Quotes about doubt

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“One could argue that there exist certain questions that are best left unanswered.”

“You can't have intentions without consequences. The question is, who pays for the consequences? Saving fish from drowning. Same thing. Who’s saved? Who’s not?”

“The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.”

“I have always been a firm believer in God and the power of prayer, though to be honest, my faith has made for alist of questions I definitely want answered after I'm gone.”

“That’s the thing when people leave us too suddenly, isn’t it? We always have so many questions.”

“Her grandmother had once told her that one of life's best lessons was not being afraid to look foolish -- to just ask the question.”

“Asking questions gives you significant power.”

“There are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is 'Where am I going?' and the second is 'Who will go with me?'

If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble.”

“It meant nothing to him any longer, only a faint tinge of sadness--and somewhere within him, a drop of pain moving briefly and vanishing, like a raindrop on the glass of a window, its course in the shape of a question mark.”

“Puck laughed, and it wasn't like that weird high-pitched giggle she'd heard out of children before, the one that begged the question: why would one possibly tickle a child just to elicit that noise?”

“But the question that everyone wanted answered was whether I would have the nerve and the strength to start the whole process from scratch. I said yes; otherwise I would be someone who had no dream left, and without dreams I would not want to live.”

“Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?"

"I give."

"You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.”

“What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?”

“The question, love, is whether you want me enough to take the risk.”

“It is simply in the nature of Armenian to study, to learn, to question, to speculate, to discover, to invent, to revise, to restore, to preserve, to make, and to give.”

“To be or not to be. That's not really a question.”

“Everything comes at a price. Everthing in your life. The question you have to ask yourself is, what price are you willing to pay?”

“At first I was almost about to despair, I thought I never could bear it — but I did bear it. The question remains: how?”

“It's the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never think to ask the stupid questions.”

“Oh, ‘twould be marvelous if the world and its moral questions were like some game board, with plain black players and white, and fixed rules, and nary a shade of grey.”

“Dear God, woman,"said Will. "Are there any questions you don't want to know the answer to?”

“Don’t ask me any more questions, Keller. I’m just going to lie to you and I’d rather not have the stress of trying to remember what lie I handed you. (Alexion)”

“Maugham then offers the greatest advice anyone could give to a young author: "At the end of an interrogation sentence, place a question mark. You'd be surprised how effective it can be.”

“If you are thinking about something that happened a long time ago:
Somebody asked you a question and you did not know the answer.
That is my name.”

“If love is the answer, could you please rephrase the question?”

“I'm a verb, Frank. Verbs don't answer questions.”

“The most important question a person can ask is, "Is the Universe a friendly place?”

“And what greater might do we possess as human beings than our capacity to question and to learn?”

“Ostara, if one dies while in these othere states of consciousness, one dies indeed. this begs the question, are dreams truly only ever dreams?”

“Because love was not the answer to every question. Because real love meant sacrifice. Sometimes love means letting go.”

“One question always leads to another question. Some things are better to wonder about.”

“Seducing him in the tub smelling of vinegar was out of the question. There had to be some boundaries.”

“Six questions respects it. Twenty questions doesn't.”

“I'm often asked what I think about as I run. Usually the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I'm running? I don't have a clue.”

“How will the world change if we do not question it?”

“Were you lying?"
"I never lie," he said piously. "About what?"
"The sand, the snake."
For a young man who never lied, he seemed surprisingly unoffended by the question.”

“I know that big people don't like questions from children. They can ask all the questions they like, How's school? Are you a good boy? Did you say your prayers? but if you ask them did they say their prayers you might be hit on the head.”

“How ya doin'?' I always think, What kind of a question is that?, and I always reply, 'A bit early to tell.”

“You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”

“No one has to know. No one would. It would be her secret, one she would share with the mountains only. The question is whether it is a secret she can live with, and Parwana thinks she knows the answer. She has lived with secrets all her life.”

“Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.”

“What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”

“One question," I said. "Did you tell me all that because you think I'm going to die?"
"No," he said. "It's because you're doing something brave, and I felt I should too."
"I'll take that as a yes," I said.”

“The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.”

“An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy.”

“That without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, moribund.”

“So how many women have you visited in their dreams? (Geary)
Is this one of those questions that if I don’t answer it correctly, you get angry at me? (Arik)”

“People of little understanding are most apt to be angry when their sense is called into question.”

“Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.”

“I wondered if there were other restless people asking the question with me:.”

“Have books ‘happened’ to you? Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk to you”

“The answer came to me before I'd even finished asking myself the question. I couldn't be Mason's girlfriend because when I imagined someone holding me and whispering dirty things in my ear, he had a Russian accent.”

