William Faulkner Quotes

Never believe what you cannot doubt.

The agnostic does not simply say, "l do not know." He goes another step, and he says, with great emphasis, that you do not know. He insists that you are trading on the ignorance of others, and on the fear of others. He is not satisfied with saying that you do not know, -- he demonstrates that you do not know, and he drives you from the field of fact -- he drives you from the realm of reason -- he drives you from the light, into the darkness of conjecture -- into the world of dreams and shadows, and he compels you to say, at last, that your faith has no foundation in fact.

That's something I learned as a philosophy major: The philosophy ethos is, always question, never rest.

I did not imitate the skeptics who doubt only for doubting's sake, and pretend to be always undecided; on the contrary, my whole intention was to arrive at a certainty, and to dig away the drift and the sand until I reached the rock or the clay beneath.

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!

On the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. Reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it's still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there's something understandable.

I determine nothing; I do not comprehend things; I suspend judgment; I examine.

To deny, to believe, and to doubt well, are to a man what the race is to a horse.

The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.

Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom.

Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt -- particularly to doubt one's cherished beliefs, one's dogmas and one's axioms.

Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness.

The wise skeptic does not teach doubt but how] to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting.

Thenceforth they thought that, rationally concluded, doubt could become an instrument of knowledge.

Skepticism is not a position; it's a process.

What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men's minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.

A philosophy that begins in doubt assails what no-one believes, and invites us to nothing believable

Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has: it never comes to the aid of spiritual things.

'UFO's' attitude toward the subject is very similar to mine. It's not an advocacy; its philosophy is more 'I want to believe this, but I want it proved.'

Skepticism is the first step on the road to philosophy.

The first step towards philosophy is incredulity.

Philosophy likes to keen common sense on the run.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.