quotations about belief
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
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
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
With how much ease believe we what we wish!
JOHN DRYDEN
Cleopatra
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"
Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.
RAY BRADBURY
The October Country
If what we worship fail us, still the fire
Burns on, and it is much to have believed.
AMY LOWELL
"Hero-Worship"
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
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
Beliefs. Once entrenched in a culture, they persist, evolve and diverge, in a manner reminiscent of biological evolution.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The God Delusion
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
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
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 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
Men that believe only what they understand can write their creed on a postage stamp.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Maturity of mind is best shown in slow belief.
BALTASAR GRACIAN
The Art of Worldly Wisdom
With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook L", Aphorisms
To learn a belief without belief is to sing a song without the tune.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Telling
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
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