Selected belief quotes

1. As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

2. If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview.

3. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

4. As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

5. Laugh at what you hold sacred, and still hold it sacred.

6. I go the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker.

7. It would be easier for the Devil to go to church and cross himself with holy water than for these people to comprehend the ideas which are accepted facts to us today.

8. I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so.

9. A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.

10. Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.

11. I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.

12. Any religion or philosophy which is not based on a respect for life is not a true religion or philosophy.

13. Faith which refuses to face indisputable facts is but little faith. Truth is always gain, however hard it is to accommodate ourselves to it. To linger in any kind of untruth proves to be a departure from the straight way of faith.

14. Only when an ideal of peace is born in the minds of the peoples will the institutions set up to maintain this peace effectively fulfill the function expected of them.

15. In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.

16. I admit that my visions can never mean to other men as much as they do to me. I do not regret this. All I ask is that my results should convince seekers after truth that there is beyond doubt something worth while seeking, attainable by methods more or less like mine. I do not want to father a flock, to be the fetish of fools and fanatics, or the founder of a faith whose followers are content to echo my opinions. I want each man to cut his own way through the jungle.

17. Both now and for always, I intend to hold fast to my belief in the hidden strength of the human spirit.

18. When you fuse Christianity with power, it isn't long before Christians start imposing the cross on others rather than taking it up for themselves.

19. Will you tell them about that far off and mythical land And how a child to the virgin came? Will you tell them that the reason why we murdered Everything upon the surface of the world Is so we can stand right up and say we did it in his name?

20. The tolerant liberal suddenly becomes very intolerant when their official religion is challenged.

21. People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don't know why. No, I do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.

22. Men who cannot believe in the mystery of our Saviour's redemption can believe that spirits from the dead have visited them in a stranger's parlour, because they see a table shake and do not know how it is shaken; because they hear a rapping on a board, and cannot see the instrument that raps it; because they are touched in the dark, and do not know the hand that touches them.

23. Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

24. If you do not believe you can do it then you have no chance at all.

25. An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.

26. One possible reason that I don't believe in fate is that I wasn't fated to.

27. I believe the stars can affect human lives, particularly by providing employment for thousands of astrologers.

28. You know, my faith is one that admits some doubt.

29. People are said to believe in God, or to disbelieve in Adam and Eve. But in such cases what is believed or disbelieved is that there is an entity answering a certain description. This, which can be believed or disbelieved is quite different from the actual entity (if any) which does answer the description. Thus the matter of belief is, in all cases, different in kind from the matter of sensation or presentation, and error is in no way analogous to hallucination. A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

30. Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

31. I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

32. I've lost my faith in science.

33. People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.

34. I do benefits for all religions - I'd hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality.

35. My music will go on forever. Maybe it's a fool say that, but when me know facts me can say facts. My music will go on forever.

36. I read a book lately by Nietzsche and he says religion is just to dull the senses of the people. I agree.

37. I can't help believing that these things that come from the subconscious mind have a sort of truth to them. It may not be a scientific truth, but it's psychological truth.

38. There's always a way. Where there's a will there is a way. You have to believe.

39. Faith makes it possible to achieve that which man's mind can conceive and believe.

40. There are lots of guys around the world that are lazy. They have big fat guts. They talk about chi power and things they can do, but don't believe it.

41. Our ancestors were very rich and eminent people, and they left us an enormous inheritance, which we have completely forgotten, especially since the time when we began to consider ourselves the descendants of a monkey.

42. The greatest barrier to consciousness is the belief that one is already conscious.

43. Christianity made us think there's one heaven.

44. With life and all I've been through, I do have a belief in goodness, a good spirit. I think what people have done with religion is personified good and evil, so good's become God with 'o' out, and evil's become Devil with a 'd' added. That's my theory of religion.

45. Belief is involuntary; nothing involuntary is meritorious or reprehensible. A man ought not to be considered worse or better for his belief.

