Quotes about doubt
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“We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

Henry James book The Middle Years

Source: The Middle Years (1893).

Art, Passion, Madness

“There is no doubt that the princess did become a queen---not only on the screen. One of the most loved, one of the most skillful, one of the most intelligent, one of the most sensitive, charming actresses---and friends, in my life---but also in the later stages of her life, the UNICEF ambassador to the children of the world. The generosity, sensitivity, the nobility of her service to the children of the world and the mothers of the world will never be forgotten.”

Gregory Peck (1916–2003) American actor

Love, Life, Children, World

“Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure.”

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) American protestant theologian

Faith

“You are your own teacher. Looking for teachers can’t solve your own doubts. Investigate yourself to find the truth - inside, not outside. Knowing yourself is most important.”

Ajahn Chah (1918–1992) thai Buddhist monk

Truth, Teachers

“His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Love, Passion, Madness

“I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race in it's gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Animals, Parting

“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

“I seek strength, not to be greater than other, but to fight my greatest enemy, the doubts within myself”

P. C. Cast (1960) American writer

Fight

“As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.”

Mark Twain book Pudd'nhead Wilson

Source: Pudd'nhead Wilson

“Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.”

Laurens van der Post (1906–1996) South African writer

“Perhaps the crescent moon smiles in doubt
at being told that it is a fragment
awaiting perfection.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Source: Fireflies: A Collection of Proverbs, Aphorisms and Maxims

Smile, Perfection

“[T]he longer you stay skeptical, doubtful, intellectually uncomfortable, the better it is for you.”

Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) Russian and American poet and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate

“I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

People, Thinking

“I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.”

Aleister Crowley book The Book of Lies

45 : Chinese Music
Source: The Book of Lies (1913)

Faith, Dance, Night

“We must doubt the certainty of everything which passes through the senses, but how much more ought we to doubt things contrary to the senses, such as the existence of God and the soul.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

God, Soul, Sense

“When in doubt tell the truth. It will confound your enemies and astound your friends.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Truth

“I love doubt in a woman. It's nearly as sexy as determination.”

Irvine Welsh book Filth

Source: Filth

Love

“Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (1973)
Context: If you don't have doubts you're either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.

Faith

“I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.”

Bram Stoker book Dracula

Source: Dracula

Fear, Soul, Thinking, Sea

“America's greatest crime against the black man was not slavery or lynching, but that he was taught to wear a mask of self-hate and self-doubt.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

Hate

“I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Source: Democracy in America

Men, People

“Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

God, Idea, Passion, Time

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer … It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled. Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states.
We are, and always will be, the United States of America.
It's the answer that led those who've been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.
It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment, change has come to America.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2008, Election victory speech (November 2008)

World, Fear, Dreams, Hope

“And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Bertrand Russell's Best: Silhouettes in Satire (1958), "On Religion".
1950s
Context: I observe that a very large portion of the human race does not believe in God and suffers no visible punishment in consequence. And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that he would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt his existence.

God, Thinking

“Give me strength, not to be better than my enemies, but to defeat my greatest enemy, the doubts within myself. Give me strength for a straight back and clear eyes, so when life fades, as the setting sun, my spirit may come to you without shame.”

P. C. Cast (1960) American writer

Life, Sun

“There can be no faith without doubt. No strength without temptation. (Rafael)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding

Faith

“No doubt the reason is that character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Helen Adams Keller (p. 60. Helen Keller's Journal: 1936-1937, Doubleday, Doran & company, inc., 1938)

Soul, Suffering, Success, Motivational

“no one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

I.597
Human, All Too Human (1878)
Context: No one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any. By enlisting passion on his side he wants to stifle his reason and its doubts: thus he will acquire a good conscience and with it success among his fellow men.

Soul, Passion

“Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret. Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.”

Quentin Crisp (1908–1999) writer, Actor

“Focus more on your desire than on your doubt, and the dream will take care of itself.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Dreams

“What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe.”

Blaise Pascal Pensées

Source: Pensées

Truth, Error, Universe

“Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's being; it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in their attempts to touch her—doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame. She knew that they were waiting like wolves just outside the circumscribing light, but she had long spells of power to keep them in hungry subjection there.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Life, Fear, Light, Waiting

“When in doubt, shoot the wizard.”

