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We are trained to believe and not to know.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVEN J. ANDERSON, Dune: House Corrino
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
- Belief is the way
- The way of the innocent
- And when I say innocent
- I should say naive
DEPECHE MODE, "Lie to Me"
A strong enough belief system, a sufficiently powerful conviction, can make anything happen. This is how we create our consensus reality, including our gods.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON, Dune: House Harkonnen
Human psychology has a near universal tendency to let belief be coloured by desire.
RICHARD DAWKINS, The God Delusion
Oftimes our belief, if in another, we would regard a superstition.
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
Belief in God does not rest upon a mere doctrine of logic, which some other statement of logic may come and upset. It is one of those primal facts in the human soul which no mere logic has established nor can refute.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Most people are too slow to believe, but once you get them going, they believe too much.
Beware! The mind of the believer stagnates. It fails to grow outward into an unlimited, infinite universe.
FRANK HERBERT, Heretics of Dune
Men that believe only what they understand can write their creed on a postage stamp.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
Belief needs something terrible to make it work, I find--blood, nails, a bit of anguish.
ANNE ENRIGHT, The Gathering
It is often said it is no matter what a man believes if he is only sincere. This is true of all minor truths, and false of all truths whose nature it is to fashion a man's life. It will make no difference in a man's harvest whether he thinks turnips have more saccharine matter than potatoes--whether corn is better than wheat. But let the man sincerely believe that seed planted without ploughing is as good as with, that January is as favorable for seed sowing as April, and that cockle seed will produce as good a harvest as wheat, and will it make no difference?
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Life Thoughts
- 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"
Beliefs. Once entrenched in a culture, they persist, evolve and diverge, in a manner reminiscent of biological evolution.
RICHARD DAWKINS, The God Delusion
Belief is something you choose to do. It's hard. If it was easy, it wouldn't be worth as much.
MEL ODOM, Unnatural Selection
Creeds, like other goods, pass by inheritance to descendants.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
Beliefs are more powerful than facts.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON, Dune: House Atreides
False beliefs can be every bit as consoling as true ones, right up until the moment of disillusionment.
RICHARD DAWKINS, The God Delusion
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
The less you know the more you believe.
U2, "Last Night on Earth"
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"
Never underestimate the power of the human mind to believe what it wants to believe, no matter the conflicting evidence.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON, Dune: House Harkonnen
It will be whatever it is, no? Nothing, something -- our believing one thing or another will matter not at all in the end.
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
I have learned not to think little of any one's belief, no matter how strange it may be. I have tried to keep an open mind, and it is not the ordinary things of life that could close it, but the strange things, the extraordinary things, the things that make one doubt if they be mad or sane.
Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.
RICHARD FEYNMAN, The Meaning of It All
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