Time & Perspective Quote by Romain Rolland

Skepticism gets cast as culture’s wrecking ball, but Rolland frames it as renovation: the noisy, inconvenient phase that makes any durable belief possible. The verb “riddling” is doing the heavy lifting. It’s not a polite critique; it’s puncturing, perforating, leaving yesterday’s faith full of holes. Yet the sentence refuses the cheap victory lap of unbelief. Skepticism isn’t the endpoint, it’s the tool that clears rot so something sturdier can be built.

That’s a novelist’s move: taking a concept that reads abstract in philosophy and giving it narrative time. “Yesterday” and “tomorrow” imply plot, generations, a before-and-after arc. Faith here isn’t necessarily religious doctrine; it’s the broader human habit of committing to meaning - nation, progress, art, moral purpose. Rolland wrote in a Europe convulsed by modernity and war, when old certainties (church authority, imperial order, “civilization” as self-justifying) were collapsing under the evidence of catastrophe. In that context, skepticism becomes less a fashionable pose than a survival instinct.

The subtext is an argument against two temptations: nostalgia that clings to discredited creeds, and cynicism that treats disbelief as sophistication. Rolland offers a third posture: skepticism as ethical pressure-testing. If tomorrow’s faith is to deserve the name, it has to be born after interrogation, not before it. The line works because it admits loss while insisting on continuity - a bridge built from doubt rather than denial.