quotations about belief
Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barriers of system.
GEORGE ELIOT
Notice: Undefined variable: id in /hermes/walnacweb03/walnacweb03ak/b2149/pow.notablequote/htdocs/b/includes/quoter_subj.php on line 37
Silas Marner
If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the believing-muscles of your mind, and then you'll be so weak you won't be able to believe the simplest true things.
LEWIS CARROLL
attributed, Lewis Carroll in Wonderland: The Life and Times of Alice and Her Creator
A strong enough belief system, a sufficiently powerful conviction, can make anything happen. This is how we create our consensus reality, including our gods.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen
I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.
LOUISE ERDRICH
Love Medicine
I don't have to run from anything because I don't believe in anything.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Wise Blood
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
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
Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good ground for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
"An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish,", Unpopular Essays
Belief is involuntary; nothing involuntary is meritorious or reprehensible. A man ought not to be considered worse or better for his belief.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"Declaration of Rights"
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Androcles and the Lion
Human beings believe just as they breathe -- in order to survive.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Angel's Game
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"
Beliefs are more powerful than facts.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Atreides
There are people who can believe anything they wish. What lucky creatures!
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
The Reflections of Lichtenberg
The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves than constrain others.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Strong beliefs win strong men, and then make them stronger.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Price of the Ticket
It is easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Neverÿon
Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.
RICHARD FEYNMAN
The Meaning of It All
He who thinks with difficulty believes with alacrity. A fool is a natural proselyte, but he must be caught young, for his convictions, unlike those of the wise, harden with age.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"