quotations about belief
Belief is the way
The way of the innocent
And when I say innocent
I should say naive
DEPECHE MODE
"Lie to Me"
The less you know the more you believe.
U2
"Last Night on Earth"
Belief is involuntary; nothing involuntary is meritorious or reprehensible. A man ought not to be considered worse or better for his belief.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"Declaration of Rights"
To learn a belief without belief is to sing a song without the tune.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Telling
Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.
RAY BRADBURY
The October Country
Maturity of mind is best shown in slow belief.
BALTASAR GRACIAN
The Art of Worldly Wisdom
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
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
If what we worship fail us, still the fire
Burns on, and it is much to have believed.
AMY LOWELL
"Hero-Worship"
Just as every man must see for himself, so every man must believe for himself. Acceptation of truth is a purely personal, individual act.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Where is the world whose people don't prefer a comfortable, warm, and well-worn belief, however illogical, to the chilly winds of uncertainty.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Foundation and Earth
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook L", Aphorisms
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 betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Price of the Ticket
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
Men that believe only what they understand can write their creed on a postage stamp.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
I don't have to run from anything because I don't believe in anything.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Wise Blood
We are trained to believe and not to know.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVEN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Corrino
What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
WILLIAM JAMES
The Moral Equivalent of War