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
What believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend, must have a very long head, or a very short creed.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
If you only believe when it's easy, you don't really believe.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Obsidian Butterfly
Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real.
GENE WOLFE
The Shadow of the Torturer
At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
On Certainty
We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing them becomes too high.
RANSOM RIGGS
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
When the old creeds are threadbare, and worn through,
And all too narrow for the broadening soul,
Give me the fine, firm texture of the new,
Fair, beautiful and whole!
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Old and New"
Belief is the way
The way of the innocent
And when I say innocent
I should say naive
DEPECHE MODE
"Lie to Me"
There can be no merit in believing something which you can neither explain nor understand.
JOHN LUBBOCK
The Use of Life
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
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
With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook L", Aphorisms
Oftimes our belief, if in another, we would regard a superstition.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
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
Human psychology has a near universal tendency to let belief be coloured by desire.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The God Delusion
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
Men that believe only what they understand can write their creed on a postage stamp.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought