BELIEF QUOTES VI

quotations about belief

The only thing wrong with love and faith and belief is not having it.

MARK SCHWAHN

"What Comes After the Blues", One Tree Hill


I have learned not to think little of any one's belief, no matter how strange it may be. I have tried to keep an open mind, and it is not the ordinary things of life that could close it, but the strange things, the extraordinary things, the things that make one doubt if they be mad or sane.

BRAM STOKER

Dracula


If I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.

WILLIAM KINGDON CLIFFORD

The Ethics of Belief


It's not about making sense. It's about believing in something, and letting that belief be real enough to change your life. It's about faith. You don't fix faith ... it fixes you.

JOSS WHEDON

"Jaynestown", Firefly


Belief is something you choose to do. It's hard. If it was easy, it wouldn't be worth as much.

MEL ODOM

Unnatural Selection


Believing seems the most "mental" thing we do, the thing most remote from what is done by mere matter. The whole intellectual life consists of beliefs, and of the passage from one belief to another by what is called "reasoning." Beliefs give knowledge and error; they are the vehicles of truth and falsehood. Psychology, theory of knowledge and metaphysics revolve about belief, and on the view we take of belief our philosophical outlook largely depends.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

The Analysis of Mind


If you think that your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument, rather then by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based on faith, you will realize that argument is useless, and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting and distorting the minds of the young in what is called "education". This last is particularly dastardly, since it takes advantage of the defencelessness of immature minds. Unfortunately it is practiced in greater or less degree in the schools of every civilised country.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

Human Society in Ethics and Politics


The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

The Celtic Twilight


There are people who can believe anything they wish. What lucky creatures!

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

The Reflections of Lichtenberg


When a belief vanishes, there survives it -- more and more vigorously so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new things -- a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it did once animate, as if it was in them and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause -- the death of the gods.

MARCEL PROUST

Swann's Way


A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.

FRANZ KAFKA

attributed, Memorable Quotations


The fact that a belief has a good moral effect upon a man is no evidence whatsoever in favor of its truth.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

BBC radio debate on the existence of God, "Russell vs. Copleston,", 1948


Belief in God does not rest upon a mere doctrine of logic, which some other statement of logic may come and upset. It is one of those primal facts in the human soul which no mere logic has established nor can refute.

E. H. CHAPIN

Living Words


Belief in the truth commences with the doubting of all those “truths” we once believed.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

"Truth Will Have No Other Gods Alongside It"


It was not right to believe anything you couldn't see or hold in your hands or test with your teeth.

FLANNERY O'CONNOR

Wise Blood


On any longer view, man is only fitfully committed to the rational -- to thinking, seeing, learning, knowing. Believing is what he's really proud of.

MARTIN AMIS

"The Voice of the Lonely Crowd,", The Guardian, Jun. 1, 2002


Belief as a positive phenomenon, if it exists, may be regarded, in this view, as a product of doubt, a decision after debate, an acceptance, not merely of THIS, but of THIS-RATHER-THAN-THAT.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

The Analysis of Mind


Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.

SAMUEL BUTLER

Notebooks


All religious beliefs seem weird to those not brought up in them.

RICHARD DAWKINS

The God Delusion


He who believes needs no explanation.

EURIPIDES

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