“I hate doubt, yet I am certain that doubt is the only way to approach anything worth believing in.”

— Edward Teller

As quoted in The Martians of Science : Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century (2006) by István Hargittai, p. 251

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Edward Teller32

Hungarian-American nuclear physicist 1908–2003

Hugh Prather (1938–2010) American writer

Source: I Touch the Earth, the Earth Touches Me

“Life is complicated. It's filled with nuance. It's unsatisfying. If I believe in anything, it is doubt.”

Anthony Bourdain (1956–2018) Chef and food writer

As reported in a New York Times appraisal of his life http://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/dining/anthony-bourdain-restaurants.html

“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.”

Frederick William Robertson (1816–1853) British writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 23.

“My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: Anna Karenina Notes

“I don't believe anyone ever suspects how completely unsure I am of my work and myself and what tortures of self-doubting the doubt of others has always given me.”

Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) American playwright

“I am inclined to doubt that anything very resembling formal logic could be a good model for human reasoning.”

Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) American cognitive scientist

Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious (1980)
Context: I am inclined to doubt that anything very resembling formal logic could be a good model for human reasoning. In particular, I doubt that any logic that prohibits self-reference can be adequate for psychology: no mind can have enough power — without the power to think about Thinking itself. Without Self-Reference it would seem immeasurably harder to achieve Self-Consciousness — which, so far as I can see, requires at least some capacity to reflect on what it does. If Russell shattered our hopes for making a completely reliable version of commonsense reasoning, still we can try to find the islands of "local consistency," in which naive reasoning remains correct.