Uncertainty about what is wholesome and unwholesome is called skeptical doubt (vicikiccha). It is considered a hindrance to liberation as it hinders the arising of discriminating knowledge. A person who has doubts about the wholesomeness and unwholesomeness of phenomena is unable to abandon what is unwholesome, develop what is wholesome, and escape the cycle of suffering.
Mahasi SayadawRelated topics
abandon arising cycle doubt escape hindrance knowledge liberation person phenomenon suffering uncertainty unwholesomeness wholesomenessRelated quotes
But an escape less self-depreciating was taken by Lord Westbury, who, it is said, rebuffed a barrister's reliance upon an earlier opinion of his Lordship: "I can only say that I am amazed that a man of my intelligence should have been guilty of giving such an opinion". If there are other ways of gracefully and good-naturedly surrendering former views to a better considered position, I invoke them all.
Robert H. Jackson
It's strange how things happen, Mauricio Silva, known as the Eye, always tried to escape from violence even at the risk of being considered a coward, but the violence, the real violence, can't be escaped, at least not by us, born in Latin America in the 1950s, those of us who were around twenty years old when Salvador Allende died.
Roberto Bolaño
Can any rational person believe that the Bible is anything but a human document? We now know pretty well where the various books came from, and about when they were written. We know that they were written by human beings who had no knowledge of science, little knowledge of life, and were influenced by the barbarous morality of primitive times, and were grossly ignorant of most things that men know today.
Clarence Darrow
Of all the frictional resistances, the one that most retards human movement is ignorance, what Buddha called 'the greatest evil in the world.' The friction which results from ignorance... can be reduced only by the spread of knowledge and the unification of the heterogeneous elements of humanity. No effort could be better spent.
Nikola Tesla
There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by. It was called the People. Find out where the People have gone. I don't mean the square-eyed toothpaste-and-hair-dye people or the new-car-or-bust people, or the success-and-coronary people. Maybe they never existed, but if there ever were the People, that's the commodity the Declaration was talking about, and Mr. Lincoln.
John Steinbeck
