Doubt Quotes

Perhaps I really was disillusioned; unable to see myself for who, and what, I really was. Maybe I really was an ungrateful wretch who just refused to take responsibility for my own actions. Maybe I was lying to myself because I didn’t want to admit to being a bad person. Maybe…

~ J.m. Northup

In the bitter waves of woe, Beaten and tossed about By the sullen winds that blow From the desolate shores of doubt,­­ When the anchors that faith had cast Are dragging in the gale, I am quietly holding fast To the things that cannot fail: In the darkest night of the year,  When the stars have all gone out,  That courage is better than fear,  That faith is truer than doubt; And fierce though the fiends may fight,  And long though the angels hide, I know that Truth and Right Have the universe on their side; And somewhere, beyond the stars, Is a Love that is better than fate; When the night unlocks her bars I shall see Him, and I will wait

~ Washington Gladden

Ah! This is retribution for Promethean fire! Besides being patient, you must also love this sadness and respect your doubts and questions. They are an abundant excess, a luxury of life, and they appear more at the summits of happiness, when you have no crude desires. They are not born in the midst of mundanity. They have no place where there is grief and want. The masses go along without knowing the fog of doubts or the anguish of questions. But for anyone who has encountered them at the right time they are dear visitors, not a hammer.''But there's no coping with them. They bring anguish and indifference to nearly everything.' she added indecisively.'But for how long? Afterward they refresh life,' he said. 'They lead to an abyss from which nothing can be gained, and they force you to look again at life, with even greater love. They summon up your tested powers to struggle with it, as if expressly to let them sleep afterward.''This fog and these specters torment me!' she complained. 'Everything is bright and all of a sudden a sinister shadow is cast over life! Are there no means against this?''What do you mean? Your buttress is in life! Without it, life is sickening, even without any questions!'p. 508

~ Ivan Goncharov

One hears a great many things, true, but can gather nothing definite.

~ Franz Kafka

Sometimes, all that is required of us is to come to a decision, a decision which would determine our course thereafter, which is sudden, which is made in an instant and not out of introspection. Because the more we happen to brood, the more we burden the mind, with doubt with dilemma, whether to or whether not to.Sometimes it is this decision that furnishes to be the highlight of our lives, it may cause us to diverge from our paths and lead us to new ones or narrow down our destinations altogether, either way it cherishes significance.

~ Chirag Tulsiani

Those who have dissected or inspected many [bodies] have at least learnt to doubt, while others who are ignorant of anatomy and do not take the trouble to attend it are in no doubt at all.

~ Giovanni Battista Morgagni

I am not accustomed to saying anything with certainty after only one or two observations.

~ Andreas Vesalius

Our doubts are traitors, and make us loose the good that we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.

~ William Shakespeare

If it took me showing some warmth to get warmth in return, I'd do it.

~ C.l. Stone

Guilt is never to be doubted.

~ Franz Kafka

They have not forgotten the Mysteries,” she said, “they have found them too difficult. They want a God who will care for them, who will not demand that they struggle for enlightenment, but who will accept them just as they are, with all their sins, and take away their sins with repentance. It is not so, it will never be so, but perhaps it is the only way the unenlightened can bear to think of their Gods.” Lancelet smiled bitterly. “Perhaps a religion which demands that every man must work through lifetime after lifetime for his own salvation is too much for mankind. They want not to wait for God’s justice, but to see it now. And that is the lure which this new breed of priests has promised them.

~ Marion Zimmer Bradley

and more important, did he love me as much as he once loved me?

~ Emily Giffin

And indeed there is little opportunity for the old and poor to sin, except to doubt God’s goodness, and if God cannot understand why we doubt that, then he is not as wise as his priests think, heh heh heh . . .

~ Marion Zimmer Bradley

Often people just don't see what I see. They have too much doubt. You can't do your best when you're doubting yourself. If you don't believe in yourself, who will?

~ Michael Jackson

Don't dig up in doubt what you planted in faith.

~ Elisabeth Elliot

Doubt is part of searching. Same as faith.

~ Gayle Forman

[T]he longer you stay skeptical, doubtful, intellectually uncomfortable, the better it is for you.

~ Joseph Brodsky

Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt, or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith. And yet I continue to live in a world the way a religious person lives in the world; I keep living in a world that I know to be enchanted, and not left alone. I doubt; I am uncertain; I am restless, prone to wander. And yet glimmers of holy keep interrupting my gaze.

~ Lauren F. Winner

Doubt is the big machine. It grinds up the delusions of women and men.

~ Victor Lavalle

Before i could utter a word, my listeners had left me long ago.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Sometimes to escape the noise of haunting memories, you need your best friends hand in your own, to help erase the sound and fill you with a sense of peace, even if it’s temporary.

~ Andrea Michelle

I submit a body of facts which cannot be invalidated. My opinions may be doubted, denied, or approved, according as they conflict or agree with the opinions of each individual who may read them; but their worth will be best determined by the foundation on which they rest—the incontrovertible facts.

~ William Beaumont

Moral scepticism can no more be refuted or proved by logic than intellectual scepticism can. When we stick to it that there is truth (be it of either kind), we do so with our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results. The sceptic with his whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but which of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows.

~ William James

I doubt that Fleming could have obtained a grant for the discovery of penicillin on that basis [a requirement for highly detailed research plans] because he could not have said, 'I propose to have an accident in a culture so that it will be spoiled by a mould falling on it, and I propose to recognize the possibility of extracting an antibiotic from this mould.

~ Hans Selye

Scientific knowledge advances haltingly and is stimulated by contention and doubt.

~ Claude Lévi-Strauss

In moments of unmet desire, heartbreak, or grief, Satan sends a poisonous arrow of doubt straight at your heart. This was his plan with Eve. He persuaded her to think God was holding out on her and that she would be better off not listening to Him.

~ Marian Jordan Ellis

Science is implausible to untutored human common sense, but that in no way casts doubt on the correctness of well-established scientific findings. Feelings of transcendence are simply that—feelings—and, as such, have no capacity to reveal truths about a world external to the people who have them.

~ Russell Blackford

So answer me, are you merely a cowardly Moses, pointing the way to the Promised Land but poisoned by doubt and so unable to cross the River Jordan?

~ Tony Vigorito

As dad would always say, when in doubt- play for time.

~ Nick Bantock

What you must realize, what you must even come to praise, is the fact that there is no right way that is going to become apparent to you once and for all. The most blinding illumination that strikes and perhaps radically changes your life will be so attenuated and obscured by doubts and dailiness that you may one day come to suspect the truth of that moment at all. The calling that seemed so clear will be lost in echoes of questionings and indecision; the church that seemed to save you will fester with egos, complacencies, banalities; the deepest love of your life will work itself like a thorn in your heart until all you can think of is plucking it out. Wisdom is accepting the truth of this. Courage is persisting with life in spite of it. And faith is finding yourself, in the deepest part of your soul, in the very heart of who you are, moved to praise it.

~ Christian Wiman

Everyone who doubts knows that he is doubting, so that he is certain of this truth at least, namely the fact that he doubts. Thus every one who doubts whether there is such a thing as truth, knows at least one truth, so that his very capacity to doubt should convince him that there is such a thing as truth.

~ Frederick Charles Copleston

You really have to let me fight my own battles. You can't constantly second-guess me and try to protect me. It's stifling.

~ E.l. James

Writing is emotional...it is baring your soul to the world and waiting for someone to acknowledge and love it, or shun and hate it, or worse be indifferent about it.

~ Anne-Rae Vasquez

What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent with the lives we are not quite living, God dormant in the world to which we are not quite giving our best selves.

~ Christian Wiman

Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, full of unknowns, asking questions but raising possibilities.

~ Florian Armas

I lay in bed and watched moments break into phenomenal particles of panic and could actually see the divine crack of God’s ass as he completely turned his back on me.

~ Arthur Nersesian

Don't let doubt steal your dreams.

~ Lynne St. James

For agnosticism is, in a sense, what I am preaching. I do not wish to reduce the sceptical element in your minds. I am only suggesting that it need not be reserved exclusively for the New Testament and the Creeds. Try doubting something else.

~ C.s. Lewis

I thought of the old proverb: Where there are three physicians, there are two atheists.

~ Regina O'melveny

His mind is in bondage. He is haunted by a great, usolved doubt. He is one of those who doesn't want millions, but an answer to their questions.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky