Phil Donahue Quotes

Not believing has a sickness which is believing a little.

Faith and doubt cannot exist in the same mind at the same time, for one will dispel the other.

I believe that, too, it's hard to believe that anybody could not believe that.

Faith is Doubt.

God, how I ricochet between certainties and doubts.

If you call yourself a non-believer, you're referring to disbelief in something, and you're acknowledging that there is something to believe in or not.

Take faith, for example. For many people in our world, the opposite of faith is doubt. The goal, then, within this understanding, is to eliminate doubt. But faith and doubt aren't opposites. Doubt is often a sign that your faith has a pulse, that it's alive and well and exploring and searching. Faith and doubt aren't opposites, they are, it turns out, excellent dance partners.

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

For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible.

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.

Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.

I am the skeptic of skeptics.

In so far as I have any beliefs, I suppose I'm like that old Peggy Lee song, 'Is That All There Is?' I want to believe there's something else going on, but what that something else is I don't pretend to know.

Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else.

Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.

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.'

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.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

I am a man of lost faiths.

If you want to lose your faith, make friends with a priest.

Skepticism, riddling the faith of yesterday, prepared the way for the faith of tomorrow.

Love and doubt have never been on speaking terms.

Life is doubt, and faith without doubt is nothing but death.

We cannot infer that because sciences of things divine and human are full of controversies and quarrels, therefore their whole subject-matter is uncertain ; for there have been many persons so enamoured of contradiction, as to turn into ridicule geometrical axioms.

You know, for a long time I became almost atheist. I believed in nothing. And it was tough for me to believe in anything at all because I had believed so strongly. And I divorced myself of spirituality, I think.