Tamora Pierce (1954) American writer of fantasy novels for children

“There is no doubt that being human is incredibly difficult and cannot be mastered in one lifetime.”

Terry Pratchett book Thief of Time

Source: Thief of Time

“When in doubt, choose to live.”

Terry Pratchett book Thief of Time

Source: Thief of Time

“Where love is great, the littlest doubts are fear; Where little fears grow great, great love grows there.”

William Shakespeare Hamlet

Source: Hamlet

Love, Fear

“There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.”

Doris Lessing (1919–2013) British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer

Source: Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949

Truth

“No doubt exists that all women are crazy; it's only a question of degree.”

W.C. Fields (1880–1946) actor

Women, Question

“In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative.”

H.P. Lovecraft book The Tomb

"The Tomb" - Written Jun 1917; first published in The Vagrant, No. 14 (March 1922)
Fiction
Context: In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.

Nature

“Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what's in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there's always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Part I: Man and Nature, Ch. 1: Current Perplexities, pp. 4–5
1950s, New Hopes for a Changing World (1951)
Context: Consider MacArthur and his Republican supporters. So limited is his intelligence and his imagination that he is never puzzled for one moment. All we have to do is to go back to the days of the Opium War. After we have killed a sufficient number of millions of Chinese, the survivors among them will perceive our moral superiority and hail MacArthur as a saviour. But let us not be one-sided. Stalin, I should say, is equally simple- minded and equally out of date. He, too, believes that if his armies could occupy Britain and reduce us all to the economic level of Soviet peasants and the political level of convicts, we should hail him as a great deliverer and bless the day when we were freed from the shackles of democracy. One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

Pain, Stupidity, Feeling, Imagination

“We may be surrounded by some greater reality, to which we are oblivious. And even if we could somehow perceive it in some entirely new way, it is extremely doubtful we would be able to comprehend what we perceived.”

Louis Sachar (1954) American writer of children's books

Source: The Cardturner: A Novel about a King, a Queen, and a Joker

Way, Reality

“A person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was gitting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful.”

Mark Twain book Tom Sawyer Abroad

Source: Tom Sawyer Abroad

Home, Cats, Knowledge, Personality

“There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

“Tis safter to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.”

William Shakespeare Macbeth

Source: Macbeth

Joy

“Tis better people think you a fool, then open your mouth and erase all doubt.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Variously attributed to Lincoln, Elbert Hubbard, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin and Socrates
Misattributed
Variant: It is better to be silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.

People, Fools, Thinking

“115. If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book On Certainty

Source: On Certainty (1969)

Game

“The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Evil, Betrayal

“If a person offends you, and you are in doubt as to whether it was intentional or not, do not resort to extreme measures; simply watch your chance, and hit him with a brick.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Chance, Personality

“In such doubtful matters, where you have to work as a pioneer, you must be able to put some trust in your intuition and follow your feeling even at the risk of going wrong.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Feeling

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

“Laugh at yourself, but don't ever aim your doubt at yourself. Be bold. When you embark for strange places, don't leave any of yourself safely on shore. Have the nerve to go into unexplored territory.”

Alan Alda (1936) actor and United States Army officer

“Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful.”

Paul Tillich (1886–1965) German-American theologian and philosopher

Faith, Thinking

“It seemed that at the end of the lecture Dr. Krokowski was making propaganda for psycho-analysis; with open arms he summoned all and sundry to come unto him. "Come unto me," he was saying, though not in those words, " come unto me, all ye who are weary and heavy-laden." And he left no doubt of his conviction that all those present were weary and heavy-laden. He spoke of secret suffering, of shame and sorrow, of the redeeming power of the analytic. He advocated the bringing of light into the unconscious mind and explained how the abnormality was metamorphosed into the conscious emotion; he urged them to have confidence; he promised relief.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 4

Secret, Confidence, Light, Suffering

“Tedium is the lack of a mithology. To whom has no beliefs, even doubt is impossible, even skepticism has no strength to suspect.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid.
The Book of Disquiet
Original: O tédio é a falta de uma mitologia. A quem não tem crenças, até a dúvida é impossível, até o cepticismo não tem força para desconfiar.

