Quotes about doubt from interviews: why scientists and artists see doubt as part of the work.
My teacher told me I would never become a pianist. It was the worst day of my life, but also the best, because I decided to prove him wrong.
A posthumously assembled notebook by a French thinker who argued that the soul obeys a pull much like physical gravity — toward self-assertion, power, filling every empty space — and that real goodness and attention to…
A young writer returns to his provincial hometown after finishing university — a film about how hard it is for someone full of ambition and contempt for other people's compromises to notice he's already begun repeating…
Questions are the beginning of answers, and answers are the beginning of new questions
a butler's monologue in which a lifetime spent calling restraint professional dignity finally has to face that the same word was also a way of refusing to live.
A guide leads a writer and a scientist through a forbidden Zone toward a room said to grant a person's deepest wish, and the journey turns out to test faith far more than nerve.
I'm fascinated by our subjective perception of reality. We're all stuck in a singular perspective, and films allow us to see things from different viewpoints.
A view of evolution from the gene's vantage point rather than the organism's: bodies are disposable survival machines that genes build and discard in order to keep copying themselves.
A film in which the organizers of mass killings in 1960s Indonesia are invited to reenact their own crimes in the film genres they love — and the camera records how their self-glorification slowly turns against them.
Ich zweifle an allem. Im Zweifel finde ich die Wahrheit. Sicherheit ist ein Zufluchtsort des Narren.
The Nobel laureate's summary book on how two systems of thought—fast and intuitive versus slow and deliberate—shape human judgment, and why neither can be trusted blindly.
A portrait of a young man trying to live by strict rules of integrity inside a system where integrity itself is a professional and social liability.
Ich weiß nicht, was ich schaffe, bis ich es geschaffen habe. Unsicherheit ist die Ehre meiner Arbeit.
The memoir of a woman raised on an isolated survivalist Mormon family farm without school, official documents, or doctors — an account of how education becomes not just knowledge but a way of separating from one's own…
A conversational anatomy of a marriage that falls apart not from one blow but from years of accumulated things left unsaid.
There are no answers in adulthood. I make films about people who are lost, searching for meaning, just like when we were children.
A physicist takes time apart piece by piece and argues that the single, forward-flowing time we experience most likely does not exist at the level of fundamental reality at all.
A silent film about the trial and execution of Joan of Arc, shot almost entirely in close-up on her face — a study of what faith looks like when pushed to the outer edge of human endurance.
Every person contains multitudes. We all contain contradictions, shadows, unexpressed desires. Cinema can explore this duality.
A French nobleman invented the essay as a form because he wanted to watch his own mind honestly at work — and discovered that a person is so shifting and self-contradictory that the only reliable ground is the act of…
A knight back from the Crusades into a plague-stricken land plays a game against Death, less to buy time than to force an answer to whether God exists at all.
Writer's block is doubt speaking louder than your voice.
Writing under a pseudonym, a Danish thinker picks apart the biblical story of Abraham's readiness to sacrifice his son to argue that real faith demands a step outside every rule of shared morality and logic — a leap no…
A director's confession at the point where answers run out, staged as a carnival of memory, dream, and self-justification.
I prefer to make films that ask questions rather than provide answers. The true experience of cinema is reflection, doubt, the search for meaning.
A philosopher uses Proust's novel not as a text to analyze but as an occasion to argue that a person is never simply born finished — selfhood and understanding have to be produced anew, by effort, or lived experience…
A near-plotless portrait of a lifelong bureaucrat who learns he is dying and discovers, almost too late, what it might mean to actually live.
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge
A book by Intel's longtime chief on how to recognize the moment when the rules of an industry change irreversibly, and why successful companies find that moment hardest of all to notice in time.
A film about how a single evening of talk with a stranger can carry as much weight as years of shared life — it just measures time differently.
Our universe may be one of countless others, evolving in parallel dimensions
A guide to the universe and the history of science, written as a declaration of love for humanity's ability to understand the world it is itself made of.
A portrait of an aging actor trying to prove to himself and the world that something real once existed beneath the mask of success.
Singularities are points where our understanding breaks down, but they may lead to new discoveries
A memoir by Pixar's co-founder on how to build an organization where creative failure is neither hidden nor punished but treated as part of the road to good films, and why candor inside a team matters more than any…
A psychological thriller about a ballerina for whom chasing a perfect performance becomes a chase toward the destruction of her own self.
When people lose the ability to think critically, they become vulnerable to lies
a novel about how an idea built to justify murder collapses not under evidence but under the murderer's own conscience.
A family drama that, through one domestic conflict, unfolds into a precise study of how truth, protective lies, and competing notions of duty coexist inside ordinary people.
Faith and science are not necessarily enemies; it's the difference between belief and knowledge that matters
An attempt by the founder of the world's largest hedge fund to turn his own painful failures into an explicit, written-down set of decision-making rules — and to build a company where even its founder is bound by them.
Consciousness may be related to quantum processes; this remains one of the greatest mysteries
A philosophical essay arguing that the universe never answers the human hunger for meaning, and asking whether, once that mismatch is named absurd, a person can go on living without either self-deception or suicide …
Time is one of the deepest mysteries of physics. Perhaps it doesn't exist at a fundamental level.
An attempt to explain, without equations, where the universe came from, what time actually is, and why physics still lacks the single theory needed to tie it all together.
The paradoxes of quantum mechanics reveal the limits of our intuition.
A trader-turned-philosopher's manifesto arguing that the fate of companies, markets and civilizations is set not by average trends but by rare events nobody could picture in advance — and about the habit of declaring…
The universe is vast, and we've barely begun exploring it. Humility matters.
The universe is not required to make sense to you. That's simply not its job.
I believe in contradiction. Life is full of contradictory truths, and art must reflect this