Skepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.
Thomas Carlyle, Edwin Markham (1842). “On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History: Six Lectures, Reported, with Emendations and Additions”, p.215