Skepticism is the highest duty and blind faith the one unpardonable sin.
Not far from the invention of fire we must rank the invention of doubt.
Teach a child what is wise, that is morality. Teach him what is wise and beautiful, that is religion!
I doubt the fact, to begin with, but if it be so even, what is this but in grand words asking me to believe a thing because I like it.
Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a "medium" hired at a guinea a seance.
It is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what Agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to Agnosticism. That which Agnostics deny and repudiate, as immoral, is the contrary doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe without logically satisfactory evidence; and that reprobation ought to attach to the profession of disbelief in such inadequately supported propositions.
Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing?
I would rather be the offspring of two apes than be a man and afraid to face the truth.
Science ... warns me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile. My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.
It ought not to be unpleasant to say that which one honestly believes or disbelieves. That it so constantly is painful to do so, is quite enough obstacle to the progress of mankind in that most valuable of all qualities, honesty of word or of deed.
The sceptics end in the infidelity which asserts the problem to be insoluble, or in the atheism which denies the existence of any orderly progress and governance of things: the men of genius propound solutions which grow into systems of Theology or of Philosophy, or veiled in musical language which suggests more than it asserts, take the shape of the Poetry of an epoch.
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