quotations about doubt
Doubt is often only a sort of moulting in the spiritual world, the moulting of the soaring eagle wings of faith.
ALEXANDER HENRY CRAUFURD
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Enigmas of the Spiritual Life
To be once in doubt is once to be resolv'd.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Othello
Who never doubted never half believed
Where doubt there truth is -- 'tis her shadow.
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
Festus
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
When in doubt, take a deep breath and keep moving.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Guilty Pleasures
Doubt is one of the main paths on the highway to failure.
RICK PITINO & BILL REYNOLDS
Success Is a Choice
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
There is a revealing phrase in English regarding this mind state: we say someone is "plagued by doubt." Doubt is like a plague that weakens us. When doubt is strong, instead of making the experiment, whether in meditation or anything else, and engaging fully in the experience so that we can see for ourselves whether it is beneficial or not, the mind simply gets lost in endless speculation. Then doubt becomes self-fulfilling, because staying lost in doubt really is useless. It doesn't allow for the opportunity to investigate for ourselves. This endless conjecture is exhausting.
JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN
Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening
I will not doubt, though sorrows fall like rain,
And troubles swarm like bees about a hive;
I shall believe the heights for which I strive
Are only reached by anguish and by pain;
And though I groan and tremble with my crosses,
I yet shall see, through my severest losses,
The greater gain.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Faith"
There are two kinds of doubt as there are two twilights: one growing darker and darker, the shadows gathering, moon and stars vanishing, leaving naught but silence and solitude; the other leading on to light and gladness, brighter and brighter until the shadows flee away and the day breaks.
DAVID JAMES BURRELL
The Gospel of Gladness
When in doubt, punt!
JOHN HEISMAN
Doubt and fear are the great enemies of knowledge, and he who encourages them, who does not slay them, thwarts himself at every step.
JAMES ALLEN
As a Man Thinketh
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
The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice.
SAUL ALINSKY
Rules for Radicals
Doubt is the vestibule which all must pass before they can enter into the temple of wisdom; therefore, when we are in doubt and puzzle out the truth by our own exertions, we have gained a something that will stay by us, and which will serve us again. But, if to avoid the trouble of the search we avail ourselves of the superior information of a friend, such knowledge will not remain with us; we have not bought but borrowed it.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Modest doubt is call'd the beacon of the wise.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Troilus and Cressida
Doubt is the whetstone of understanding.
JOHN DOS PASSOS
U.S.A.
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 is a profound and effective spiritual motivator. Without doubt, no truism is transcended, no new knowledge found, no expansion of the imagination possible. Doubt is unsettling to the ego, and those who are drawn to ideologies that promise the dispelling of doubt by proffering certainties will never grow. In seeking certainty they are courting the death of the soul, whose nature is forever churning possibility, forever seeking the larger, forever riding the melting edge of certainty's glacier.
JAMES HOLLIS
Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life
Doubt is the pinprick in the life raft.
RANSOM RIGGS
Library of Souls