Philosophical Skepticism Quotes

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

If there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god? Therefore there are no gods.

There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.

This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.

I am too inquisitive, too questionable, too exuberant to stand for any gross answer. God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers—at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.

God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist.

If we will disbelieve everything, because we cannot certainly know all things, we shall do much what as wisely as he who would not use his legs, but sit still and perish, because he had no wings to fly.

By convention sweet is sweet, by convention bitter is bitter, by convention hot is hot, by convention cold is cold, by convention color is color. But in reality there are atoms and the void. That is, the objects of sense are supposed to be real and it is customary to regard them as such, but in truth they are not. Only the atoms and the void are real.

We cannot prove that there is no God, but we can safely conclude the He is very, very improbable indeed.

I do not believe in Belief.

There may be things that are completely unknowable to us, so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limit of what there is.

Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind that it never had many professors.

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

Mere unbelief in a personal God is no philosophy at all.

I enjoy life. I think I'll enjoy death even more. Life is too confusing.

Two religions cannot both be right, because they contradict each other, yet they can both be wrong.

Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.

It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?

We have no right to pick out all that is noblest and fairest in man, to project these qualities into space, and to call them God. We only thus create an ideal figure, a purified, ennobled, 'magnified' Man.

A matter that becomes clear ceases to concern us.--What was that god thinking who counseled, "Know thyself!" Did he perhaps mean,"Cease to concern yourself! Become objective!"--And Socrates?--And "scientific men"?

Who is to say what is real and what is not?'Real' is a distinction of a naïve mind.

It is time, therefore, to abandon the superstition that natural science cannot be regarded as logically respectable until philosophers have solved the problem of induction. The problem of induction is, roughly speaking, the problem of finding a way to prove that certain empirical generalizations which are derived from past experience will hold good also in the future.

Traditions are neither good nor bad, they simply are... Rationality is not an arbiter of traditions, it is itself a tradition or an aspect of a tradition.