Les doutes sont fâcheux plus que toute autre chose.
Act III, sc. v
Le Misanthrope (1666)
“A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth.”
Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer
[The Autumn of the Patriarch, 2006 [1976], HarperCollins, 978-0-06-088286-0, 254] translated from El Ontoño del Patriarica (1975) by Gregory Rabassa
“Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.”
Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990)
“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN
Responding to an assertion that his support for a ban on nuclear testing would probably cost him votes, as quoted in As We Knew Adlai : The Stevenson Story by Twenty-two Friends (1966) by Edward P. Doyle, p. 185
“It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.”
Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer
“Fear (in times of doubt the worst of prophets) revolves many things.”
Plurima versat,
pessimus in dubiis augur, timor.
Source: Thebaid, Book III, Line 5
Richard Dawkins book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
Source: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
