Charles Churchill Quotes

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

In philosophy you're never 100% sure. You're always undermining what you think you know. That's always been my philosophy and my intellectual ethos.

They had applied their doubts to the very head that had introduced doubt as a tool for advancing knowledge. And in the end they gave the head a nod.

A mind that questions everything, unless strong enough to bear the weight of its ignorance, risks questioning itself and being engulfed in doubt.

I determine nothing; I do not comprehend things; I suspend judgment; I examine.

Thenceforth they thought that, rationally concluded, doubt could become an instrument of knowledge.

The first step towards philosophy is incredulity.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

Philosophy would render us entirely Pyrrhonian, were not nature too strong for it.

Believe those who seek the truth; doubt those who find it.

The great benefit of philosophy, which is also its great weakness, is that all its steps are taken in the spirit of doubt.

That's something I learned as a philosophy major: The philosophy ethos is, always question, never rest.

As it is natural to believe many things without proof, so, despite all proof, is it natural to disbelieve others.

The greater the knowledge, the greater the doubt.

It is not proof that I sought. I, of all men, know that proof is but a fallacy invented by man to justify to himself and his fellows his own crass lust and folly.

The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.

By doubting we come to questioning, and by questioning we perceive the truth.

When a doubt is once received, men labour rather how to keep it a doubt still, than how to solve it; and accordingly bend their wits.

Descartes, the father of modern philosophy ... would never-so he assures us-have been led to construct his philosophy if he had had only one teacher, for then he would have believed what he had been told; but, finding that his professors disagreed with each other, he was forced to conclude that no existing doctrine was certain.

I did not imitate the skeptics who doubt only for doubting's sake, and pretend to be always undecided; on the contrary, my whole intention was to arrive at a certainty, and to dig away the drift and the sand until I reached the rock or the clay beneath.

But without doubts, without a standpoint reached through questionings, human beings can't acquire knowledge.

I say with my own authority that if you go on questioning without accepting anybody's answer, including mine, by and by you will find that the answer is not found but the question disappears.

On the one hand, philosophy is to keep us thinking about things that we may come to know, and on the other hand to keep us modestly aware of how much that seems like knowledge isn't knowledge

Never believe what you cannot doubt.

Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.