Doubt Quotes

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.

~ David W. Earle

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.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

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.

~ Luther Burbank

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.

~ Bertrand Russell

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 always there was this long fall that pride and fear and self-live at once protected me from and subjected me to. Was the fall into belief or into unbelief? Both. For if grace woke me to God’s presence in the world and in my heart, it also woke me to his absence. I never truly felt the pain of unbelief until I began to believe.

~ Christian Wiman

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, for they [the Academics] even argue that they do not know what they cannot help knowing. For no one can 'not know' that he himself is alive. If he is not alive, he cannot 'not know' about it or anything else at all, because either to know or to 'not know' implies a living subject. But, in such a case, by not positively affirming that they are alive, the skeptics ward off the appearance of error in themselves, yet they do not make errors simply by showing themselves alive; one cannot err who is not alive. That we live is therefore not only true, but it is altogether certain as well. And there are many things that are thus true and certain concerning which, if we withhold positive assent, this ought not to be regarded as a higher wisdom but actually a sort of dementia.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

Doubt keeps us from believing things can get better.

~ Renee Swope

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

~ Emily Dickinson

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 the need to accept God’s mysterious providence. Instead he responded with compassion – a word from Latin which simply means, “to suffer with” – and comfort and healings. God stands on the side of those who suffer. (pp.27-28/What Good Is God?)

~ Philip Yancey

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

~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

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.

~ Dallas Willard

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?

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

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.

~ Anna White

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.

~ Édouard Levé

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

~ Robert Hughes

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

~ Samuel Rutherford

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.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

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.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

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.

~ Wendell Berry

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.

~ Jasleen Kaur Gumber

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.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

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

~ Lawrence M. Krauss

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

~ Criss Jami

...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.

~ Brandon Mull

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

~ Bryant Mcgill

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

~ Francine Rivers

Shadows of doubt will always fall behind you when you keep your face towards the sunshine. Believe in God, face the brighter light and cast behind the dark shadows!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

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

~ Ashim Shanker

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

~ Evinda Lepins

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.

~ Tammara Webber

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.

~ Stephanie Perkins

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.

~ Malti Bhojwani

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

~ Elizabeth Gaskell

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.

~ N.t. Wright

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.

~ C. Joybell C.

She had reason to doubt him, he was real good at planning but real bad at doing.

~ Junot Díaz

Faith slips - and laughs, and rallies

~ Emily Dickinson

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.

~ Marsha Norman

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.

~ Anthony Trollope