Albert Schweitzer Quotes

Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt.

I'm a strict, strict agnostic. It's very different from a casual, 'I don't know.' It's that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can't present it as fact.

Who never doubted, never half believed. Where doubt is, there truth is - it is her shadow.

Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

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.

'Belief' means something that you do not know. You want to assume and bring a certainty to something that you do not know. That means you are concretising your ignorance. There is no need to believe anything.

The first lesson about trusting your senses is: don't. Just because you believe something to be true, just because you know it's true, that doesn't mean it is true.

Carl did not want to believe. He wanted to know.

Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.

Which country is real, mine or the teacher's? My wish is that we might progressively lose our confidence in what we think we believe and the things we consider stable and secure, in order to remind ourselves of the infinite number of things still waiting to be discovered.

I might as well doubt of my own being, as of the being of those things I actually see and feel.

Sometimes the truth isn't good enough. Sometimes people have got to have their faith rewarded.

You do not believe, you only believe that you believe.

Everyone who observes himself doubting observes a truth, and about that which he observes he is certain; therefore he is certain about a truth. Everyone therefore who doubts whether truth exists has in himself a truth on which not to doubt.... Hence one who can doubt at all ought not to doubt the existence of truth.

Belief in truth begins with doubting all that has hitherto been believed to be true.

People would rather believe than know.

Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn't believing. It's where belief stops, because it isn't needed any more.

Belief is not the beginning of knowledge - it is the end.

If faith is what you have to go on, if faith is the link between your beliefs and the world at large, your beliefs are very likely to be wrong. Beliefs can be right or wrong. If you believe you can fly, that belief is only true if indeed you can fly. Somebody who thinks he can fly, and is wrong about it, will eventually discover there's a problem with his view of the world.

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.