quotations about belief
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
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"What Pragmatism Means,", Pragmatism
The only thing wrong with love and faith and belief is not having it.
MARK SCHWAHN
"What Comes After the Blues", One Tree Hill
Belief needs something terrible to make it work, I find--blood, nails, a bit of anguish.
ANNE ENRIGHT
The Gathering
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
With how much ease believe we what we wish!
JOHN DRYDEN
Cleopatra
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
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
A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.
FRANZ KAFKA
attributed, Memorable Quotations
Beware! The mind of the believer stagnates. It fails to grow outward into an unlimited, infinite universe.
FRANK HERBERT
Heretics of Dune
If what we worship fail us, still the fire
Burns on, and it is much to have believed.
AMY LOWELL
"Hero-Worship"
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
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
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
What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
WILLIAM JAMES
The Moral Equivalent of War
I don't have to run from anything because I don't believe in anything.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Wise Blood
It's so hard to believe in anything anymore. I mean, it's like, religion, you really can't take it seriously, because it seems so mythological, it seems so arbitrary... but, on the other hand, science is just pure empiricism, and by virtue of its method, it excludes metaphysics. I guess I wouldn't believe in anything any more if it weren't for my lucky astrology mood watch.
STEVE MARTIN
A Wild and Crazy Guy
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
If you want to know what your true beliefs are, take a look at your actions.
ROBERT ANTHONY
Think Big
I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.
LOUISE ERDRICH
Love Medicine
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