Henrietta Szold Quotes

I have to recognize that I am agnostic.

I'm interested in characters who should know better, who know they should give up, move on, accept life as it is, with all its constraints - life, death, time - but don't.

My songs are about not knowing who to be and not knowing how to act.

I do struggle with the fact that I don't have all the answers.

Sometimes I think I'm real predictable to myself and other times... you always wonder, Is this really what I wanted to do? Did I make a mistake? Should I be doing something else?

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.

I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.

I am a deeply religious unbeliever.

I think we all go through those moments of self-doubt.

That's true that I'm "not religious as that term is conventionally understood," though I've never been an atheist. Atheism is an active faith; it says, "I believe there is no God." But I don't know what I believe. I was brought up a Lutheran in Jamestown, North Dakota. I have trouble with faith. I'm not proud of this. I don't think it makes me an intellectual. I would believe if I could, and I may be able to before it's over. I would welcome that.

Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.

If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.

I go to church because I am a skeptic in regard to my own skepticism.

I think writing for me has always been a matter of fear. Writing is fear and not writing is fear. I am afraid of writing and then I'm afraid of not writing.

Standing alone,eager to just believe,it's good enough to be what you really are,but in your heart,uncertainty forever lies,and you'll always be,somewhere on the outside.

I began to feel that if religion was either an illusion or a revelation, it was simpler to accept it as an illusion.

Throughout the long period of religious doubt, I had been rendered very unhappy by the gradual loss of belief, but when the process was completed, I found to my surprise that I was quite glad to be done with the whole subject.

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.

An agnostic is a doubter. The word is generally applied to those who doubt the verity of accepted religious creeds of faiths.

Torn between fear and something that resembled love, she wrestled with questions she never dreamed she would face: How could she leave? Then again, how could she stay?

My fear is greater than my faith, but I walk the missionary way.

I don't have enough faith to be an Atheist.

...if you ask me whether or not I'm an atheist, I wouldn't even answer. I would first want an explanation of what it is that I'm supposed not to believe in, and I've never seen an explanation.

I do think that many religious people have enormous doubts.

Pride and curiosity are the two scourges of our souls. The latter prompts us to poke our noses into everything, and the former forbids us to leave anything unresolved and undecided.