“In a crunch a man's reputation never counts for as much as it ought to. Most people are good-hearted and willing to give a man the benefit of the doubt, but the poisonous few are eager to see others brought down, ruined. … Envy, Bob. Envy eats them alive. If you had money, they'd envy you that. But since you don't, they envy you for having such a good, bright, loving daughter. They envy you for just being a happy man. They envy you for not envying them. One of the greatest sorrows of human existence is that some people aren't happy merely to be alive but find their happiness only in the misery of others.”

Dean Koontz book Lightning

Part I, Chapter 1.2, the mysterious stranger's words to Bob Shane
Lightning (1988)

Love, Money, Happiness, People

“I'm sure Obama is an atheist, I’m sure Kennedy was an atheist, but I doubt if Pope Frank is.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Interview with Bill Maher (2013) http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=d2b_1382908273

“In the cotton States, after the war…the Jew came down in force, set up shop on the plantation, supplied all the negro's wants on credit, and at the end of the season was proprietor of the negro's share of the present crop and of part of his share of the next one. Before long, the whites detested the Jew, and it is doubtful if the negro loved him.”

Mark Twain book Concerning the Jews

Concerning the Jews (Harper's Magazine, Sept. 1899)

Love, War, Parting, Season

“Up to a certain point it is good for us to know that there are people in the world who will give us love and unquestioned loyalty to the limit of their ability. I doubt, however, if it is good for us to feel assured of this without the accompanying obligation of having to justify this devotion by our behavior.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

This Is My Story (1937)

Love, People, World, Behavior

“Try to put well in practice what you already know; and in so doing, you will in good time, discover the hidden things which you now inquire about. Practice what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know. By following carefully the rules of teachings provided that they are truthful, you can save a lot of time. But a student full of doubt is unable to move forwards and to judge well the truth.”

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) Dutch 17th century painter and etcher

1640 - 1670

Truth, Time, Help

“The people of the country have taken to planning from the start – accepted it…At the top there were doubts, differences. Now The acceptance of planning is almost unanimous in the country. The importance of industrialization has always been accepted. Gandhiji’s emphasis on cottage industries…Cottage industries, however will not suffice.”

Gulzarilal Nanda (1898–1998) Prime Minister of India

In, p. 30.
Gulzarilal Nanda: A Life in the Service of the People

People, Country

“A doubtful balance is made between truth and pleasure, and… the knowledge of one and the feeling of the other stir up a combat the success of which is very uncertain, since, in order to judge of it, it would be necessary to know all that passes in the innermost spirit of the man, of which man himself is scarcely ever conscious.”

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

The Art of Persuasion

Pleasure, Truth, Feeling, Knowledge

“I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lack an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that evil. Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are underweight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this "great majority." But what is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress--as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Sec. 2
The Gay Science (1882)

Women, Men, People, Faith

“Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness; and this truth is in itself so excellent that, even when it dwells on humble and lowly matters, it is still infinitely above uncertainty and lies, disguised in high and lofty discourses; because in our minds, even if lying should be their fifth element, this does not prevent that the truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects, though not of wandering wits. But you who live in dreams are better pleased by the sophistical reasons and frauds of wits in great and uncertain things, than by those reasons which are certain and natural and not so far above us.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.

Truth, Dreams, Lying, Fraud

“I feel there is sensuality … eroticism in the primary things that move, like animals and insects. Being able to inspire the movement to still images … gives me the joy of the creator that breathes life into things that do not have life. The movement must be sufficiently round and sweet … so express its eroticism. In creating cartoons I always think of an ideal, but … half the finish to doubt the rightness of what I'm doing. So I put all my expectations always work next. * * […] I often say jokingly that comics are my true wife and that the cartoons are my lover. The fact that I am fully dedicated to animation, my lover … is because it allows me to express in a sublime … the interesting metamorphosis of a changing body. For me, the greatest fun, no doubt, lies in the draw and give movement to change processes. Always look in my cartons this metamorphosis.”

Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989) Japanese cartoonist and animator

From Interview to the author , in Osamu Tezuka, Jumping ; quoted in AA.VV., Osamu Tezuka: A Manga Biography , vol. 4, translated by Marta Fogato, Coconino Press, Bologna, 2001, p. 178. ISBN 8888063188

Life, Feeling, Lovers, Thinking

“In this connection I call to mind Genesis, chapter xlvii…the pathetic story of the years of plenty and the years of famine in Egypt, and how Joseph, with that opportunity, made a corner in broken hearts, and the crusts of the poor, and human liberty--a corner whereby he took a nation's money all away, to the last penny…then took the nation itself, buying it for bread, man by man, woman by woman, child by child, till all were slaves…and it was a disaster so crushing that its effects have not wholly disappeared from Egypt to-day… Was Joseph establishing a character for his race which would survive long in Egypt? and in time would his name come to be familiarly used to express that character--like Shylock's? It is hardly to be doubted. Let us remember that this was centuries before the Crucifixion.”

