Quotes about doubt

„The reflective teacher makes the learners decide for themselves and ensures that the decision is sound and reasonable. He or she asks a lot of questions for the learners to carry out self-assessment.“

—  Sukavich Rangsitpol Thai politician 1935

Teacher

„I wish the very best for each and every one of you. Even if you think you are the most pitiful wretch on two feet, this is completely possible. It doesn't matter how bad we have been or how much difficulty and trouble we've created for ourselves and others in the past. The question is, how will it end? "All's well that ends well," as the saying goes, and that's as true as can be. The way things end is the way they will remain. Things won't be as they were before.“

—  Elias Aslaksen Norwegian clergyman 1888 - 1976

Closing remark - Aslaksen's last recorded message
No difficulties (Stavanger, 18 January, 1976)

„Sometimes people like to ask me why should girls go to school, why is it important for them. But I think the more important question is why shouldn't they, why shouldn't they have this right to go to school.“

—  Malala Yousafzai Pakistani children's education activist 1997

Nobel Peace Prize Lecture (December 10, 2014)

„To determine whether or not you have the ingredients to be charismatic, answer the following questions: What are your real feelings about who you are? What do you believe in? Do you have goals or a mission in life? Do you project optimism? Do others turn to you for leadership? Non-charismatic people spend their lives auditioning for others and hoping they'll be accepted. Charismatic people don't doubt their ability to add value to a situation, so they move forward with their mission.“

—  Roger Ailes Television executive 1940 - 2017

You are the Message : Getting What You Want by Being Who You Are (1989)

„I think success is when you are confronted with utter defeat of your world, your intimacy, your ideas, your public picture, your heritage, your previous achievements. When in one moment it looks like there is one, and nothing that helps you. When almost every look is also a look of doubt, when you yourself put everything under the question mark. When all the illusions about yourself fall, illusions about your surroundings, about people, about faith and religion, about flags, about objects of love and how much are you in love…and then, in that moment of personal and private holocaust, of that ocean of pain looking like all inner strength faded away, and there is no right for excuses about your existence. When at that moment you rise and keep moving forward, you start and you lead a creative and productive life. Yes, I think that is objective strength and power.“

—  Alfred Freddy Krupa Croatian contemporary painter, master draughtsman, book artist and art teacher, the pioneer of the New Ink Art movement 1971

Overcoming a Personal Holocaust, Alfred Freddy Krupa (in the article by Ante Vranković), Life As A Human (Canada), 2019
2010s

„Utopia is a spatial matter that might be thought to know potential change in fortunes in so spatialized a culture as the postmodern; but if this last is a dehistoricized and dehistorizing as I some times claim here, the synaptic chain that might lead the Utopian impulse to expression becomes harder to localize. Utopian representations knew an extraordinarily revival in the 1960's; if postmodernism is the substitute for the sixties and the compensation for their political failure, the question of Utopia would seem to be a crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change at all.“

—  Fredric Jameson American academic 1934

Introduction
Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)

„When it is a question of fighting against imperialism we can state with conviction that we are all Stalinists. We can take pride that we have taken part in the fight for the advance of our great cause against our enemies. From that point of view I am proud that we are Stalinists.“

—  Nikita Khrushchev First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 1894 - 1971

Remark made at Kremlin New Year's Eve reception, December 31, 1956. Quoted in Khrushchev by Edward Crankshaw. ISBN 9781448205059

„What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is what can you make people believe you have done.“

—  Arthur Conan Doyle, book A Study in Scarlet

Source: A Study in Scarlet

„The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.“

—  Ludwig Wittgenstein Austrian-British philosopher 1889 - 1951

„Faith does not eliminate questions. But faith knows where to take them.“

—  Elisabeth Elliot, A Chance to Die: The Life and Legacy of Amy Carmichael

Source: A Chance to Die: The Life and Legacy of Amy Carmichael

„I know you want to study me psychologically. That's reasonable and I appreciate it. At least you don't lecture to me and pry into my affairs. You have a good technique as a psychiatrist. Let the other fellow talk and stick his neck into the noose. I don't mean that the way it sounds. But you hardly say anything. Someday I'm going to ask you questions.“

