"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. "
— René Descartes

"Westley: Hear this now: I will always come for you.
Buttercup: But how can you be sure?
Westley: This is true love - you think this happens every day?

Westley: I told you I would always come for you. Why didn't you wait for me?
Buttercup: Well... you were dead.
Westley: Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.
Buttercup: I will never doubt again.
Westley: There will never be a need. "
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith."
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith."
— Paul Tillich

"Doubt everything. Find your own light."
— Siddhārtha Gautama

"Every mental act is composed of doubt and belief,
but it is belief that is the positive, it is belief
that sustains thought and holds the world together."
— Søren Kierkegaard

"If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation."
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

"Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little or too much;
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd;
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!"
— Alexander Pope

"I'll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation."
— Yann Martel

"And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrased, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers--perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"In these times I don't, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I don't want what I know and want what I don't know."
— Marsilio Ficino (Letters of Marsilio Ficino: Volume 3)

"Life is doubt,
And faith without doubt is nothing but death."
— Miguel de Unamuno

"And I realized that I’d tolerated him this long because of self-doubt."
— Anne Rice (Interview With the Vampire)

"Once you become self-conscious, there is no end to it; once you start to doubt, there is no room for anything else."
— Mignon McLaughlin (The Complete Neurotic's Notebook)

"There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds."
— Alfred Lord Tennyson

"Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving."
— Frederick Buechner

"She was as one who, in madness, was resolute to throw herself from a precipice, but to whom some remnant of sanity remained which forced her to seek those who would save her from herself."
— Anthony Trollope (Can You Forgive Her?)

"Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness."
— Gustave Flaubert (Memoirs of a Madman)

"A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading."
— Leszek Kołakowski (Metaphysical Horror)

""Sometimes doubting is not a lack of faith, but an expression of it. Sometimes to doubt is to merely insist that God be taken seriously not frivolously, to insist that our faith is placed in and upheld by something other than seeming conjuring tricks." "
— Mark Buchanan (Your God is Too Safe)

"It's not atheists who get stuck in my caw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for awhile. We all must pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we... But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as means of transportation."
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.



"
— Samuel Johnson

"Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure. "
— Reinhold Niebuhr

"We live by revelation, as Christians, as artists, which means we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds. The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget the questions, and we become smug like the Pharisee who listed all his considerable virtues, and thanked God that he was not like other men.

Unamuno might be describing the artist as well as the Christian as he writes, "Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.""
— Madeleine L'Engle (Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art)

"Orthodoxy is idolatry if it means holding the 'correct opinions about God' - 'fundamentalism' is the most extreme and salient example of such idolatry - but not if it means holding faith in the right way, that is, not holding it at all but being held by God, in love and service. Theology is idolatry if it means what we say about God instead of letting ourselves be addressed by what God has to say to us. Faith is idolatrous if it is rigidly self-certain but not if it is softened in the waters of 'doubt.'"
— John D. Caputo (What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church)

"I never seek to defeat the man I am fighting, " he explained. "I seek to defeat his confidence. A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course to victory. Two men are equals - true equals - only when they both have equal confidence."
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

Haven't been able to find the place where this quote was taken, and have heard at times that he may not have coined it. However it's great nonetheless."
— Voltaire

"Any truth is better than indefinite doubt.
"
— Arthur Conan Doyle

"I always knew I was going to be rich. I don't think I ever doubted it for a minute. "
— Warren Buffett

"They had applied their doubts to the very head that had introduced doubt as a tool for advancing knowledge. And in the end they gave the head a nod."
— Russell Shorto (Descartes' Bones: a Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason)

""There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds." Alfred, Lord Tennyson "
— Alfred Lord Tennyson