaries.

Fear nothing but your conscience.

Doubt is a creature within the air. It grows when someone hesitates.

Be true, unbeliever.

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

No one knows for sure that that tomorrow won't come, but most people assume that tomorrow will still exist as usual. This is Toba's Paradox, which means, hope overcomes doubt.

Sometimes doubting is not a lack of faith, but an expression of it. Sometimes to doubt is to merely insist that God be taken seriously not frivolously, to insist that our faith is placed in and upheld by something other than seeming conjuring tricks.

It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can't help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet.

Expressing doubt is how we begin a journey to discover essential truths.

A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.

To better understand God we must first shatter our own idea of God - maybe even day after day. Maybe he's too great to stay compressed in the human mind. Maybe he splits it wide open; this is why pretentious intellectualism so often fails to comprehend the concept of God: it is only accepting of what it can explain while in the process finding higher sources offensive. What we may confidently assert is that faith is the opening that allows God, this unpredictable, unseen power, to travel in and

Plato offers the amazing idea that contemplation of the way things really are is, in itself, a purifying process that can bring human beings into the only divinity there is.

There is no such thing a boring content. In the hands of a great teacher...even if as teachers we doubt that we can make it so...this doubt puts us at risk of undercutting it: watering it down or apologizing for teaching it.

Doubts are good. Confusion is excellent. Questions are awesome.All these are attempts to expand the wisdom of mind.

Even a wise man knows doubt from time to time, it is the fool who allows it to rule his judgement.

Everything that happens, happens at the only possible time it can happen, and it is always at exactly the right time.

I have always felt that doubt was the beginning of wisdom, and the fear of God was the end of wisdom.

The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

Peaceful disputes are maintained when men sincerely believe that they are morally, logically correct about the issues at hand. It is when neither side is really certain that wars are instigated.