Sally Quinn Quotes

Throughout the long period of religious doubt, I had been rendered very unhappy by the gradual loss of belief, but when the process was completed, I found to my surprise that I was quite glad to be done with the whole subject.

How can a rabbi not live with doubt? The Bible itself is a book of doubt.

The most interesting character to me is someone who is stuck in the no man's land between Belief and Unbelief, Faith and Faithlessness. I'm capitalizing like a German, but it doesn't matter whether it's faith in a person or in God, or belief in science or whatever, it's the desperate in-between state that makes for interesting dramatic tension.

Faith is Doubt.

I questioned the blind faith demanded by my religion, which was Islam.

I'm a big believer in tolerance. I think that religion at it's best comes with a big dose of doubt.

The mature religious sentiment is ordinarily fashioned in the workshop of doubt.

Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing. Always. It's because I'm not quite an atheist and it worries me. There's that little bit that holds on: 'Well, I'm almost an atheist. Give me a couple of months.'

My faith, inasmuch as I have any, is more like a kind of Joseph Campbell thing, and even that frequently finds itself tested to oblivion in siren waters.

In spite of my surroundings, of my education, I had no love for God.

You believe in God, then you don't believe anymore and when you have a big problem, you pray anyway.

I have moved from certainty to doubt, from devotion to rebellion.

I don't know what I believe in. I try not to think about it. I don't want to think about it.

Believing in God is a very intense inner struggle of mine. It's something I worry about a lot, but which I don't have the answer to.

I gave up religious thinking a long time ago and am really just an agnostic now.

You know, a lot of people give up their religion, but, oh, my goodness, they go through such agonies. I never did.

I fear You and, yes, I love You: and yet I cannot believe. Why could You not let me believe, where so many believed? Or else, why could You not let me deride, as the remainder derided so noisily? O God, why could You not let me have faith? for You gave me no faith in anything, not even in nothingness. It was not fair.

By the age of fifteen, I had convinced myself that nobody could give a reasonable explanation of what he meant by the word 'God' and that it was therefore as meaningless to assert a belief as to assert a disbelief in God. Though this, in a general way, has remained my position ever since, I have always avoided unnecessarily to offend other people holding religious belief by displaying my lack of such belief, or even stating my lack of belief, if I was not challenged.

God, how I ricochet between certainties and doubts.

My fear is greater than my faith, but I walk the missionary way.

[When a young person loses faith in his religion because he begins to study science and its methodology] it isn't that [through the obtaining of real knowledge that] he knows it all, but he suddenly realizes that he doesn't know it all.

I am an agnostic as to the question of God.

What did I really think fifteen years ago? A nonbeliever, I felt guilty in the midst of all those believers. And since it seemed to me that they were in the right, I decided to believe, as you might decide to take an aspirin: It can't hurt and you might get better.

It seems to me that doubt is worse than trial. I had sooner suffer any affliction than be left to question the gospel or my own interest in it.

It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith-as mysterious as faith itself. Like faith, it is ultimately not rooted in logic; it is a change in the climate of the mind.