Doubtful Quotes - Page 9

• I'm doubtful about the temper of your flamingo. Shall I try the experiment?

  Lewis Carroll

  Trying, Flamingos, Programming

  Lewis Carroll (1869). “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland”, p.133

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• How convenient it would be to many of our great men and great families of doubtful origin, could they have the privilege of the heroes of yore, who, whenever their origin was involved in
  obscurity, modestly announced themselves descended from a god.

  Washington Irving

  Hero, Men, Privilege

  Washington Irving (2015). “The Complete Works of Washington Irving: Short Stories, Plays, Historical Works, Poetry and Autobiographical Writings (Illustrated): The Entire Opus of the Prolific American Writer, Biographer and Historian, Including The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Bracebridge Hall and many more”, p.1619, e-artnow

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• Life is divided into three periods: that which has been, that which is, that which will be. Of these the present is short, the future is doubtful, the past is certain.

  Seneca the Younger

  Time, Past, Three

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• People who are lazy, careless, doubtful-minded or arrogant need not expect God to reveal His secret or covenant to them.

  Watchman Nee

  People, Secret, Lazy

  Watchman Nee (1982). “The Better Covenant”, p.40, Christian Fellowship Publishers

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• Doubtful prayer is no prayer at all.

  John Calvin

  Prayer

  John Calvin (2012). “John Calvin's Commentaries On The Psalms 119 - 150 (Annotated Edition)”, p.209, Jazzybee Verlag

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• It was not in my nature to be an assertive person. I was used to looking to others for guidance, for influence, sometimes for the most basic cues of life. And yet writing stories is one of the most assertive things a person can do. Fiction is an act of willfulness, a deliberate effort to reconceive, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing short of reality itself. Even among the most reluctant and doubtful of writers, this willfulness must emerge. Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, "Listen to me."

  Jhumpa Lahiri

  Writing, Mean, Reality

  "Trading Stories". www.newyorker.com. June 13 & 20, 2011.

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• I am beginning to realize that "sanity" is no longer a value or an end in itself. The "sanity" of modern man is about as useful to him as the huge bulk and muscles of the dinosaur. If he were a little less sane, a little more doubtful, a little more aware of his absurdities and contradictions, perhaps there might be a possibility of his survival.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, People, Survival

  "Raids on the Unspeakable".

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• It is certainly a wonderful, a brain-staggering conception... that our own stellar universe may be but one of hundreds of thousands of similar universes... Familiarity with these mighty concepts most certainly does not breed contempt, does not dull our awe at the mightiness of the universe in which we play so small a part. It is very doubtful if any of those who are seriously studying the heavens ever lose their feeling of reverence for this supremely wonderful universe and for Whoever or Whatever must be behind it all.

  Heber Doust Curtis

  Play, Space, Heaven

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• ...he seemed to approach the grave as an hyperbolic curve approaches a line, less directly as he got nearer, till it was doubtful if he would ever reach it at all.

  Thomas Hardy

  Math, Curves, Lines

  Thomas Hardy (2016). “Far from the Madding Crowd: Works of Hardy”, p.66, 谷月社

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• It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Writing, Connections, Fiction

  "Ten rules for writing fiction" by Jonathan Franzen, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2010.

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• The longer they were together the more doubtful seemed the nature of his regard, and sometimes for a few painful minutes she believed it to be no more than friendship

  Jane Austen

  Together, Sometimes, Painful

  Jane Austen (2013). “Jane Austen Collection: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, Love and Friendship and Other Austin Works”, p.396, Lulu Press, Inc

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• A doubtful throne is ice on summer seas.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Summer, Ice, Sea

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Illustrated)”, p.943, Delphi Classics

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• The whole history of these books (i.e. the Gospels) is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Religious, Book, Men

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• It is clear that 'social Darwinism' and 'survival of the fittest' were intended by Obama to evoke feelings of fear and disgust. It is highly doubtful that Obama knows anything about the history of these ideas, and it is even more doubtful that he cares. A concern for truth is not the coin of the political realm.

  George H. Smith

  Ideas, Political, Feelings

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• The key to all strange things is in thy heart..../ My spirit has come home, that sailed the doubtful seas.

  Countee Cullen

  Home, Heart, Keys

  Countee Cullen, “The Shroud Of Color”

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• Even if the disciples had believed in the resurrection of Jesus, it is doubtful they would have generated any following. So long as the body was interred in the tomb, a Christian movement founded on belief in the resurrection of the dead man would have been an impossible folly.

  William Lane Craig

  Christian, Jesus, Men

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• We can only learn and advance with contradictions. The faithful inside should meet the doubtful. The doubtful should meet the faithful. Human slowly advances and becomes mature when he accepts his contradictions.

  Shams Tabrizi

  Faithful, Mature, Contradiction

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• Indeed Christianity passes. Passes - it has gone! It has littered the beaches of life with churches, cathedrals, shrines and crucifixes, prejudices and intolerances, like the sea urchin and starfish and empty shells and lumps of stinging jelly upon the sands here after a tide. A tidal wave out of Egypt. And it has left a multitude of little wriggling theologians and confessors and apologists hopping and burrowing in the warm nutritious sand. But in the hearts of living men, what remains of it now? Doubtful scraps of Arianism. Phrases. Sentiments. Habits.

  H. G. Wells

  Beach, Heart, Men

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• The thrill of tramping alone and unafraid through a wilderness of lakes, creeks, alpine meadows, and glaciers is not known to many. A civilization can be built around the machine but it is doubtful that a meaningful life can be produced by it.... When man worships at the feet of avalas creations. When he feels the wind blowing through him on a high peak or sleeps under a closely matted white bark pine in an exposed basin, he is apt to find his relationship to the universe.

  William O. Douglas

  Meaningful, Sleep, Journey

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• Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express. Let them make the effort to express these ideas in appropriate words without the aid of symbols, and if they succeed they will not only lay us laymen under a lasting obligation, but, we venture to say, they will find themselves very much enlightened during the process, and will even be doubtful whether the ideas as expressed in symbols had ever quite found their way out of the equations into their minds.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Science, Ideas, Effort

  James Clerk Maxwell, W. D. Niven (2003). “The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell”, p.328, Courier Corporation

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• When the other person is hurting, confused, troubled, anxious, alienated, terrified; or when he or she is doubtful of self-worth, uncertain as to identity, then understanding is called for. The gentle and sensitive companionship of an empathic stance… provides illumination and healing. In such situations deep understanding is, I believe, the most precious gift one can give to another.

  Carl Rogers

  Hurt, Confused, Believe

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• I believe in not quite knowing. A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiosity and bewilderment.

  William Trevor

  Believe, Writing, Knowing

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• We give thanks often with a tearful, doubtful voice, for our spiritual mercies positive, but what an almost infinite field there is for mercies negative! We cannot even imagine all that God has allowed us not to do, not to be.

  Frances Ridley Havergal

  Thanksgiving, Spiritual, Voice

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• For those [observations] that I made in Leipzig in my youth and up to my 21st year, I usually call childish and of doubtful value. Those that I took later until my 28th year [i.e., until 1574] I call juvenile and fairly serviceable. The third group, however, which I made at Uraniborg during approximately the last 21 years with the greatest care and with very accurate instruments at a more mature age, until I was fifty years of age, those I call the observations of my manhood, completely valid and absolutely certain, and this is my opinion of them.

  Tycho Brahe

  Science, Years, Age

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• Delaying and withholding tactics, red herrings, partial and doubtful outcomes are stock in trade for fiction writers, especially crime writers.

  Garry Disher

  Red, Fiction, Tactics

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