BELIEF QUOTES V

quotations about belief

It is hard for anyone who has not given himself wholeheartedly to a belief (and I say again, Miss V., that is how it is: you give yourself to it, it does not fall upon you like sanctifying grace from Heaven) to appreciate how the believer's conscious mind can separate itself into many compartments containing many, conflicting, dogmas. These are not sealed compartments; they are like the cells of a battery (I think this is how a battery works), over which the electrical charge plays, leaping from one cell to another, gathering force and direction as it goes. You put in the acid of world-historical necessity and the distilled water of pure theory and connect up your points and with a flash and a shudder the patched-together monster of commitment, sutures straining and ape brow clenched, rises in jerky slow motion from Dr. Diabolo's operating table.

JOHN BANVILLE

The Untouchable


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


But I was commanded to believe; and yet it corresponded not with what had been established by calculations and my own sight.

ST. AUGUSTINE

Confessions


Beliefs are more powerful than facts.

BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON

Dune: House Atreides


If you want to know what your true beliefs are, take a look at your actions.

ROBERT ANTHONY

Think Big


Never underestimate the power of the human mind to believe what it wants to believe, no matter the conflicting evidence.

BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON

Dune: House Harkonnen


The man who is unhappy will, as a rule, adopt an unhappy creed, while the man who is happy will adopt a happy creed; each may attribute his happiness or unhappiness to his beliefs, while the real causation is the other way round.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

The Conquest of Happiness


I don't have to run from anything because I don't believe in anything.

FLANNERY O'CONNOR

Wise Blood


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


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


Strong beliefs win strong men, and then make them stronger.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Physics and Politics


If we can once believe that success is possible, success becomes possible.

FRANK CHAPMAN SHARP

Success: A Course in Moral Instruction


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


Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barriers of system.

GEORGE ELIOT

Silas Marner


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


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"


He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.

THOMAS FULLER

Gnomologia


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


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