Stephen R. Donaldson Quotes

If fallacies come knocking at my door,I'd rather feed, and shelter full a score,Than hide behind the black portcullis, doubt,And run the risk of barring one Truth out.And if pretension for a time deceive,And prove me one too ready to believe,Far less my shame, than if by stubborn act,I brand as lie, some great colossal Fact.

The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.

It's OK to have beliefs, just don't believe in them.

Belief is tricky because left to its own devices, it can court a kind of surety, an unquestioning allegiance that fears doubt and destroys difference.

I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I'm wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.

The natural cause of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism.

What is important is that one utilizes one's intellect and not to be 100 percent sure about one's convictions. One should always leave room for doubt.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

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

Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing.

There are two ways to slice easily thorugh life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.

To accept anything on trust, to preclude critical application and development, is a grievous sin;

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.

Progress is born of doubt and inquiry. The Church never doubts, never inquires. To doubt is heresy, to inquire is to admit that you do not know—the Church does neither.

When did ignorance become a point of view?

He that believes all misseth; he that believes nothing, hits not.

Incredulity is not wisdom.

True belief is not about blind submission. It is about open-eyed acceptance, and acceptance requires persistent distance from the truth, and that distance is doubt. Doubt, in other words, can feed faith, rather than destroy it. And it forces us, even while believing, to recognize our fundamental duty with respect to God's truth: humility. We do not know. Which is why we believe.

Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.

If you haven't doubted, you probably haven't thought very hard about what you believe.

A man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.

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.

My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.

A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.

It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the Truth.