quotations about belief
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
Whether your beliefs are true or totally insane, if you accept them, then that's what your life will be about.
ROBERT ANTHONY
Beyond Positive Thinking
False beliefs can be every bit as consoling as true ones, right up until the moment of disillusionment.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The God Delusion
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
Men that believe only what they understand can write their creed on a postage stamp.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Oftimes our belief, if in another, we would regard a superstition.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
The less you know the more you believe.
U2
"Last Night on Earth"
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
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
Creeds, like other goods, pass by inheritance to descendants.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
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
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
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
Many a prophecy, by the mere force of its being believed, is transmuted to fact.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Prelude to Foundation
Most people are too slow to believe, but once you get them going, they believe too much.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
We are trained to believe and not to know.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVEN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Corrino
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
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Androcles and the Lion