Byron Katie Quotes

I think the appropriate kind of skepticism is this: you've got to be asking questions all the time, you've also got to make sure that you're doing so in the spirit of genuinely wanting to find the answers - and that also means being open. I battle with this: I know I tend to be very skeptical and as a result, I veer towards the dismissive. But being aware of the tendency, I like to challenge my own skepticism and make sure it's not just knee-jerk. You need to be skeptical towards yourself as well. When you're only skeptical outwards you've got an unbalanced skepticism.

I believe unconditionally in the ability of people to respond when they are told the truth. We need to be taught to study rather than believe, to inquire rather than to affirm.

I question everything I do.

I think that probably the most important thing about our education was that it taught us to question even those things we thought we knew.

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to doubt.

Test everything, including assumptions

I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions... Don't take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can't. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself.

Watch the things you say you can't believe, and then recall the things you accept without thinking, like your own existence.

There is no faith, without a critical mind

This idea is more surely understood by interrogation; WHAT DO I KNOW? which I bear as my motto with the emblem of a pair of scales.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

Doubt your doubts before you doubt your beliefs.

As a person... I'm a little more doubtful, introspective and analytical.

I think that probably the most important thing about our education was that it taught us to question even those things we thought we knew. To say you've got to inquire, you've got to be testing your knowledge all the time in order to be more effective in what you're doing.

Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.

I've always felt some kind of connection to people who are kind of over-smart. People who over-think things to the point of some sort of paralysis, and I think that certainly can be me on any given day.

I think I tend to live in sort of a meta state of existence where I'm always analyzing and analyzing whatever I'm going through at any given moment, and a lot of times I'll reflect back on and go, 'Oh look at that - if I acted this way when that happened, I might not have thought of that that way.'

Seek the company of those who are looking for the truth, but run from those who have found it.

I see myself as an avatar of curiosity and doubt.

If children were taught to question and think through their beliefs, instead of being taught the superior virtue of faith without question, it is a good bet that there would be no suicide bombers.

I think you need to have a healthy sense of doubt because I think doubt leads to inquiry.

The few have said, Think! The many have said, Believe! The first doubt was the womb and cradle of progress, and from the first doubt, man has continued to advance.

True belief is not about blind submission. It is about open-eyed acceptance, and acceptance requires persistent distance from the truth, and that distance is doubt. Doubt, in other words, can feed faith, rather than destroy it. And it forces us, even while believing, to recognize our fundamental duty with respect to God's truth: humility. We do not know. Which is why we believe.

A matter that becomes clear ceases to concern us.--What was that god thinking who counseled, "Know thyself!" Did he perhaps mean,"Cease to concern yourself! Become objective!"--And Socrates?--And "scientific men"?