Quotes About Doubt

In those who rest on their unshakable faith, pharisaism and fanaticism are the unmistakable symptoms of doubt which has been repressed. Doubt is not overcome by repression but by courage. Courage does not deny that there is doubt, but it takes the doubt into itself as an expression of its own finitude and affirms the content of an ultimate concern. Courage does not need the safety of an unquestionable conviction. It includes the risk without which no creative life is possible.

If I learned one thing, it is that self-doubt is one of the most destructive forces. It makes you defensive instead of open, reactive instead of active. Self-doubt is consuming and cruel. And my hope today is that we can all collectively agree to ban it. . . . Think to the moments of your life when you forgot to doubt yourself. When you were so inspired that you were just living and creating and working. Pay attention to those moments because they're trying to reach you through those lenses of doubt and trying to show you your potential.

An intellectual is going to have doubts, for example, about a fundamentalist religious doctrine that admits no doubt, about an imposed political system that allows no doubt, about a perfect aesthetic that has no room for doubt.

You call for faith: I show you doubt, to prove that faith exists. The more of doubt, the stronger faith, I say, If faith o'ercomes doubt.

It's better to throw a theoretically poorer pitch whole-heartedly, than to throw the so-called right pitch with feeling of doubt-doubt that's it's right, or doubt that you can make it behave well at that moment. You've got to feel sure you're doing the right thing-sure that you want to throw the pitch you're going to throw.

Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.

They will tell you tough stories of sharks all over the Cape, which I do not presume to doubt utterly,--how they will sometimes upset a boat, or tear it in pieces, to get at the man in it. I can easily believe in the undertow, but I have no doubt that one shark in a dozen years is enough to keep up the reputation of a beach a hundred miles long.

Doubt is only removed by action. If you're not working then that's where doubt comes in.

When in doubt, throw doubt out and have a little faith.

Dogma is a defensive reaction against doubt in the mind of the theorist, but doubt of which he is unaware.

Diane von Furstenberg actually gave me a very good piece of advice. She said, 'When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt,' so that's something I'm going with. I think that's a really good answer: Just don't listen to the doubts. Your doubts are generated by fear, and fear is a series of distorted thoughts."

When you are in doubt, wait. Fall back on the contemplation of your vision, and increase your faith and purpose. And by all means, in times of doubt and indecision, cultivate gratitude.

We must, then, apply the principle of Doubt to Civilization; we must doubt its necessity, its excellence, and its permanence.

Doubt indulged soon becomes doubt realized.

I have no doubt that as the Iraqi security forces get better, and they are getting better and they are holding territory and they are doing these things with minimal help, that we are going to be able to bring down the levels of our forces. And I have no doubt that that's going to happen in a reasonable time frame.

There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans. I have very little reason to doubt that the consensus is indeed correct.

To believe is to be happy; to doubt is to be wretched. To believe is to be strong. Doubt cramps energy. Belief is power. Only so far as a man believes strongly, mightily, can he act cheerfully, or do any thing that is worth the doing.

In the spiritual search doubt is beneficial, a closed mind is not. Doubt used wisely assists enlightenment; a closed mind assists ignorance.

At the bottom of great doubt lies great awakening. If you doubt fully, you will awaken fully.

I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect. Even DuBois’s learning and Baldwin’s love and Langston’s humor eventually succumbed to its corrosive force, each man finally forced to doubt art’s redemptive power, each man finally forced to withdraw, one to Africa, one to Europe, one deeper into the bowels of Harlem, but all of them in the same weary flight, all of them exhausted, bitter men, the devil at their heels.

I have no doubt there are magician psychopaths, and magician serial killers. I doubt Brakebills admissions is very good at screening for those.

A map in the hands of a pilot is a testimony of a man's faith in other men; it is a symbol of confidence and trust. It is not like a printed page that bears mere words, ambiguous and artful, and whose most believing reader - even whose author, perhaps - must allow in his mind a recess for doubt. A map says to you, 'Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.' It says, 'I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.

It is truly excellent to have someone believe in you and your ability to write. But I think it is just as helpful to have people who don't believe in you, people who mock you, people who doubt you, people who enrage you. Fortunately, there is never a shortage of this type of person in the world ... write for yourself. Write for the story. And write, also, for all of the people who doubt you. Write for all those people who are not brave enough to do this grand and wondrous thing themselves. Let them motivate you.

In your discipline, if doubt comes, let it come. You do your work and let doubt carry on with its work. And let us see which gives up first!

