quotations about belief
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
The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Celtic Twilight
It's not about making sense. It's about believing in something, and letting that belief be real enough to change your life. It's about faith. You don't fix faith ... it fixes you.
JOSS WHEDON
"Jaynestown", Firefly
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.
BRAM STOKER
Dracula
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
There are people who can believe anything they wish. What lucky creatures!
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
The Reflections of Lichtenberg
If you think that your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument, rather then by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based on faith, you will realize that argument is useless, and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting and distorting the minds of the young in what is called "education". This last is particularly dastardly, since it takes advantage of the defencelessness of immature minds. Unfortunately it is practiced in greater or less degree in the schools of every civilised country.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Human Society in Ethics and Politics
Many people have died for their beliefs. The real courage is living and suffering for what you believe.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI
Eragon
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
A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.
FRANZ KAFKA
attributed, Memorable Quotations
I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.
LOUISE ERDRICH
Love Medicine
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
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
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
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
Belief as a positive phenomenon, if it exists, may be regarded, in this view, as a product of doubt, a decision after debate, an acceptance, not merely of THIS, but of THIS-RATHER-THAN-THAT.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
The Analysis of Mind
It was not right to believe anything you couldn't see or hold in your hands or test with your teeth.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Wise Blood
Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.
SAMUEL BUTLER
Notebooks
All religious beliefs seem weird to those not brought up in them.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The God Delusion
He who believes needs no explanation.
EURIPIDES
Bacchæ