Edgar Quinet Quotes

Skepticism is provisional, even if it lasts a lifetime.

Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.

I am too inquisitive, too skeptical, too arrogant, to let myself be satisfied with an obvious and crass solution of things. God is such an obvious and crass solution; a solution which is a sheer indelicacy to us thinkers - at bottom He is really nothing but a coarse commandment against us: ye shall not think!

The supreme triumph of reason is to cast doubt upon its own validity.

We somehow believe that our point of view is superior, higher than those of the greatest minds either because our point of view is that of our time, and our time, being later than the time of the greatest minds, can be presumed to be superior to their times; or else because we believe that each the greatest minds was right from his point of view, but not, as he claims, simply right.

The proof that a philosopher does not know what he is talking about is apt to sadden his followers before it reacts on himself.

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.

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.

If we will disbelieve everything, because we cannot certainly know all things, we shall do much what as wisely as he who would not use his legs, but sit still and perish, because he had no wings to fly.

Every man is fully satisfied that there is such a thing as truth, or he would not ask any question.

Plenty of pundits have really high IQs, but they don't have any discipline in how they look at the world, and so it leads to a lot of bullshit, basically.

Everywhere, except in theology, there has been a vigorous growth of skepticism about skepticism itself.

Their [the Skeptics'] way of speaking is: "I settle nothing. . . . I do not understand it. . . . Nothing seems true that may not seem false." Their sacramental word is . . . , which is to say, I suspend my judgment.

Be very slow to believe that you are wiser than all others; it is a fatal but common error.

The feeling of mistrust is always the last which a great mind acquires.

If ... it is not in my power to arrive at the knowledge of any truth, I may at least do what is in my power, namely, suspend judgement.

In philosophy, when we make use of false principles, we depart the farther from the knowledge of truth and wisdom exactly in proportion to the care with which we cultivate them, and apply ourselves to the deduction of diverse consequences from them, thinking that we are philosophizing well, while we are only departing the farther from the truth; from which it must be inferred that they who have learned the least of all that has been hitherto distinguished by the name of philosophy are the most fitted for the apprehension of truth.

Skepticism is my only gospel, but I don't want to make a dogma out of it.

They dispute not in order to find or even to seek Truth, but for victory, and to appear the more learned and strenuous upholders of a contrary opinion. Such persons should be avoided by all who have not a good breastplate of patience.

Skepticism means, not intellectual doubt alone, but moral doubt.

I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions.

Discussion is impossible with someone who claims not to seek the truth, but already to possess it.

Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions.

We are suffering from a believism that never has believed, and a receivism that never has received, and it leads to deceivism.