quotations about belief
Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that ensures the successful outcome of the venture.
WILLIAM JAMES
The Varieties of Religious Experience
Beware! The mind of the believer stagnates. It fails to grow outward into an unlimited, infinite universe.
FRANK HERBERT
Heretics of Dune
There is a force that controls all your decisions. It influences how you think and feel every moment you're alive. It determines what you will do and what you will not do. It determines how you feel about anything that occurs in your life. That force is your beliefs.
ANTHONY ROBBINS
Notes from a Friend: A Quick and Simple Guide to Taking Control of Your Life
Though my sight be lost, I do not yet lose my faith: when I can no longer see, I can still believe.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
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 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
The more we justify our beliefs, the more narrow-minded we become.
LIN YUTANG
The Importance of Living
To learn a belief without belief is to sing a song without the tune.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Telling
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
A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence.
DAVID HUME
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
If you want to know what your true beliefs are, take a look at your actions.
ROBERT ANTHONY
Think Big
It is easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Neverÿon
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
Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barriers of system.
GEORGE ELIOT
Silas Marner
If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the believing-muscles of your mind, and then you'll be so weak you won't be able to believe the simplest true things.
LEWIS CARROLL
attributed, Lewis Carroll in Wonderland: The Life and Times of Alice and Her Creator
Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good ground for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
"An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish,", Unpopular Essays
Strong beliefs win strong men, and then make them stronger.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
The only thing wrong with love and faith and belief is not having it.
MARK SCHWAHN
"What Comes After the Blues", One Tree Hill