Edward Teller Quotes

Skepticism may undermine beliefs, but never belief.

I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them.

if you don't have doubts you're either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants-in-the-pants of faith. They keep it alive and moving.

Doubt is the first step towards knowledge, not faith.

"Belief in the truth commences with the doubting of all those "truths" we once believed."

What do we believe? Why do we believe it?

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth of falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it?

As I get older I seem to believe less and less and yet to believe what I do believe more and more.

Carl did not want to believe. He wanted to know.

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.

When you don't believe something, you can't make yourself believe it. There's nothing you can do to believe it again. You either believe it or you don't.

The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty.

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

I think maybe it is better to believe than not to believe. But I couldn't tell you why.

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to doubt.

I May Be Wrong but I Doubt It.

I do not believe in Belief.

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.

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

It is no sin to doubt some things, but it may be fatal to believe everything.

There Lives More Faith in Honest Doubt, Believe Me, Than Half the Creeds. - Alfred, Lord Tennyson

There is no faith, without a critical mind

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.

Questions are not scary. What is scary is when people don’t have any. What is tragic is faith that has no room for them.