Incredulity Quotes - Page 2

• Knowledge of divine things for the most part is lost to us by incredulity.

  Heraclitus

  Believe, Belief, Divine

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• What is divine escapes men's notice because of their incredulity.

  Heraclitus

  Men, Spirituality, Divine

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• For men can endure to hear others praised only so long as they can severally persuade themselves of their own ability to equal the actions recounted: when this point is passed, envy comes in and with it incredulity.

  Thucydides

  Men, Envy, Long

  Thucydides, Victor Davis Hanson, Robert B. Strassler (2008). “The Landmark Thucydides”, p.111, Simon and Schuster

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• Looking back through the mists of time, I recall some distinctly religious experiences in my teens--when I was only fourteen years old to be precise. These experiences opened my mind to the idea of a Creator and that caring for other living things was a Christian duty. My parents were not strongly religious at the time and when I announced at that youthful age that I wanted to be a priest, it not unnaturally provoked some incredulity, even mirth. In the same year, I became a vegetarian, which--for family and friends--was even more vexing.

  Andrew Linzey

  Christian, Religious, Caring

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• Never say, and never take seriously anyone who says, 'I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection.' I have dubbed this kind of fallacy 'the Argument from Personal Incredulity.' Time and again, it has proven the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience.

  Richard Dawkins

  Believe, Intellectual, Skins

  "River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life". Book by Richard Dawkins, March 20, 2014.

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• Sisters don't need words. They have perfected a language of snarls and smiles and frowns and winks - expressions of shocked surprise and incredulity and disbelief. Sniffs and snorts and gasps and sighs - that can undermine any tale you're telling.

  Pam Brown

  Sister, Sarcastic, Sibling

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• Nothing is so contemptible as that affectation of wisdom, which some display, by universal incredulity.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Universal, Display

  Oliver Goldsmith (1859). “A History of the Earth and Animated Nature: Illus. with 85 Copperplates”, p.270

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• Incredulity is not wisdom, but the worst kind of folly. It is folly, because it causes ignorance and mistake, with all the consequents of these; and it is very bad, as being accompanied with disingenuity, obstinacy, rudeness, uncharitableness, and the like bad dispositions; from which credulity itself, the other extreme sort of folly, is exempt.

  Isaac Barrow

  Mistake, Ignorance, Causes

  Isaac Barrow, James Hamilton (1861). “The works of Isaac Barrow”, p.163

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• It's a taboo subject. How the dead are betrayed by the living. We who are living--we who have survived--understand that our guilt is what links us to the dead. At all times we can hear them calling to us, a growing incredulity in their voices, You will not forget me -- will you? How can you forget me? I have no one but you.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Voice, Guilt, Calling

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• ... [a] girl one day flared out and told the principal "the only mission opening before a girl in his school was to marry one of those candidates [for the ministry]." He said he didn't know but it was. And when at last that same girl announced her desire and intention to go to college it was received with about the same incredulity and dismay as if a brass button on one of those candidate's coats had propounded a new method for squaring the circle or trisecting the arc.

  Anna Julia Cooper

  Girl, School, College

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• There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.

  Doris Lessing

  Ordinary, Flats, Feels

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• Scanning the newspapers and absorbing with a mixture of incredulity and indignation the enormities they report, I conclude that what England lacks today is, quite simply, sense.

  Paul Johnson

  America, World, Mixtures

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• The human understanding is a revelation from its maker, which can never be disputed or doubted. There can be no scepticism, Pyrrhonism, or incredulity or infidelity here. No prophecies, no miracles are necessary to prove this celestical communication. This revelation has made it certain that two and one make three, and that one is not three nor can three be one. We can never be so certain of any prophecy, or the fulfilment of any prophecy, or of any miracle, or the design of any miracle, as we are from the revelation of nature, that is, nature's God, that two and two are equal to four.

  John Adams

  Communication, Two, Miracle

  John Adams, Charles Francis Adams (1856). “The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations”, p.66

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• The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.

  Colin Wilson

  Believe, Passion, Self

  Colin Wilson (2011). “Afterlife: An Investigation”, p.307, Doubleday

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• When passion and habit long lie in company it is only slowly and with incredulity that habit awakens to finds its companion fled, itself alone.

  Ouida

  Lying, Passion, Long

  Ouida (2016). “Wisdom, Wit and Pathos of Ouida”, p.383, Ouida

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• So...have you ever thought about dyeing your hair punk-rocker-chick black? As I'm sure you've heard, I have a thing for brunettes and always avoid blondes." "I've heard. And no." "Too bad. Because you're making me rethink my stance about doing my friends' exes." i snorted, not even trying to hide my...incredulity? Surely I wasn't amused. "Your making me rethink my stance on cold-blooded homicide

  Gena Showalter

  Hair, Black, Trying

  Gena Showalter (2015). “The White Rabbit Chronicles: Alice in Zombieland\Through the Zombie Glass\The Queen of Zombie Hearts”, p.474, Harlequin

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• You used your power to toss one rock at me?" he exclaimed, an almost comic note of incredulity in his voice. "On the contrary," I heard Dorian say pleasantly. "I didn't use magic for that. I just threw it.

  Richelle Mead

  Rocks, Voice, Magic

  Richelle Mead (2012). “Richelle Mead Dark Swan Bundle: Storm Born, Thorn Queen, Iron Crowned & Shadow Heir”, p.400, Zebra Books

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• He stared at her fists and at her face and said with upset incredulity, "You promised me you would forgive me-" "Forgive you,"Tatiana hissed through her teeth, tears streaming down her face, "for your brave and indifferent face, Alexander!" She groaned in pain. "Not for your brave and indifferent heart.

  Paullina Simons

  Pain, Heart, Brave

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• MESMERISM, n. Hypnotism before it wore good clothes, kept a carriage and asked Incredulity to dinner.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Science, Clothes, Dinner

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.164, University of Georgia Press

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• The Bishop goes on to the human eye, asking rhetorically, and with the implication that there is no answer, 'How could an organ so complex evolve?' This is not an argument, it is simply an affirmation of incredulity.

  Richard Dawkins

  Eye, Religion, Bishops

  Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.48, W. W. Norton & Company

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• A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?

  C.P. Snow

  Science, Law, People

  C.P. SNOW (1963). “THE TWO CULTURES: AND A SECOND LOOK”

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• I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own skeptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale.

  Edgar Rice Burroughs

  Vintage, Seductive, Balance

  Edgar Rice Burroughs (2015). “TARZAN OF THE APES SERIES - Complete Collection: 25 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated): The Return of Tarzan, The Beasts of Tarzan, The Son of Tarzan, Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, Jungle Tales of Tarzan, Tarzan the Untamed, Tarzan and the Golden Lion, Tarzan the Terrible and many more”, p.5, e-artnow

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• Those of you who speak only English, applaud [audience applause]. Those of you who speak only Spanish, applaud [audience applause]. [In mock incredulity] Then how do you know what I just said?

  Gloria Estefan

  Speak, Applause, Said

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• When a belief vanishes, there survives it -- more and more vigorously so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new things -- a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it did once animate, as if it was in them and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause -- the death of the gods.

  Marcel Proust

  Reality, Attachment, Old Things

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.581, Modern Library

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• Knowledge of divine things for the most part, as Heraclitus says, is lost to us by incredulity.

  Plutarch

  Divine, Lost

  Plutarch (2010). “Plutarch's Lives”, p.190, Cosimo, Inc.

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