Mark Twain book Concerning the Jews

Concerning the Jews (Harper's Magazine, Sept. 1899)

Money, Time, Heart

“Do not be swept away by new slogans and leaders who had a doubtful past. Do not fritter away your time and energy in encouraging or participating in mushroom parties an organizations.”

Fatima Jinnah (1893–1967) Pakistani dental surgeon, biographer, stateswoman and one of the leading founders of Pakistan

Address to Zenana Muslim League, at Curzon Hall of Dhaka, 23 March 1948[citation needed]

Time, Past

“I don’t doubt that a man can live perfectly well on his own, but I’m convinced that he begins to die as soon as he closes the door of his house behind him.”

José Saramago book The Cave

Source: The Cave (2000), p. 29 (Vintage 2003)

Housing

“…the old axiom that 'all power corrupts' has doubtful validity, because it derives from our neglect of Plato's advice to find men carefully and train them by methods which make them fit for heroes.”

Oswald Mosley (1896–1980) British politician; founder of the British Union of Fascists

Excerpt from Beyond the Pale by Nicholas Mosley.

Men, Training

“Did you know that Bertrand Russell dropped all belief in God because he wasn't able to voice his doubts in the company of believers? -Appalachian Melody.”

Mark Heard (1951–1992) American musician and record producer

Liner Notes

God

“Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) Polish-born Jewish-American author

The New York Times (3 December 1978)

Religion, Parting

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one. What is most repellent in the System of Nature [of d'Holbach] — after the recipe for making eels from flour — is the audacity with which it decides that there is no God, without even having tried to prove the impossibility.”

Voltaire Oeuvres de Voltaire

Le doute n'est pas un état bien agréable, mais l'assurance est un état ridicule.
Ce qui révolte le plus dans le Système de la nature ( après la façon de faire des anguilles avec de la farine), c'est l'audace avec laquelle il décide qu'il n'y a point de Dieu , sans avoir seulement tenté d'en prouver l'impossibilité.
Letter to Frederick William, Prince of Prussia (28 November 1770). English: in S.G. Tallentyre (ed.), Voltaire in His Letters. New York : G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1919. p. 232. French: Au prince royal de prusse, le 28 novembre, in M. Palissot (ed.), Oeuvres de Voltaire: Lettres Choisies du Roi de Prusse et de M. de Voltaire, Tome II. Paris : Chez Baudoiun, 1802. p. 419
Citas

God, Nature

“Most Illustrious Lord and My Lord, I received the other day, with due reverence your Lordship's letter, together with the canvas and framing. Having read and noted the contents, I considered them so pretty and ingenious as to require no improvement of any kind; and the more I thought over it the more I became convinced that the greatness of art amongst the ancients was due to the assistance they received from great princes content to leave to the painters the credit and renown derived from their own ingenuity in bespeaking pictures. Can I therefore doubt that, if God enables me to satisfy in any part the wishes of Your Lordship, I shall have all credit for my labour? Yet I shall, after all have done no more than give shape to that which received its spirit — the most essential part — from Your Excellency.”

Titian (1488–1576) Italian painter

In a letter to the Duke Alfonso of Ferrara, From Venice, April 1, 1518; as quoted by J.A.Y. Crowe & G.B. Cavalcaselle in Titian his life and times - With some account ..., publisher John Murray, London, 1877, p. 181-82
1510-1540

God, Art, Reading, Parting

“Today, the Princess Royal has been canonized as a secular saint, for her truly admirable international work on behalf of the Save the Children Fund. Her dedication and concern are beyond doubt, but she didn't catch them like measles.”

Anne, Princess Royal (1950) daughter of Elizabeth II

Bernard Levin, "Uneasy Lies the Head", The Times, 23 January 1989.
About

Children, Princess

“If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics…”

Roger Bacon book Opus Majus

Bk. 1, ch. 4. Translated by Robert B. Burke, in: Edward Grant (1974) Source Book in Medieval Science. Harvard University Press. p. 93
Opus Majus, c. 1267

Truth, Error, Mathematics, Knowledge

“Seeing that your love's true.
Never I'll doubt you.
My heart belongs to you.
That's alright with me.
Worlds could end around me.
So in love that I can't see.
You and me were meant to be.
That's alright with me.”

Janet Jackson (1966) singer from the United States

Alright
Rhythm Nation (1989)

Love, World, Heart

“Passion is always a mystery and unaccountable, and unfortunately there is no doubt that life does not spare its purest children and often it is just the most deserving people who cannot help loving those that destroy them.”

Hermann Hesse book Gertrud

Source: Gertrude (1910), p. 217

Love, Life, Children, People

“The corporate manager who achieves success by honest efficiency in giving the best service to the public should be favored because we all beneﬁt by his efficiency. […] he should be helped by the Government because his success is good for the National welfare. But a man who, grasps and holds business power by breaking the industrial efficiency of others, who wins success by methods which are against‘ the public interest and degrading to the public morals, should not be permitted to ‘ exercise such power. Instead of punishing him by a long and doubtful process of the law after the wrong has been com- mitted, there should be such effective Government regulation as to check the evil tendencies at the moment that they start do develop.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, The Progressives, Past and Present (1910)

Law, Exercises, Business, Evil

“370. But more correctly: The fact that I use the word "hand" and all the other words in my sentence without a second thought, indeed that I should stand before the abyss if I wanted so much as to try doubting their meanings — shows that absence of doubt belongs to the essence of the language-game, that the question "How do I know…"”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book On Certainty

drags out the language-game, or else does away with it.
On Certainty (1969)

Game, Question

“All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible as yet.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Source: The Integration of the Personality (1939), p. 72

God, Age

“Still let us not be over-sanguine of a speedy final triumph. Let us be quite sober. Let us diligently apply the means, never doubting that a just God, in his own good time, will give us the rightful result.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Letter to James C. Conkling (1863)

God, Time

“The position I early was enabled to take was one of self-reliance. And were all women as sure of their wants as I was, the result would be the same. But they are so overloaded with precepts and guardians who think that nothing is so much to be dreaded for a woman as originality of thought or character, that their minds are impeded with doubts till they lose their chance of fair, free proportions. The difficulty is to get them to the point from which they shall naturally develop self-respect, and learn self-help.”

Margaret Fuller book Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)

Women, Nature, Thinking, Learning

“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 (1940–2017) Television executive

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

Life, People, Hope, Feeling

“I don't know where my expertise is; my expertise is no disciplines. I would recommend to drop disciplinarity wherever one can. Disciplines are an outgrowth of academia. In academia you appoint somebody and then in order to give him a name he must be a historian, a physicist, a chemist, a biologist, a biophysicist; he has to have a name. Here is a human being: Joe Smith -- he suddenly has a label around the neck: biophysicist. Now he has to live up to that label and push away everything that is not biophysics; otherwise people will doubt that he is a biophysicist. If he's talking to somebody about astronomy, they will say "I don't know, you are not talking about your area of competence, you're talking about astronomy, and there is the department of astronomy, those are the people over there," and things of that sort. Disciplines are an aftereffect of the institutional situation.”

Heinz von Foerster (1911–2002) Austrian American scientist and cybernetician

Von Foerster (1995) " Interview Heinz von Foerster http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/interviewvonf.html" S. Franchi, G. Güzeldere, and E. Minch (eds) in: Constructions of the Mind Volume 4, issue 2. 26 June 1995 <br class="br">1990s

People

“I greatly doubt whether the men who become pirate chiefs are those who are filled with retrospective terror of their fathers, or whether Napoleon, at Austerlitz, really felt that he was getting even with Madame Mère. I know nothing of the mother of Attila, but I rather suspect that she spoilt the little darling, who subsequently found the world irritating because it sometimes resisted his whims.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1930s, Power: A New Social Analysis (1938), Ch. 2: Leaders and Followers

Men, World

“Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.
Have we no tendency to the latter condition?
Let any one who doubts, carefully contemplate that now almost complete legal combination — piece of machinery so to speak — compounded of the Nebraska doctrine, and the Dred Scott decision.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1850s, The House Divided speech (1858)

Law, Decision