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It is reserved for man alone to find his very existence questionable, to experience the whole dubiousness of being. More than such faculties as power of speech, conceptual thinking, or walking erect, this factor of doubting the significance of his own existence is what sets man apart from animal.
-Victor Frankl
The Doctor and the Soul (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 1960
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The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
-Erich Fromm
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Skepticism, is that anything more than we used to mean when we said, Well, what have we here?
-Robert Frost
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Doubt is the father of invention.
-Galileo Galilei
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Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.
-Kahlil Gibran
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I will listen to anyone's convictions, but pray keep your doubts to yourself.
-Johann von Goethe
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We know accurately only when we know little, with knowledge doubt increases.
-Johann von Goethe
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Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.
-Ernest Hemingway
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He that knows nothing doubts nothing.
-George Herbert
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The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.
-Eric Hoffer
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To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes
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Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom.
-George Iles
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Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.
-Samuel Johnson
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He that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly become corrupt.
-Samuel Johnson
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Suspicion is most often useless pain.
-Samuel Johnson
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There is much honest doubt that should be encouraged. History, for instance, is literally patched together by doubt. There could be no progress without it. Galileo doubted that the Earth stood still. Copernicus doubted that the Earth was the center of the universe. Columbus doubted that it was flat. Newton doubted that nature was erratic, and Einstein doubted that the Earth was fixed.
-Larry Jones
How To Make It To Friday
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A new disease? I know not, new or old, but it may well be called poor mortals plague for, like a pestilence, it doth infect the houses of the brain till not a thought, or motion, in the mind, be free from the black poison of suspect.
-Ben Jonson
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Everybody in the world thought we couldn't do it. But we did, dammit.
-Bill Koch, After winning the America's Cup.
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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.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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An honest man can never surrender an honest doubt.
-Walter Malone
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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
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To doubt is worse than to have lost; And to despair is but to antedate those miseries that must fall on us.
-Philip Massinger
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Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
-H. L. Mencken
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I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
-Wilson Mizner
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The path of sound credence is through the thick forest of skepticism.
-George Jean Nathan
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Books about Doubt
