Quotes about doubter (20 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“The doubters said,
"Man can not fly,"
The doers said,
"Maybe, but we'll try,"
And finally soared
In the morning glow
While non-believers
Watched from below.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Flying

“All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us.”

Eugene H. Peterson (1932–2018) American translator

God , Faith , Personality

“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

“From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Tears and Saints (1937)

Life , God

“Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.”

Brenda Ueland (1891–1985) Journalist and writer

Source: If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

Love , Time

“Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.”

Franz Kafka book The Zürau Aphorisms

75
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)

“When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.
:This quote, often attributed to Jomo Kenyatta, was first written in a fiction play published by holocaust doubter Rolf Hochhuth, in his controversial The Deputy, a Christian tragedy (1964), Grove Press, p. 144. No reference to any historical or original source was given. Other citations are found in books written by critics of religion, such as Christos Tzanetakos's "The Life and Work of an Atheist Pioneer", iUniverse; and Jack Huberman's "Quotable Atheist: Ammunition for Nonbelievers, Political Junkies, Gadflies, and Those Generally Hell-Bound" (2008), 175. No references are given.
: In Desmond Tutu: A Biography (2004) by Steven Gish, p. 101; is clarified Tutu used it as a joke which was not of him.”

Desmond Tutu (1931) South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Prize winner

Misattributed

Life , Books , Religion , Quotes

“The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilisations, doubters, disintegrators, deiciders.”

J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964) Geneticist and evolutionary biologist

Daedalus or Science and the Future (1923)
Variant: The conservative has little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires.

Fear , Passion

“Night in so sweet an attitude beheld Asleep, was by an angel sculptured In this stone; and sleeping, is alive; Waken her, doubter; she will speak to thee”

Giovan Battista Strozzi

Epigram for Michelangelo's ""la Notte""

Angels , Sleep , Night

“There are very different programming styles. I tend to see them as Mozart versus Beethoven. When Mozart started to write, the composition was finished. He wrote the manuscript and it was 'aus einem Guss' (from one cast). In beautiful handwriting, too. Beethoven was a doubter and a struggler who started writing before he finished the composition and then glued corrections onto the page. In one place he did this nine times. When they peeled them, the last version proved identical to the first one.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (2001) Source: Denken als discipline https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Uae9_pgZzE#t=280, a program from Dutch public TV broadcaster VPRO from April 10th, 2001 about Dijkstra
2000s

Beauty , Time

“They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt;
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson Brahma

Brahma, st. 3
1860s, May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)

Singing , Flying

“In electron microscopy, the difficulties took considerably more time to surmount, and therefore the doubters held the field for a longer period. I can, however, also confirm from my own experience the observation of my colleagues that the doubt of the others has the advantage of leaving the field uncrowded. Mostly, this is understood only much later, in the beginning one is very disappointed.”

Ernst Ruska (1906–1988) German physicist

On the advantage of facing doubt when one has discovered something new. Speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1986 http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1986/ruska-speech.html.

Disappointment , Time

“The Pact of Munich is signed. Czechoslovakia as a power is out. The genius of the Führer and his determination not to shun even a world war have again won victory without the use of force. The hope remains that the incredulous, the weak and the doubters have been converted and will remain that way.”

Alfred Jodl (1890–1946) German general

Munich Conference, September 29, 1938. Quoted in "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany" - Page 422 - by William Lawrence Shirer - Germany - 1990.

War , World , Hope , Way

“Intellectualism, though by no means confined to doubters, is often the sole piety of the skeptic.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 28

“We today have that same power if we but choose it, but choose it we must. What makes each of us unique is the individual choices we make. There will always be doubters, those who prefer inaction. I have heard it all, but I am still a believer in the dream. I choose to believe.”

Yolanda King (1955–2007) American actress

2000s

Dreams

“History is written by the dreamers, not the doubters.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2017, June

History

“Once again, he has silenced the doubters by simply delivering an extraordinary film.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/avatar-2009 of Avatar (11 December 2009)
Reviews, Four star reviews
Context: Watching Avatar, I felt sort of the same as when I saw Star Wars in 1977. That was another movie I walked into with uncertain expectations. James Cameron's film has been the subject of relentlessly dubious advance buzz, just as his Titanic was. Once again, he has silenced the doubters by simply delivering an extraordinary film. There is still at least one man in Hollywood who knows how to spend $250 million, or was it $300 million, wisely.

Silence

“An agnostic is a doubter. The word is generally applied to those who doubt the verity of accepted religious creeds of faiths. Everyone is an agnostic as to the beliefs or creeds they do not accept.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Why I Am An Agnostic (1929)
Context: An agnostic is a doubter. The word is generally applied to those who doubt the verity of accepted religious creeds of faiths. Everyone is an agnostic as to the beliefs or creeds they do not accept. Catholics are agnostic to the Protestant creeds, and the Protestants are agnostic to the Catholic creed. Any one who thinks is an agnostic about something, otherwise he must believe that he is possessed of all knowledge. And the proper place for such a person is in the madhouse or the home for the feeble-minded. In a popular way, in the western world, an agnostic is one who doubts or disbelieves the main tenets of the Christian faith.

Faith

“Oh, doubters, let's go down…”

Aaron Weiss

Four-Word Letter, Pt 2.
Catch For Us The Foxes (2004)

“It feels like if I had said it was a Muslim or a Mexican or someone black, I feel like the doubters would have supported me a lot much more. A lot more. And that says a lot about the place that we are in our country right now.”

Jussie Smollett (1982) American actor, singer, director and photographer

14 February 2019 interview with ABC excerpt in tweet https://twitter.com/abc/status/1096026425768005632 promoting their coverage https://abcnews.go.com/US/chicago-pd-locate-persons-interest-alleged-racist-attack/story?id=61075518
also quoted by Global News https://globalnews.ca/news/4960466/jussie-smollett-first-interview-since-alleged-attack/ and CNN https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/16/entertainment/jussie-smollett-attack/index.html and New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/arts/television/jussie-smollett-interview.html and Entertainment Weekly https://ew.com/tv/2019/02/14/jussie-smollett-attack-interview-good-morning-america/ and The Daily Beast https://www.thedailybeast.com/jussie-smollett-in-first-tv-interview-youd-believe-me-if-i-said-attackers-were-black and Desert https://www.deseret.com/2019/3/27/20669388/jussie-smollett-says-i-am-a-man-of-faith-after-charges-were-dropped and RealClearPolitics https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/02/14/jussie_smollett_pissed_at_critics_if_i_blamed_a_muslim_or_a_mexican_doubters_would_support_me.html and Business Insider https://www.businessinsider.com/jussie-smollett-addresses-assault-doubters-good-morning-america-2019-2 and NBC https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/probe-alleged-jussie-smollett-attack-shifts-whether-actor-staged-incident-n972516 and PageSix https://pagesix.com/2019/02/16/nigerian-brothers-confirmed-to-be-in-surveillance-video-of-jussie-smollet-attack/, all of whom mutually left out the following sentence...

Country , Support , Feeling