“To doubt
Is worse than to have lost; and to despair
Is but to antedate those miseries
That must fall on us.”
Duke of Milan (1623), Act I, scene iii.
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Philip Massinger 17
English writer 1583–1640Related quotes
“Absence from whom we love is worse than death,
And frustrate hope severer than despair.”
"Hope, like the short-lived ray that gleams awhile", line 35.
“I don’t want to.. you know, fall for you any worse than I already have.”
Source: Fire with Fire
Page 23.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)
No. 47 (24 April 1711).
The Spectator (1711–1714)
“Doubt is brother-devil to Despair.”
Prometheus.
Source: Dying Earth (1950-1984), The Eyes of the Overworld (1966), Chapter 4, "The Sorcerer Pharesm"
As quoted in The Artist Observed: 28 interviews with contemporary artists (1991) by John Gruen, p. 3
Context: I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or the better or the worse. It must alter him. The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.
The Ethics of Belief (1877), The Limits Of Inference
Context: p>We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when it is inferred from that experience by the assumption that what we do not know is like what we know. We may believe the statement of another person, when there is reasonable ground for supposing that he knows the matter of which he speaks, and that he is speaking the truth so far as he knows it.It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence; and where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, there it is worse than presumption to believe.</p