Quotes about Doubt

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. 

Make me strong in spirit,
Courageous in action,
Gentle of heart,

Let me act in wisdom,
Conquer my fear and doubt,
Discover my own hidden gifts,

Meet others with compassion,
Be a source of healing energies,
And face each day with hope and joy.

All of you knowing now,
Tthat the Buddhas, the Teachers of the Ages,
In accord with what is peculiarly appropriate, have recourse to expedient devices,
Need have no more doubts or uncertainties.
Your hearts shall give rise to great joy,
Since you know that you yourselves
Shall become Buddhas.

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 told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different, that their voice could be that difference.

True love is like religion. It is full of devotion and free of doubt.

In that moment, there was no place for doubt. I was sitting with the supreme being.  I had always sat beside her.  She was inside of me.

Mankind owns four things
that are no good at sea:
rudder, anchor, oars
and the fear of going down.

A good philosopher is one who does not take ideas seriously.

Is there a God?  Who knows?  Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?

There are four gate-keepers at the entrace to the Realm of Freedom [moksha].

Self control
Spirit of Inquiry
Contentment
Good Company

With a pure heart and a receptive mind, and without the veil of doubt and  restlessness of the mind, listen to the exposition of the nature and means of liberation.

Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt the people who are doing it.

You know, my faith is one that admits some doubt.

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.

For Man nothing is beyond doubt; for God everything is beyond doubt.

I have no proof for any proof.

 

Whoever was responsible for the idea of dividing self into lower and higher parts committed a serious crime against humanity. This division has given rise to the notion that the lower (ego and immature) self must be overcome while the higher (unitive and whole) self must be sought as the goal of human realization. Out of ignorance, I too clung to this notion because I believed it was this higher self that would be united with God for all eternity. It took a long time before my experiences led me to doubt this conviction and, at the same time, let in the possibility that this was not the whole truth and that there was still further to go.

Doubt, the essential preliminary of all improvement and discovery, must accompany the stages of man’s onward progress. The faculty of doubting and questioning, without which those of comparison and judgment would be useless, is itself a divine prerogative of the reason.

Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we often might win, by fearing to attempt.

"We'll never survive!"
"Nonsense. You're only saying that because no one ever has."

The absurd is a shadow cast over everything we do and even if we try to live life as if it has meaning as if there are reasons for doing things the absurd will linger in the back of our minds as a nagging doubt that perhaps there is no point.

All that the posture of skepticism accomplishes is to freeze the ego in an ignorantist poverty that never stretches or diversifies its resources of imagination or understanding.  Any uncultured cretin can close his eyes and try to reduce the issues down to linear simplisms and say, "I am doubting, I am proving my magisterial or sovereign control over my own mind."  Doubt is a useful and significant test of one's critical powers, but by itself it bears little if any significant cultural charge of enlightenment or satori; indeed it is the very opposite kind of thing.

In spite of the ancient roots of skepticism--all the way back to the radical Sextus Empiricus and beyond, to Parmenides and Zeno--"doubt" remains a constantly miscomprehended action and posture.  Doubt is a state of the suspension of both belief and disbelief:  many people assume that thinking has only two positions, positive and negative, and if you doubt something you are disputing its validity or positing the contradictory position.  This is disputation, not doubt.  Doubt per se questions the form or content of what has been asserted but it itself is a freeform state of wondering what the general parameters of the issue are and how it most rationally ought to be framed.  Such particulars as most people are familiar with--position A or not-A, conservative or liberal, Christian or atheist, etc.--are never authoritative or exhaustive alternatives for a truly thinking and creative or radical mind (determined to go for fundamental principles, not their peripheral consequences or specific applications).  They are "stock fallacies" or forced choices.

Doubt everything. Find your own light.

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Doubt.

In the spiritual search doubt is beneficial, a closed mind is not. Doubt used wisely assists enlightenment; a closed mind assists ignorance.

                                                                                                                                                from The "Quo Vadis?" File.

Buddhism took what I thought were the truly worthwhile things about the hardcore punk movement to their logical conclusion. The hardcores questioned society’s values, but never really questioned their own. The hardcores knew the straight world was fucked, but didn’t seem to have any idea what to do about that. Buddhism was absolutely free of the kind of bullshit I’d found in every religion I’d looked into. The object of Buddhist worship is this world itself, the reality we are living in right now. No God, no angels, no Heaven or Hell, no Savior except yourself.

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.