Self Skepticism Quotes

We need to enter the conversation willing to be wrong, willing to admit the limits of our own knowledge, willing to reconsider our evidence, sources, and premises. That is self-skepticism. ~ Patricia Roberts-Miller

I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further. ~ Richard Dawkins

Unanimity makes me itchy. It almost always hides a grave. I started digging. ~ Ben Ehrenreich

...age-old evil, tireless and vigilant, cloaked from the masses by modern skepticism, yet still a potent force stalking the dark ways of the night. ~ Dennis Wheatley

I was perplexed by the failure of teachers at school to address what seemed the most urgent matter of all: the bewildering, stomach-churning insecurity of being alive. The standard subjects of history, geography, mathematics, and English seemed perversely designed to ignore the questions that really mattered. As soon as I had some inkling of what 'philosophy' meant, I was puzzled as to why we were not taught it. And my skepticism about religion only grew as I failed to see what the vicars and priests I encountered gained from their faith. They struck me either as insincere, pious, and aloof or just bumblingly good-natured. (p. 10) ~ Stephen Batchelor

You want waffles?" I tried to keep the skepticism from my voice. "No firstborn or a pot of gold?"
"I'm not a leprechaun, Sam. And what would I do with a baby?" Her eyebrow shot back up, and she crossed her arms. "I want waffles. Take it or leave it."
I glanced at Brid, who was staring at Ashley shrewdly.
"Let's talk numbers," she said. "Are we talking, like, twenty waffles all at once? Or a waffle a week for six months? What?"
"Every day for two years," Ashley said.
"That's outrageous," Brid sputtered. ~ Lish McBride

Skepticism regarding morality is what is decisive ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety. ~ Emile M. Cioran

Yet while it may be true that religious zeal can inspire armies better than most secular incentives, there was another great awakening that occurred before and during the Revolutionary era that also played a role. The other great awakening was a reevaluation of the merits of doubt. Often unspoken, religious skepticism in the colonial era was taboo even among professed radicals. Yet the spiritual awakenings of the middle of the eighteenth century signaled a transformation of "unbelief" from presumed moral failing to a reasonable theological and political position. ~ Peter Manseau

[Rinda] often worried how she might make the coward she saw [in Remus] into a brave warrior, and someday, a king -- a task which she felt was her responsibility. Rinda had not yet realized that sometimes courage is the same thing as folly and that sometimes a skepticism bordering on her blindness to her brother's strengths was a result of her own sensitivity. ~ Kaoru Kurimoto

How could any Lord have made this world? ... there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for this world to commit ... No happiness lasted. ~ Virginia Woolf

Skepticism and cynicism, on the other hand, have been growing on me. For one thing, they serve me in repressing that hazardous state of hope. It's the most destructive of all human emotions. It keeps us in the places we are frightened by the most."

Almohammad, Asaad. An Ishmael of Syria (Kindle Locations 77-79). . Kindle Edition. ~ Asaad Almohammad

Flaubert teaches you to gave upon the truth and not blink from its consequences; he teaches you, with Montaigne, to sleep on the pillow of doubt; he teaches you to dissect out the constituent parts of reality, and to observe the Nature is always a mixture of genres; he teaches you the most exact use of language; he teaches you not to approach a book in search of moral or social pills
literature is not a pharmacopoeia; he teaches the pre-eminence of Truth, Beauty, Feeling and Style. And if you study his private life, he teaches courage, stoicism, friendship; the importance of intelligence, skepticism and wit; the folly of cheap patriotism; the virtue of being able to remain by yourself in your own room; the hatred of hypocrisy; distrust of the doctrinaire; the need for plain speaking. ~ Julian Barnes

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an athiest. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Design with skepticism, and you will achieve resilience. Ask, "What can system X do to hurt me?" and then design a way to dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge whatever wrench your supposed ally throws. ~ Michael T. Nygard

