Skepticism is the beginning of Faith.

The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil.

Skepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.

Great intellects are skeptical.

Nearly all the powerful people of this age are unbelievers, the best of them in doubt and misery, the most in plodding hesitation, doing as well as they can, what practical work lies at hand.

There is something pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything.

If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.

Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.

''Skepticism,'' is that anything more than we used to mean when we said, ''Well, what have we here?''

If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.