Becca Fitzpatrick Quotes

I have teken refuge in the doctrine that advises one not to seek tranquility in certainty but in permanently suspended judgement.

A scientist is never certain. ... We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning.

It is not by believing but by doubting that one can attain to the truth, which is ever changing form and condition.

The pragmatist knows that doubt is an art which hs to be acquired with difficulty.

Doubt is often the beginning of wisdom.

I have many questions, but no patience to think them through.

I have throughout been curious about how much we can be said to know and with what degree of certainty or doubtfulness.

That's a question mark everyone's asking

There is no permanence in doubt; it incites the mind to closer inquiry and experiment, from which, if rightly managed, certainty proceeds, and in this alone can man find thorough satisfaction.

I think doubt is a very healthy way to live.

He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know, but as the essence of knowing.

Doubt is an element of criticism, and the tendency of criticism is necessarily skeptical.

Que sçais-je?" (What do I know?)

Do you want me to answer that?

Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily playful, he begins to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties.

William James used to preach the "will-to-believe." For my part, I should wish to preach the "will-to-doubt." None of our beliefs are quite true; all at least have a penumbra of vagueness and error. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

Some people say, "How can you live without knowing?" I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know.

At the very smallest wheel of our reasoning it is possible for a handful of questions to break the bank of our answers.

Questions outlive the answers.

In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting, to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself.

To doubt is a misfortune, but to seek when in doubt is an indispensable duty. So he who doubts and seeks not is at once unfortunate and unfair.

It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.

doubts, like facts, are stubborn things.

I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.

As you yourself have said, what other explanation can there be?' Poirot stared straight ahead of him. 'That is what I ask myself,' he said. 'That is what I never cease to ask myself.