“I am concentrating docilely on the question why U. S. restrooms always appear to us as infirmaries for public distress, the place to reagain control.”

“The questioners had that beautiful detachment and devotion to stern justice of men dealing in death without being in any danger of it.”

“Sometimes a simple question could have a complicated answer.”

“I don't have to answer. Until you know the question.”

“Quick question. Does this magical skill with gray matter come with a total lack of compunction for your kind, or is it just you who were born without a conscience?

V: I beg your pardon?”

“Faith never stays put. It's always challenging always questioning. That's what makes it real.”

“There was no answer, except the general answer life gives to all the most complex and insoluble questions. That answer is: one must live for the needs of the day, in other words, become oblivious. To become oblivious in dreams was impossible now, at least till night-time; it was impossible to return to that music sung by carafe-women; and so one had to become oblivious in the dreams of life.”

“In some situations, if you say nothing, you are called dull; if you talk, you are thought impertinent and arrogant. It is hard to know what to do in this case. The question seems to be, whether your vanity or your prudence predominates.”

“You can't believe because she tells you to," I said
"No. The question is: how to be a good person if I don't believe anymore.”

“We're all blessed and we're all blighted, Chief Inspector," said Finney. "Everyday each of us does our sums. The question is, what do we count?”

“I have always considered "Pascal's Wager" a questionable bet to place, since any God worth believing in would prefer an honest agnostic to a calculating hypocrite.”

“His view of the world is one that keeps his blood pressure low, sweeping the cholesterol from his relaxed, freeway-sized arteries. Everyone knows he is going to live till age ninety, although the question that goes begging is, “for what?”

“You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question”

“Suicide is a permanent question.”

“EPICURUS's old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?”

“The real question is, can you love the real me? Not the perfect person you want me to be, not that image you had of me, but who I really am.”

“The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers.
The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.”

“Are we prepared to make an enemy out of the Kingdom? The question is, are you bastards prepared to make an enemy out of Fairy Tail?”

“We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.”

“You never let things go unanswered for too long. Emails. Phone calls. Questions. As if you know the waiting is the hardest part for me.”

“To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.”

“Crowds of questions stream through me like lines of people exiting a soccer ground or a concert. They push and shove and trip. Some make their way around. Some remain in their seats, waiting for their opportunity.”

“Love is the answer. But while you're waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.”

“But questions that don’t answer themselves at the very moment of their asking are never answered.”

“Is Joe your father, Zach?'

I don't know where the question came from, but it was out, and I couldn't take it back even if I'd wanted to.

'No.' Zach shook his head. 'I never knew my dad. I don't know anything about him.”

“View your life with KINDSIGHT. Stop beating yourself up about things from your past. Instead of slapping your forehead and asking, “What was I thinking,” breathe and ask yourself the kinder question, “What was I learning?”

“The question 'What was there before creation?' is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation.”

“The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.”

“There are a lot of questions I keep asking myself about why I do comedy. I guess I laugh to keep from crying. And I guess if you ever get me crying, I might not stop. This is the way I look at tragedy or else I'll cry.”

“What if there were no hypothetical questions?”

“And before you barrel through some idiotic Cosmo girl list of how-well-do-you-know-your-man questions, let me say that I don't know squat about him except that he kisses like a god and screws like a devil.”

“Liberals, it has been said, are generous with other peoples' money, except when it comes to questions of national survival when they prefer to be generous with other peoples' freedom and security.”

“There was no solution, save that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insolvable: One must live in the needs of the day--that is, forget oneself.”

“Your teacher might be a child who takes you by the hand and asks you a question that you hadn't considered before, and your answer to the child is your answer to yourself.”

“My father, Zeus, did not love me. The demigods at Camp Half-Blood did not love me. Python and the Beast and his comrades at Triumvirate Holdings did not love me. It was almost enough to make me question my self-worth.

No, no. That was crazy talk.”

“I remember discussions withwhich went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighbouring park I repeated to myself again and again the question:?”

“What were you doing with her?" I ask quietly.
"Apart from questioning her about your whereabouts, I was listening to the most intriguing story about my life moonlighting as a kidnapper.”

“Good books make you ask questions. Bad readers want everything answered.”

“Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.”

“[They] agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.”

“The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return …”

“You might question a winkle - a feeling that came to you right out of the blue - but you didn’t question knowing.”

“When you're in a rut, you have to question everything except your ability to get out of it.”

“Rachel: They asked me a lot of questions about you. I played dumb.
Annabeth: Was it hard?”

“Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing.”

“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”

“I salute your spunk, but I question your sanity,” Sam said.”