Doubt

Doubt

Doubt, a status between belief and disbelief, involves uncertainty or distrust or lack of sureness of an alleged fact, an action, a motive, or a decision. Doubt brings into question some notion of a perceived "reality", and may involve delaying or rejecting relevant action out of concerns for mistakes or faults or appropriateness. Some definitions of doubt emphasize the state in which the mind remains suspended between two contradictory propositions and unable to assent to either of them (compare paradox).

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Famous quotes containing the word doubt:

    One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
    Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)

    A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.
    Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)

    These battles sound incredible to us. I think that posterity will doubt if such things ever were,—if our bold ancestors who settled this land were not struggling rather with the forest shadows, and not with a copper-colored race of men. They were vapors, fever and ague of the unsettled woods. Now, only a few arrowheads are turned up by the plow. In the Pelasgic, the Etruscan, or the British story, there is nothing so shadowy and unreal.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)