385 Quotes About Skepticism

Spurious accounts that snare the gullible are readily available. Skeptical treatments are much harder to find. Skepticism does not sell well.

It is far harder to make a believer into a skeptic than to make a skeptic into a believer.

It is epokhe all the way.

David Hume, in a moment of acute skepticism, felt panicky in the solitude of his study and had to go out and join his friends in the billiard room in order to be reassured that the external world was really there.

There is a remarkable sentence of Pascal according to which we know too little to be dogmatists and too much to be skeptics, which expresses beautifully what Plato conveys through his dialogues.

Scepticism does not abolish the world, it turns it into questions.

If you can't prove that anything exists outside you own mind, is it all right to go on believing in the external world anyway?

The holly grove, carved a century ago by the druids, was designed to amplify emotion to a cathartic crescendo. You see, druidism (as did most early religions) realized the essential truth that faith is an emotional, rather than a logical, response to the world. They designed their places of worship around this fact. Love, fear, guilt, rapture, these are religious words. Believers feel their belief. Skeptics contemplate their doubt.

Don't take security in the false refuge of consensus.