—  Hermann Göring German politician and military leader 1893 - 1946

To Leon Goldensohn (21 May 1946)
The Nuremberg Interviews (2004)

„The central feature of the stigmatized individual's situation in life can now be stated. It is a question of what is often, if vaguely, called 'acceptance. Those who have dealings with him fail to accord him the respect and regard which the un-contaminated aspects of his social identity have led them to anticipate extending, and have led him to anticipate receiving; he echoes this denial by ending that some of his own attributes warrant it.“

—  Erving Goffman, book Stigma

p. 18
1950s-1960s, Stigma, 1963

„Dear Mr. President,
Come take a walk with me.
Let's pretend we're just two people
And you're not better than me.
I'd like to ask you some questions
If we can speak honestly.What do you feel when you see
All the homeless on the street?
Who do you pray for at night
Before you go to sleep?
What do you feel
When you look in the mirror?
Are you proud?“

—  Pink (singer) American singer-songwriter 1979

Dear Mr. President, featuring the Indigo Girls, written by Pink and Billy Mann
Song lyrics, I'm Not Dead (2006)

„MAKE LIFE SIMPLER
Missing someone? Call them.
Want to understand? Ask questions.
Want to be heard? Speak clearly.
Object to something? Say so.
Like something? Say so.
Want something? Ask.
Feel hurt? Tell them.
Feel happy? Share it.
Love someone? Tell them.
When you need to communicate, don't rely on telepathy.“

—  Ralph Smart

facebook

„The problem comes up because we ask the question in the wrong way. We supposed that solids were one thing and space quite another, or just nothing whatever. Then it appeared that space was no mere nothing, because solids couldn't do without it. But the mistake in the beginning was to think of solids and space as two different things, instead of as two aspects of the same thing. The point is that they are different but inseparable, like the front end and the rear end of a cat. Cut them apart, and the cat dies. Take away the crest of the wave, and there is no trough.
Here is someone who has never seen a cat. He is looking through a narrow slit in a fence, and, on the other side, a cat walks by. He sees first the head, then the less distinctly shaped furry trunk, and then the tail. Extraordinary! The cat turns round and walks back, and again he sees the head, and a little later the tail. This sequence begins to look like something regular and reliable. Yet again, the cat turns round, and he witnesses the same regular sequence: first the head, and later the tail. Thereupon he reasons that the event head is the invariable and necessary cause of the event tail, which is the head's effect. This absurd and confusing gobbledygook comes from his failure to see that head and tail go together: they are all one cat.
The cat wasn't born as a head which, sometime later, caused a tail; it was born all of a piece, a head-tailed cat. Our observer's trouble was that he was watching it through a narrow slit, and couldn't see the whole cat at once.“

—  Alan Watts British philosopher, writer and speaker 1915 - 1973

p. 26-27
The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966)

„It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly.“

—  Margaret Mead American anthropologist 1901 - 1978

Attributed in American Quotations (1992) by Gorton Carruth and Eugene H. Ehrlich, p. 149
1990s

„I have so often been asked the question: "But how did you come to think of The Scarlet Pimpernel?" And my answer has always been: "It was God's will that I should." And to you moderns, who perhaps do not believe as I do, I will say, "In the chain of my life, there were so many links, all of which tended towards bringing me to the fulfillment of my destiny."“

—  Emma Orczy Hungarian-British author of "The Scarlet Pimpernel" 1865 - 1947

And nothing can be quite so wonderful as the workings of a man's or a woman's destiny.
Ch. 8
Links in the Chain of Life (1947)

„When you love something, you'll always come back to it. You'll always keep asking questions, and finding answers.“

—  Kobe Bryant American basketball player 1978 - 2020

„We need to go back to the discovery, to posing a question, to having a hypothesis and having kids know that they can discover the answers and can peel away a layer.“

—  Shirley Jackson (physicist) American physicist, eighteenth president of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 1946

in Charlie Rose Science Series: The Imperative of Science http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9027 with Paul Nurse, President of Rockefeller University, Harold Varmus, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Shirley Ann Jackson, President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Bruce Alberts, Editor-In-Chief of Science and Lisa Randall of Harvard University.