I'm a lawyer. Pessimists see a glass half-empty; optimists see a glass half-full. Lawyers see a glass containing possible carcinogenic materials without a warning label. Skepticism is coded in our DNA. ~ Naima Simone

What we know here is very little, but what we are ignorant of is immense. ~ Pierre Laplace

We all approached doing a sequel with great trepidation and skepticism. ~ Jason Biggs

Good general differ from bad generals only in the degree to which they resist the psychopathology of the very organization they serve. Norman Dixon ~ Patrick Hennessey

One of the best things I've read about that inexplicably, but endlessly, fascinating group of people, the so-called Serious Collectors of 78s. Petrusich burrows into not just their personalities but the hunger that unites and drives their obsessions. She writes elegantly, and makes you think, and most important manages to hang onto her skepticism in the midst of her own collecting quest. ~ John Jeremiah Sullivan

Everybody's part of the greater whole and skepticism and virtue are a part of that. ~ Marc Webb

The hallmark of religion is to distrust claims made for mortal men. It is in ages of great religious faith that great skepticism can find expression. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

Liberalism regards all absolutes with profound skepticism, including both moral imperatives and final solutions ... Insistence upon any particular solution is the mark of an ideologue ... ~ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Scepticism is the first step towards truth. ~ Denis Diderot

That Muhammad could predict certain events does not prove that he was a prophet: he may have been able to guess successfully, but this does not mean that he had real knowledge of the future. And certainly the fact that he was able to recount events from the past does not prove that he was a prophet, because he could have read about those events in the Bible and, if he was illiterate, he could still have had the Bible read to him. ~ Muhammad Al Warraq

There are always individuals who pit their minds against the general modes of thought and who are arrogant enough to feel that they alone are right and that the many are wrong. ~ Isaac Asimov

In the discoveries of science the harmony of the spheres is also now the harmony of life. And as the eerie illumination of science penetrates evermore deeply into the order of nature, the cosmos appears increasingly to be a vast system finely tuned to generate life and organisms of biology very similar, perhaps identical, to ourselves. All the evidence available in the biological sciences supports the core proposition of traditional natural theology - that the cosmos is a specially designed whole with life and mankind as a fundamental goal and purpose, a whole in which all facets of reality, from the size of galaxies to the thermal capacity of water, have their meaning and explanation in this central fact.

Four centuries after the scientific revolution apparently destroyed irretrievably man's special place in the universe, banished Aristotle, and rendered teleological speculation obsolete, the relentless stream of discovery has turned dramatically in favor of teleology and design, and the doctrine of the microcosm is reborn. As I hope the evidence presented in this book has shown, science, which has been for centuries the great ally of atheism and skepticism, has become at last, in the final days of the second millennium, what Newton and many of its early advocates had so fervently wished - the "defender of the anthropocentric faith. ~ Michael Denton

A lifetime spent in the study of the history of societies since the dawn of mankind presumably inclined him to skepticism and misgivings in regard to any great scheme, religious or political, that set out to create universal happiness in one fell swoop; what it was more likely to create, in his opinion, was universal misery; and his faith in heaven-sent saviors was hardly greater. ~ Francois Maspero

This fuzzification of faith has developed in parallel to increasing ignorance of biblical teaching and growing skepticism as to whether that teaching as it stands may properly be called the Word of God. Is there a connection? Yes. When the church ceases to treat the Bible as a final standard of spiritual truth and wisdom, it is going to wobble between maintaining its tradition in a changing world and adapting to that world, and as the wobbles go on, uncertainty as to what is the real substance of faith and the proper way of embracing it and living it out will inevitably increase. ~ J.I. Packer

If we wanted to construct a basic philosophical attitude from these scientific utterances of Pauli's, at first we would be inclined to infer from them an extreme rationalism and a fundamentally skeptical point of view. In reality however, behind this outward display of criticism and skepticism lay concealed a deep philosophical interest even in those dark areas of reality of the human mind which elude the grasp of reason. And while the power of fascination emanating from Pauli's analyses of physical problems was admittedly due in some measure to the detailed and penetrating clarity of his formulations, the rest was derived from a constant contact with the field of creative processes, for which no rational formulation as yet exists. ~ Werner Heisenberg

