Robert Adams Quotes

Doubt your doubts before you doubt your beliefs.

I began to realize that thinking itself is nothing but the process of asking and answering questions.

I think everyone has questions in their mind. Did they do their very best?

When you ask the best questions of yourself and others, you invite the best answers.

People with lots of doubts sometimes find life more oppressive and exhausting than others, but they're more energetic - they aren't robots.

Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

Doubt yourself and you doubt everything you see. Judge yourself and you see judges everywhere. But if you listen to the sound of your own voice, you can rise above doubt and judgment. And you can see forever.

If you're not riddled with doubt, you've probably done something wrong.

Who knows most, doubts most.

The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure that it is right

I always thought it better to allow myself to doubt before I decided, than to expose myself to the misery, after I had decided, of doubting whether I had decided rightly and justly.

We'd all like to be certain of what we know, but I think the most important question is to ask yourself do you really know what you know?

Even criticism is more interesting when the writer's authority does not only come through this omniscient narrator, but through questions, ambivalence, vulnerability. A mind questioning and on the move, not just settling down and declaring - that's one of the most interesting possibilities.

I question everything I do.

In philosophy you're never 100% sure. You're always undermining what you think you know. That's always been my philosophy and my intellectual ethos.

I'd ask people to keep in mind the idea that if you really understand something, it's even more important for you to consider the possibility of your wrongness. Even if it takes someone dumber than you to point that out.

The doubter is a true man of science: he doubts only himself and his interpretations, but he believes in science.

The only virtue on which I pride myself is my self-doubt; when a writer loses her self-doubt, the time has come to lay aside her pen.

I think the appropriate kind of skepticism is this: you've got to be asking questions all the time, you've also got to make sure that you're doing so in the spirit of genuinely wanting to find the answers - and that also means being open. I battle with this: I know I tend to be very skeptical and as a result, I veer towards the dismissive. But being aware of the tendency, I like to challenge my own skepticism and make sure it's not just knee-jerk. You need to be skeptical towards yourself as well. When you're only skeptical outwards you've got an unbalanced skepticism.

Doubt is merely a thought. When experience proves it wrong, it will quickly go away.

Question everything. Your love, your religion, your passion. If you don't have questions, you'll never find answers.

I think that probably the most important thing about our education was that it taught us to question even those things we thought we knew.

Evil does not question itself. Only Hope questions itself.