59 Doubt-Inspiring Quotes

In a world that often values certainty and decisiveness, doubt can be an underrated companion in our quest for truth and understanding. Embracing uncertainty can lead to profound insights, more meaningful self-reflection, and even personal growth. Our carefully curated collection of the top 59 doubt-inspiring quotes serves as a reminder that questioning the status quo and acknowledging our uncertainties might just open the door to unexpected wisdom. Whether you're navigating a personal crossroads or simply seeking a fresh perspective, these thought-provoking quotes are sure to challenge your thinking and inspire deeper contemplation. Dive in and explore the power of doubt as a catalyst for enlightenment and change.

1. “We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt.” - Dallas Willard

2. “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” - Bertrand Russell

3. “We learn from failure, not from success!” - Bram Stoker

4. “Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.” - Voltaire

5. “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

6. “Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.” - Richard P. Feynman

7. “Now, Kalamas, don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that, ‘These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness’ — then you should enter & remain in them.[Kalama Sutta, AN 3.65]” - Gautama Buddha

8. “Every mental act is composed of doubt and belief,but it is belief that is the positive, it is beliefthat sustains thought and holds the world together.” - Søren Kierkegaard

9. “Life is doubt,And faith without doubt is nothing but death.” - Miguel de Unamuno

10. “It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can't help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet.” - P.G. Wodehouse

11. “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

12. “We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!” - Douglas Adams

13. “The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice.” - Saul Alinsky

14. “Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure. ” - Reinhold Neibuhr

15. “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

16. “Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.” - Guy de Maupassant

17. “I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.” - David Foster Wallace

18. “The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt. (p. 21)” - Rollo May

19. “Nothing was or is farther from my intentions, than to enlist myself as the champion of a fixed opinion, where I have only expressed doubt.” - Thomas Jefferson

20. “To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.” - Christopher Hitchens

21. “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

22. “Faith doesn't mean that you never doubt. It only means that you never act upon your doubts.” - Orson Scott Card

23. “People who're nuts never doubt their own sanity. (The Killer's Cousin)” - Nancy Werlin

24. “No one knows for sure that that tomorrow won't come, but most people assume that tomorrow will still exist as usual. This is Toba's Paradox, which means, hope overcomes doubt.” - Toba Beta

25. “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

26. “Temptation is stronger in the minds of people who are in doubt. Prayer makes it weaker.” - Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident]

27. “Be true, unbeliever.” - Stephen R. Donaldson

28. “Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.” - Frederick Buechner

29. “I had to nurture those doubts as if they were tiny, sickly kittens, until eventually they became sturdy, healthy grievances, with their own cat doors, which allowed them to wander in and out of our conversation at will.” - Nick Hornby

30. “The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed enough for it.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

31. “Questioning anything within doubt, will just bring mind to no certainty.” - Toba Beta

32. “I always knew I was going to be rich. I don't think I ever doubted it for a minute. ” - Warren Buffett

33. “I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.” - Bram Stoker

34. “When you don't know where to start,just go to a place you miss so much.” - Toba Beta

35. “He who replies to words of doubtdoth put the light of knowledge out.” - William Blake

36. “The question that is upon my lips (please forgive me) is the doubt in your heart” - Jeremy Aldana

37. “You are not Dostoevsky,' said the woman...'You never can tell...' he answered.'Dostoevsky is dead,' the woman said, a bit uncertainly.'I protest!' he said with heat, 'Dostoevsky is immortal!” - Mikhail Bulgakov

38. “In times of widespread chaos and confusion, it has been the duty of more advanced human beings--artists, scientists, clowns and philosophers--to create order. In times such as ours, however, when there is too much order, too much management, too much programming and control, it becomes the duty of superior men and women to fling their favorite monkey wrenches into the machinery. To relive the repression of the human spirit, they must sow doubt and disruption.” - Tom Robbins

39. “If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

40. “I do not preach doubtingly, for I do not live doubtingly.” - C.H. Spurgeon

41. “So it goes for those of us who live in a cul-de-sac, where babies are brought home from the hospital and watched over, where hearts stop and feet slip, where we wonder if there is a hidden road that leads somewhere.We believe and we doubt. Believing and doubting share the same inevitability, but they are not equal. They cannot lay the same claim on our allegiance. They do not share the same power.If there are places beyond the cul-de-sac, doubt cannot take us there.” - John Ortberg

42. “He tried to read her heart in her handclasp but he knew nothing.” - Cormac McCarthy

43. “Those mortals who operate in the grey area between conviction and incredulity are in a position to choose most meaningfully, and with most meaningful consequences […] Perhaps only a doubter can appreciate the miracle of life without end.” - Terryl L. Givens

44. “No one should be surprised at the difficulty of faith, if there is some part of his life where he is consciously resisting or disobeying the commandment of Jesus. Is there some part of your life which you are refusing to surrender at his behest, some sinful passion, maybe, or some animosity, some hope, perhaps your ambition or your reason? ... How can you hope to enter into communion with him when at some point in your life you are running away from him?” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

45. “Fear and doubt are major stampeders.” - Karen Marie Moning

46. “La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia.” - Jorge Luis Borges

47. “Do you have any idea how mad you sound?’‘Indeed I do. I have in moments of doubt considered the question of my sanity.’ (...)‘And?’‘Then I consider what a piece of work is man. How defective in reason, how mean his facilities, how ugly in form and movement, in action how like a devil, in apprehension how like a cow. The beauty of the world? The paragon of animals? To me the quintessence of dust.” - Paul Hoffman

48. “Best not to take, yet doubt its strength,A leash with Demons at its length.” - McKenzie Bodkin

49. “Soul mates, I've always believed in, so I accepted the truth there. But curses? That was extreme. There had to be a place where the line was drawn between fiction and reality, and a curse sounded way more on the fiction side of the spectrum.” - Michelle Madow

50. “Faith slips - and laughs, and rallies” - Emily Dickinson

51. “He said that doubt provided contour to faith, like shading in a drawing, that it allowed you to see what was really there. At the time we were learning how to sketch in art class, I felt like it was the one thing he said that I actually understood.” - Anna Jarzab

52. “Like JJ Abrams,  creators just want to tell a story and entertain people. So why only focus in one way of telling it?Give readers another way to connect with your story.  Entertainment does not need to be contained in one medium. Think about telling your story in many mediums.” - Anne-Rae Vasquez

53. “Why do I keep evading my work? Is it because I’m afraid of being confronted by my lack of abilities?” - Candace Bushnell

54. “Check other sources before believing mainstream media.Seek the truth.” - Anne-Rae Vasquez

55. “You used to give yourself over to endless sessions of doubt. You would claim to be an expert on the subject. But doubting would tire you so much that you would end up doubting doubt itself. I saw you one day at the end of an afternoon of solitary speculation. You were unmoving and petrified. Running several kilometers in a deep forest full of ravines and pitfalls would have exhausted you less.” - Edouard Leve

56. “Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt, as I understand the subject; difficulty and doubt are incommensurate.” - John Henry Newman

57. “God is always trying to give blessings to us, but our minds are usually too full to receive them.” - Shannon L. Alder

58. “She had reason to doubt him; he was real good at planning but real bad at doing.” - Junot Diaz

59. “We both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an hour, which keeps believing nimble.” - Emily Dickinson