I have got, over the years, a sense of the immense sweep of creation, of the evolutionary process in everything, of how incomprehensible God must necessarily be to be the God of heaven and earth. You can't fit the Almighty into your intellectual categories…. What kept me a skeptic [of secularism] in college was precisely my Christian faith. It always said: wait, don't bite on this, get a wider picture, continue to read. If you want your faith, you have to work for it…. Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It's there, even when he can't see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide in college. Learn what you can, but cultivate Christian skepticism. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Without such trust and safety, social relationships tend to become strategic rather than cooperative, increasingly full of skepticism and even anxiety and fear about others' intentions. (p. 27) ~ Donald Rothberg

It is the press that has taken these charges and accusations and blown them up without any kind of skepticism whatsoever - blown them into realities and treated them as if they were true. ~ Dixie Lee Ray

I have had a certain amount of experience with skepticism and the conversation it generates, and there is an inevitable futility in it. ~ Marilynne Robinson

Skepticism is the tonic of the mind . ~ Joseph Conrad

Different authors have different points of view. You can't just say, 'I believe in the Bible. ~ Bart D. Ehrman

The heart must be kept tender and pliable; otherwise agnosticism converts to skepticism. In such a case, the value of apologetics is voided, for apologetics is aimed at persuading doubters, not at refuting the defiant. He who demands a kind of proof that the nature of the case renders impossible, is determined that no possible evidence shall convince him. ~ Edward John Carnell

Skepticism literally means a thoughtful inquiry, the looking at a problem in a disinterested spirit, the surveying of a question from many sides. In this sense it is the very essence of philosophy and science. ~ Joseph Alexander Leighton

In view of the tide of religiosity engulfing a once secular republic it is refreshing to be reminded by Freethinkers that free thought and skepticism are robustly in the American tradition. After all the Founding Fathers began by omitting God from the American Constitution. ~ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

The true skeptic is skeptical even about skepticism. ~ Marty Rubin

Scepticism, as we know, can never be thoroughly applied, else life would come to a standstill ~ George Eliot

When I wake up I go through an abbreviated process of mourning all over again. Plainly, there's something within me that's ready to believe in life after death. And it's not the least bit interested in whether there's any sober evidence for it. ~ Carl Sagan

As a conservative, I maintain a healthy skepticism of the theory of man-made global warming. I also believe that more people enjoying the fruits of modernity and economic development is a good thing - as long as those people arrived legally and obey the law. ~ Gary Bauer

Skepticism must go hand in hand with rationality. When theories are shown to be false, the correct thing to do is to move on. ~ Brian Cox

A person who peremptorily denies the existence of anything which is beyond the horizon of his understanding because he cannot make it harmonise with his accepted opinions is as credulous as he who believes everything without any discrimination. Either of these persons is not a freethinker, but a slave to the opinions which he has accepted from others, or which he may have formed in the course of his education, and by his special experiences in his (naturally limited) intercourse with the world. If such persons meet with any extraordinary fact that is beyond their own experience, they often either regard it with awe and wonder, and are ready to accept any wild and improbable theory that may be offered to them in regard to such facts, or they sometimes reject the testimony of credible witnesses, and frequently even that of their own senses. They often do not hesitate to impute the basest motives and the most silly puerilities to honourable persons, and are credulous enough to believe that serious and wise people had taken the trouble to play upon them "practical jokes," and they are often willing to admit the most absurd theories rather than to use their own common sense. ~ Franz Hartmann

Professional opinion is skeptical about anything that doesn't fit in with the version of reality it has been programmed to believe in. The skepticism comes from a lack of understanding and the need to defend the status quo and not from actual knowledge of the subject. ~ David Icke

Campaign may invite a certain skepticism about democracy, but it will surely restore your faith in cinema verite. ~ A.O. Scott

The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. ~ Michael Crichton