Michael Shermer Quotes

Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.

I think of how and why and what happened and the thoughts come easily, but the answers don't.

Sometimes people ask if my books have morals or lessons for readers, and I shudder at that thought. I always say that I have more questions than answers.

There aren't always answers for the questions you're looking for, so I have to make peace with that sometimes.

I think there are certain questions that get asked in comics over and over again, and people want definitive answers, but I feel like there shouldn't be definitive answers.

You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out - perhaps a little at a time.' And how long is that going to take?' I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps.' That could be a long time.' I will tell you a further mystery,' he said. 'It may take longer.

You don'’t always have to have the answer to everything.

He found himself still with too many questions and not enough answers.

Not all questions can be answered.

We all want to know what went wrong, even when there isn't really an answer to that question.

Those questions you have? Whether he's the one, whether you feel about him the way you should, or whether the relationship is going okay? When you're not sure whether you're in love with someone or not, the answer is not.

I do not like odd things until I can understand them.

Or maybe you’re merely uncomfortable with uncertainty. Like the rest of the human race.

It seems to be very hard for people to live with riddles or to let them live, although one would think that life is so full of riddles as it is that a few more things we cannot answer would make no difference. But perhaps it is just this that is so unendurable, that there are irrational things in our own psyche which upset the conscious mind in its illusory certainties by confronting it with the riddle of its existence.

Larry Grobel senses there are no answers in life, only questions. Good ones.

That is my theory to explain the I don't knows. It's human.

The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.

Sometimes a question can hurt more than an answer.

Don't beat yourself up for not knowing the answers. You don't always have to know who you are. You don't have to have the big picture, or know where you're heading. Sometimes, it's enough just to know what you're going to do next.

There were mysterious questions, but a mysterious answer was a contradiction in terms.

Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I’m hoping to define a new position - one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story.

There will always be more questions. Every answer leads to more questions. The only way to survive is to let some of them go.

Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.

Maybe the only thing I can definitely say about is this: That’s life. Maybe the only thing we can do is accept it, without really knowing what’s going on.