quotations about belief
False beliefs can be every bit as consoling as true ones, right up until the moment of disillusionment.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The God Delusion
The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them.
MARCEL PROUST
Swann's Way
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
Oftimes our belief, if in another, we would regard a superstition.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
Men that believe only what they understand can write their creed on a postage stamp.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
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
The less you know the more you believe.
U2
"Last Night on Earth"
It will be whatever it is, no? Nothing, something -- our believing one thing or another will matter not at all in the end.
SCOTT SMITH
The Ruins
The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
On Certainty
An angel is a belief, with wings, and arms that can carry you. It's not to be afraid of, and if it can't hold you up, seek for something new.
TONY KUSHNER
Angels in America
Creeds, like other goods, pass by inheritance to descendants.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
Most people are too slow to believe, but once you get them going, they believe too much.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
Many a prophecy, by the mere force of its being believed, is transmuted to fact.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Prelude to Foundation
There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death.
ISAAC ASIMOV
The Stars in Their Courses
We are trained to believe and not to know.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVEN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Corrino
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
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair