quotations about belief
To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.
HENRI POINCARé
Of Science and Hypotheses
Believing seems the most "mental" thing we do, the thing most remote from what is done by mere matter. The whole intellectual life consists of beliefs, and of the passage from one belief to another by what is called "reasoning." Beliefs give knowledge and error; they are the vehicles of truth and falsehood. Psychology, theory of knowledge and metaphysics revolve about belief, and on the view we take of belief our philosophical outlook largely depends.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
The Analysis of Mind
The more we justify our beliefs, the more narrow-minded we become.
LIN YUTANG
The Importance of Living
Knowing what our beliefs are requires confronting ourselves, our fears, and our resistance to change. Once we know what our real beliefs are, we can allow them to evolve and change if they do not serve us.
PAT. B. ALLEN
Art Is a Way of Knowing
Beliefs. Once entrenched in a culture, they persist, evolve and diverge, in a manner reminiscent of biological evolution.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The God Delusion
What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which habitually acts.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Maxims for Revolutionists
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
Many people have died for their beliefs. The real courage is living and suffering for what you believe.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI
Eragon
Beware! The mind of the believer stagnates. It fails to grow outward into an unlimited, infinite universe.
FRANK HERBERT
Heretics of Dune
The only thing wrong with love and faith and belief is not having it.
MARK SCHWAHN
"What Comes After the Blues", One Tree Hill
Strong beliefs win strong men, and then make them stronger.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
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
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
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
Beliefs are more powerful than facts.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Atreides
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
I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.
LOUISE ERDRICH
Love Medicine
If we can once believe that success is possible, success becomes possible.
FRANK CHAPMAN SHARP
Success: A Course in Moral Instruction
When a belief vanishes, there survives it -- more and more vigorously so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new things -- a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it did once animate, as if it was in them and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause -- the death of the gods.
MARCEL PROUST
Swann's Way
On any longer view, man is only fitfully committed to the rational -- to thinking, seeing, learning, knowing. Believing is what he's really proud of.
MARTIN AMIS
"The Voice of the Lonely Crowd,", The Guardian, Jun. 1, 2002