385 Quotes About Skepticism

It all depends on what people you're talking about helping. That's the wonderful think about just about every religion on the planet - they're all so incredibly selfish.

My natural optimism just leads me to be skeptical.

Friends ask you questions; enemies question you.

We discover truth by asking rapier-like questions that cut through the thick fog of doctrinarism. Artists and philosophers must be subversive: we need these rebellious cynics to ask questions, they must resist cultural norms; seek out truths that are not self-evident and challenge everything. Doubt, not blind belief, is essential for discovering truth.

But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.

Reasonably question the motives of power and authority despite its source, because people are often inclined to abuse them.

The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.

I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything.

To love at a distance and without hope; never to possess; to dream chastely of pale charms and impossible kisses extinguished on the waxen brow of death: ah, that is something like it. A delicious straying away from the world, and never the return. As only the unreal is not ignoble and empty, existence must be admitted to be abominable. Yes, imagination is the only good thing which heaven vouchsafes to the skeptic and pessimist, alarmed by the eternal abjectness of life.