George Bernard Shaw Quotes

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

Progress is born of doubt and inquiry. The Church never doubts, never inquires. To doubt is heresy, to inquire is to admit that you do not know—the Church does neither.

The alternative to doubt is authority, against which science had fought for centuries.

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

There is no consensus, there is no homogeneity, there is no truth.

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

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

There is only one thing about which I am certain, and that is that there is very little about which one can be certain.

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.

All through my life, when faced with a difficult decision, I always ask myself - where can I learn more. Make the choice to learn.

Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle: permit us to question - to doubt - to not be sure. I think that it is important that we do not forget this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained.

It was the schoolboy who said, ""Faith is believing what you know ain't so.""

It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.

No one is infallible, and no one can claim a monopoly on truth or virtue. It would be contradictory for skepticism to seek to translate itself into a new faith.

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.

There are no indisputable truths.

Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered.

I've gone through most of my life not believing anything. Either I know or I don't know, or I think.

We don't need to invest all of our faith in every concept, in every symbol, in every opinion that forms the totality of our knowledge. Faith means to believe in something 100% without a doubt, and to doubt our own knowledge can seem like the most frightening thing that can happen to us.

Buddha urged people to investigate things - he didn't just command them to believe.

We need wisdom the most when we believe in it the least.

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

You must never believe all these things which the scientists say because they always want more than they can get-they are never satisfied.

I've read too many books to believe what I am told.