Top 38 Self Skepticism Quotes
#1. Self-esteem, the kind that comes from finding the sweet spot between a healthy fondness for yourself and healthy self-skepticism, tends to get harder to come by the older we get.
Meghan Daum
#2. Another source of fallacy is the vicious circle of illusions which consists on the one hand of believing what we see, and on the other in seeing what we believe.
Thomas Clifford Allbutt
#3. One special advantage of the skeptical attitude of mind is that a man is never vexed to find that after all he has been in the wrong.
William Osler
#4. Centripetal organization unifying a culture in all its phases into a unique, coherent, and artistic form; the other a period of centrifugal disorganization in which creed and culture decompose in division and criticism, and end in a chaos of individualism, skepticism, and artistic aberrations.
Will Durant
#5. Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible.
C.S. Lewis
#6. Believing everyone is dangerous, but believing nobody is more dangerous.
Abraham Lincoln
#7. Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.
George Santayana
#8. To me, people's lives and loves are entwined with their characters, natures and circumstances. I regard all general advice with skepticism.
Rafael Yglesias
#10. I have recommended you the dignity of skepticism: yet here I am, prowling around the Absolute. Technique of contradiction? Remember, rather, what Flaubert said: "I am a mystic and I believe in nothing".
Emil Cioran
#12. Simply to acquiesce in skepticism can never suffice to overcome the restlessness of reason.
Immanuel Kant
#13. You could just as well say that an agnostic is a deeply religious person with at least a rudimentary knowledge of human fallibility.
Carl Sagan
#14. Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
Voltaire
#16. If Christians always seemed to be the most intelligent and the most righteous of men, I'd be a skeptic.
Criss Jami
#17. What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject's blind self absorption and the journalist's skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.
Janet Malcolm
#18. There is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.
Walter Lippmann
#19. Can you dissolve your ego? Can you abandon the idea of self and other? Can you relinquish the notions of male and female, short and long, life and death? Can you let go of all these dualities and embrace the Tao without skepticism or panic? If so, you can reach the heart of the Integral Oneness.
Laozi
#21. It's not only the British voters who have doubts about European cooperation. There is skepticism in many other E.U. countries.
Mark Rutte
#23. I am no fan of books. And chances are, if you're reading this, you and I share a healthy skepticism about the printed word. Well, I want you to know that this is the first book I've ever written, and I hope it's the first book you've ever read. Don't make a habit of it.
Stephen Colbert
#24. It Begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.
Steven Pinker
#25. Skepticism can never provide firm ground under a man's feet. And perhaps, after all, we need firm ground.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#26. Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.
Bertrand Russell
#27. Everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected.
Richard P. Feynman
#28. Uncertain of uncertainty, skeptical of skepticism, it seems that the most important question is whether there is an important question.
Mitchell Heisman
#29. Healthy skepticism is often the best way to glean the value of what's being presented - challenge it; prove it wrong, if you can. That creates engagement, which is the key to understanding.
David Allen
#30. People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs.
Carl Sagan
#31. If a man have a strong faith he can indulge in the luxury of skepticism.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#32. The fact that Newton and Michael Faraday and other scientists of the past were deeply religious shows that religious skepticism is not a prejudice that governed science from the beginning, but a lesson that has been learned through centuries of experience in the study of nature.
Steven Weinberg
#33. For the New Age community, 'ancient' knowledge is always considered unimpeachable and unimprovable, just as a diverse range of beliefs from Eastern mysticism to UFOs, energy dowsing to cryptozoology, are - though mutually contradictory - unquestionably accepted in the name of open-mindedness.
Mark Crutchfield
#34. Campaign may invite a certain skepticism about democracy, but it will surely restore your faith in cinema verite.
A.O. Scott
#35. Scientific knowledge advances haltingly and is stimulated by contention and doubt.
Claude Levi-Strauss
#36. In the United States, the Supreme Court's decision of 1954, outlawing segregation in school systems, was greeted with mixed feelings of hope and skepticism by African-Americans.
John Henrik Clarke
#37. If the rule of thumb for attention literacy is to pay attention to your intention, then the heuristic for crap detection is to make skepticism your default.
Howard Rheingold
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