quotations about belief
What believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
Most people are too slow to believe, but once you get them going, they believe too much.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real.
GENE WOLFE
The Shadow of the Torturer
We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing them becomes too high.
RANSOM RIGGS
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it seems to me the deepest root of all evil that is in the world.
MAX BORN
attributed, The New Intimacy
Oftimes our belief, if in another, we would regard a superstition.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
On Certainty
Where is the world whose people don't prefer a comfortable, warm, and well-worn belief, however illogical, to the chilly winds of uncertainty.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Foundation and Earth
There can be no merit in believing something which you can neither explain nor understand.
JOHN LUBBOCK
The Use of Life
Belief was immune to logic; it operated by its own laws.
JAMES SIEGEL
Detour
Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Mystery and Manners
He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend, must have a very long head, or a very short creed.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Belief needs something terrible to make it work, I find--blood, nails, a bit of anguish.
ANNE ENRIGHT
The Gathering
If you only believe when it's easy, you don't really believe.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Obsidian Butterfly
When the old creeds are threadbare, and worn through,
And all too narrow for the broadening soul,
Give me the fine, firm texture of the new,
Fair, beautiful and whole!
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Old and New"
Just as every man must see for himself, so every man must believe for himself. Acceptation of truth is a purely personal, individual act.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Belief is the way
The way of the innocent
And when I say innocent
I should say naive
DEPECHE MODE
"Lie to Me"
Human psychology has a near universal tendency to let belief be coloured by desire.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The God Delusion
So easy are men to be drawn to believe any thing, from such men as have gotten credit with them; and can with gentleness and dexterity take hold of their fear and ignorance.
THOMAS HOBBES
Leviathan
The most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one’s own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.
WILLIAM JAMES
"What Pragmatism Means,", Pragmatism