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
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
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
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
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
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
If you want to know what your true beliefs are, take a look at your actions.
ROBERT ANTHONY
Think Big
Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barriers of system.
GEORGE ELIOT
Silas Marner
If we can once believe that success is possible, success becomes possible.
FRANK CHAPMAN SHARP
Success: A Course in Moral Instruction
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
He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.
THOMAS FULLER
Gnomologia
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"
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
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
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