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If you had loved people then the earnestness of life might have taught you not to be strident but to become silent, and when you were in distress at sea and did not see land, then at least not to involve others in it; it might have taught you to smile at least as long as long as you believed anyone sought in your face an explanation, a witness. We do not judge you for doubting, because doubt is a crafty passion, and it can certainly be difficult to tear oneself out of its snares. What we require of the doubter is that he be silent. That doubt did not make him happy-why then confide to others what will make them just as unhappy. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Hong, p. 22-23

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

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The Garden of Eden was closed; everything was changed, the man became afraid of himself, afraid of the world around him. Troubled he asked: What is the good, where is the perfect to be found? If it exists, where is its source? But the doubt that had come along with the knowledge coiled itself alarmingly around his heart, and the serpent that had seduced him with the delectable now squeezed him in its coils. Would he find out what the good and perfect is without learning where it came from, would he be able to recognize the eternal source without knowing what the good and perfect is? Doubt would explain to him first one thing, then another, and in the explanation itself would lie in wait for him in order to disquiet him still more. What happened at the beginning of days is repeated in every generation and in the individual; the consequences of the fruit of the knowledge could not be halted. With the knowledge, doubt became more inward, and the knowledge, which should have guided man, fettered him in distress and contradiction. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Hong, p. 127

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

 

Nobody likes to see a body, but it's better than seeing a ghost. Bodies just make you doubt the world and the people in it. Ghosts make you doubt everything, and to doubt it in a part of the mind that has no words to answer the question, where the comforting promises you make yourself are neither believed nor even really understood.

 

Michael Marshall Smith

 

There is a mental fear, which provokes others of us to see the images of witches in a neighbor’s yard and stampedes us to burn down this house. And there is a creeping fear of doubt, doubt of what we have been taught, of the validity of so many things we had long since taken for granted to be durable and unchanging. It has become more difficult than ever to distinguish black from white, good from evil, right from wrong.

 

Edward R. Murrow

 

My demand of life is this-that it would make it clear whether I was trapped in self-delusion or I loved faithfully, perhaps more faithfully than she [Regine]. How long I must persevere is not known. Even if the age of oracles vanished long ago, there is still one thing of which the simplest and the most profound person must, if he talks about it, talk mysteriously-that is: time. Without a doubt it is the most difficult mystery, just as it is also supposed to be the most profound wisdom, to arrange one’s life as if today were the last day one lives and also the first in a sequence of years.

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

 

Only the person who cravingly runs away from every more profound explanation, who does not have the courage to assume the responsibility of the master by submitting to the obligation of a servant, who does not have the humility to be willing to obey in order to learn how to rule and at all times is willing to rule only insofar as he himself obeys-only he fills time with perpetual deliberations that takes him nowhere but only serves as a dissipation in which his soul, his capacity for comprehending and willing, vanishes like mist and is extinguished like a flame. How doleful is such a self-consuming, how far from witnessing by his life, from giving expression in his life, to a human being’s exalted destiny-to be God’s coworker. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Hong, p. 85-86

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard