quotations about belief
What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which habitually acts.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Maxims for Revolutionists
Human beings believe just as they breathe -- in order to survive.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Angel's Game
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
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
Strong beliefs win strong men, and then make them stronger.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
To learn a belief without belief is to sing a song without the tune.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Telling
I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.
LOUISE ERDRICH
Love Medicine
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
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 does not believe that does not live according to his belief.
THOMAS FULLER
Gnomologia
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
There are people who can believe anything they wish. What lucky creatures!
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
The Reflections of Lichtenberg
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
A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.
FRANZ KAFKA
attributed, Memorable Quotations
If we can once believe that success is possible, success becomes possible.
FRANK CHAPMAN SHARP
Success: A Course in Moral Instruction
I don't have to run from anything because I don't believe in anything.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Wise Blood
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"
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
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