Really, doesn´t everything make sense? There are, of course, things from which we more or less recover, although some of them are too harsh even for saints. But that is no reason to accuse God. Even if there are reasons to doubt him, the fact that he did not arrange the world like a well-ordered parlor is not one of them. It speaks rather in his favor. This used to be much better understood.

When in doubt, exchange.

People tend to care about dogs because they generally have more experience with dogs as companions; but other animals are as capable of suffering as dogs are. Few people feel sympathy for rats. Yet rats are intelligent animals, and there can be no doubt that rats are capable of suffering and do suffer from countless painful experiments performed on them. If the army were to stop experiments on dogs and switch to rats instead, we should not be any less concerned.

I doubt God keeps track of how many arguments we win; God may indeed keep track of how well we love.

Whenever you're in doubt about any action, ask yourself: Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind? You can also ask, what would love do now?

If we understood, as we do not, the physical bases for intellectual structures, I have little doubt that we would find structures in the brain for social interactions, or language, or analysis of personality - a whole variety of systems developed on the basis of a specific biological endowment.

Doubt is a difficult animal to master because it requires that we learn the difference between doubting God and doubting what we believe about God. The former has the potential to destroy faith; that latter has the power to enrich and refine it. The former is a vice; the latter a virtue.

Readers have no doubt noticed how seldom builders live in houses of their own construction. You will find a town or village expanding in all directions with their masterpieces of modernity in the way of houses and bungalows; but the builder himself you will usually find living nearer the heart of things, snugly and comfortably housed in some more substantial, if less convenient, building of less recent date.

If love and ambition should be in equal balance, and come to jostle with equal force, I make no doubt but that the last would win the prize.

Someday, I have no doubt, the dead from today's wars will be seen with a similar sense of sorrow at needless loss and folly as those millions of men who lie in the cemeteries of France and Belgium - and tens of millions of Americans will feel a similar revulsion for the politicians and generals who were so spendthrift with others' lives.

It has been said "the truth will make men free". The truth alone has never set anyone free. It is only DOUBT which will bring mental emancipation.

When you doubt one thing about yourself, you start thinking there's also something wrong with your hair, your body, your clothes, your accent.

On the other hand, there was hard evidence of real tampering in the election, and that was the email, you know, that were revealed from the DNC, that showed, in fact, that the DNC was collaborating with Hillary's [Clinton] campaign, and with some members of the corporate media, to smear Bernie Sanders and to really pull the rug out from under him. So, there's no doubt about that tampering, and that's when they began to say, oh, the Russians are doing this terrible stuff to our election.

Indecision, doubt and fear. The members of this unholy trio are closely related; where one is found, the other two are close at hand.

I think we listen to music because we want to be changed. Music is not solely for our entertainment. Music has such tremendous power to bring joy. To me, that's our job as artists. Not happiness, not a groove, whatever. You must bring joy. I think that's the assignment. I have no doubt about it.

You will certainly not doubt the necessity of studying astronomy and physics, if you are desirous of comprehending the relation between the world and Providence as it is in reality, and not according to imagination.

Until, accustomed to disappointments, you can let yourself rule and be ruled by these strings or emanations that connect everything together, you haven't fully exorcised the demon of doubt that sets you in motion like a rocking horse that cannot stop rocking.

Should doubt knock at your doorway, just say to those skeptical, disturbing, rebellious thoughts: "I propose to stay with my faith, with the faith of my people."

I had often thought that if I managed to live through the war I wouldn't expect too much of life. How could one resent disappointment in love if life itself was continuously in doubt? Since Belgorod, terror had overturned all my preconceptions, and the pace of life had been so intense one no longer knew what elements of ordinary life to abandon in order to maintain some semblance of balance. I was still unresigned to the idea of death, but I had already sworn to myself during moments of intense fear that I would exchange anything - fortune, love, even a limb - if I could simply survive.

I wonder much that a court of Law should be in doubt whether a Resolution of Congress can superceed the Law of a Sovereign State.

First doubt, then inquire, then discover. This has been the process with all our great thinkers.

I think that there is no doubt that every experience you have in your life, whether it's playing a character or something else, you bring that to the work.

Johnny Apple, a New York Times correspondent, wrote a front-page story saying Afghanistan could be a quagmire and he was mocked and derided. What is certainly true is that all sorts of resources that would have been used in Afghanistan were diverted to Iraq. Would those resources have helped? Almost undoubtedly. Whether or not Afghanistan would be a peaceful nation-state had we not gone into Iraq I doubt. Afghanistan is going to be Afghanistan, no matter how hard we try to make it something else.

I think audiences deserve the benefit of the doubt. I prefer to be surprised by them rather then just assume they'll react negatively to any new idea.