Quotes about skepticism

If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.

— Woody Allen

A skeptic is a person who, when he sees the handwriting on the wall, claims it is a forgery.

— Morris Bender

If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.

— Lord Byron

There is something pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything.

— Lord Byron

Skepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.

— Thomas Carlyle

Skepticism has never founded empires, established principles, or changed the world's heart. The great doers in history have always been people of faith.

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.

— John Dewey

He talks about the Scylla of Atheism and the Charybdis of Christianity -- a state of mind which, by the way, is not conducive to bold navigation.

— Norman Douglas

A mind that questions everything, unless strong enough to bear the weight of its ignorance, risks questioning itself and being engulfed in doubt. If it cannot discover the claims to existence of the objects of its questioning -- and it would be miraculous if it so soon succeeded in solving so many mysteries -- it will deny them all reality, the mere formulation of the problem already implying an inclination to negative solutions. But in so doing it will become void of all positive content and, finding nothing which offers it resistance, will launch itself perforce into the emptiness of inner revere.

— Emile Durkheim

Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Lord I disbelieve -- help thou my unbelief.

— Edward M. Forster

Skepticism, is that anything more than we used to mean when we said, Well, what have we here?

— Robert Frost

Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.

— Samuel Johnson

Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than the most up-to-date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. Only out of radical skeptics, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need.

— Thomas Mann

The path of sound credence is through the thick forest of skepticism.

— George Jean Nathan

Great intellects are skeptical.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Do not let yourself be tainted with a barren skepticism.

— Louis Pasteur

Skeptics are never deceived.

— French Proverb

The believer is happy; the doubter is wise.

— Hungarian Proverb

Believe nothing and be on your guard against everything.

— Latin Proverb

Skepticism, riddling the faith of yesterday, prepared the way for the faith of tomorrow.

— Romain Rolland

Nearly all the powerful people of this age are unbelievers, the best of them in doubt and misery, the most in plodding hesitation, doing as well as they can, what practical work lies at hand.

— John Ruskin

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.

— George Santayana

There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.

— George Santayana

The empiricist... thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.

— George Santayana

The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found.

— Miguel De Unamuno

The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil.

— Simone Weil

Skepticism is the beginning of Faith.

— Oscar Wilde