quotations about belief
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
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Neverÿon
To learn a belief without belief is to sing a song without the tune.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Telling
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
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"
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
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
All religious beliefs seem weird to those not brought up in them.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The God Delusion
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
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
Many people have died for their beliefs. The real courage is living and suffering for what you believe.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI
Eragon
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
There is a class of people who, if they do not believe, must at least make a semblance of believing. This class, comprising all the tormentors, all the oppressors, and all the exploiters of humanity; priests, monarchs, statesmen, soldiers, public and private financiers, officials of all sorts, policemen, gendarmes, jailers and executioners, monopolists, capitalists, tax-leeches, contractors and landlords, lawyers, economists, politicians of all shades, down to the smallest vendor of sweetmeats, all will repeat in unison those words of Voltaire: "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." For, you understand, the people must have a religion. That is the safety-valve.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
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
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
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
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
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
He who believes needs no explanation.
EURIPIDES
Bacchæ
Many a prophecy, by the mere force of its being believed, is transmuted to fact.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Prelude to Foundation
Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.
SAMUEL BUTLER
Notebooks