46. Not one of them who took up in his youth with this opinion that there are no gods ever continued until old age faithful to his conviction.

47. Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.

48. None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed.

49. The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution.

50. 120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.

51. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.

52. That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

53. My whole life has been decided by fate.

54. You can kill a thousand; you can bring an end to life; you cannot kill an idea.

55. At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.

56. The Mosaic religion had been a Father religion; Christianity became a Son religion. The old God, the Father, took second place; Christ, the Son, stood in His stead, just as in those dark times every son had longed to do.

57. Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

58. Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.

59. There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.

60. In order to obey God, one must receive his commands. How did it happen that I received them in adolescence, while I was professing atheism? To believe that the desire for good is always fulfilled - that is faith, and whoever has it is not an atheist.

61. All I ask is the chance to prove that money can't make me happy.

62. Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.

63. I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

64. If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.

65. Few intellectual tyrannies can be more recalcitrant than the truths that everybody knows and nearly no one can defend with any decent data (for who needs proof of anything so obvious). And few intellectual activities can be more salutary than attempts to find out whether these rocks of ages might crumble at the slightest tap of an informational hammer.

66. Now, the essence, the very spirit of Christmas is that we first make believe a thing is so, and lo, it presently turns out to be so.

67. God is by definition the holder of all possible knowledge, it would be impossible for him to have faith in anything. Faith, then, is built upon ignorance and hope.

68. 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 anymore if it weren't for my lucky astrology mood watch.

69. Trust your doubt. Always fight for your beliefs. That is the path beyond thought.

70. The one distinct feature of our Association has been the right of the individual opinion for every member. We have been beset at every step with the cry that somebody was injuring the cause by the expression of some sentiments that differed with those held by the majority of mankind. The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God. I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do to their fellows, because it always coincides with their own desires.

71. You cannot believe in God until you believe in yourself.

72. Our first duty is not to hate ourselves, because to advance we must have faith in ourselves first and then in God. Those who have no faith in themselves can never have faith in God.

73. We are ever free if we would only believe it, only have faith enough. You are the soul, free and eternal, ever free, ever blessed. Have faith enough and you will be free in a minute.

74. I acknowledge the Furies. I believe in them. I have heard the disastrous beating of their wings.

75. And this Feare of things invisible, is the naturall Seed of that, which every one in himself calleth Religion; and in them that worship, or feare that Power otherwise than they do, Superstition.

76. Politics, like religion, hold up the torches of martyrdom to the reformers of error.

77. Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our god alone. I enquire after no man's and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friend's or our foe's, are exactly the right.

78. I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

79. Our school systems teach our children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud, by teaching evolution as fact.

80. There's probably no subject with quite so many conflictin' opinions about it as there are about food, and 'tis better to swap bubble gum with a rabid bulldog than challenge a single one o' the varyin' beliefs your average human holds about nutrition.

81. Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.

82. What has changed is that my life then was less difficult and my future seemingly less gloomy, but as far as my inner self, my way of looking at things and of thinking is concerned, that has not changed. But if there has indeed been a change, then it is that I think, believe and love more seriously now what I thought, believed and loved even then.

83. History is the lie commonly agreed upon.

84. After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

85. I believe in being an innovator.

86. What I stand for is what I stand on.

87. Men of integrity are generally pretty obstinate, in adhering to an opinion once adopted.

88. Blind unbelief is sure to err, And scan his work in vain; God is his own interpreter, And he will make it plain.

89. A thing is important if anyone think it important.

90. We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.

91. We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.

92. Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.

93. One in whom persuasion and belief Had ripened into faith, and faith become A passionate intuition.

94. What we need is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out.

95. To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.

96. I do occasionally envy the person who is religious naturally, without being brainwashed into it or suckered into it by all the organized hustles.

97. Gods always behave like the people who make them.

98. Thou canst not pray to God without praying to Love, but mayest pray to Love without praying to God.

99. Two fixed ideas can no more exist together in the moral world than two bodies can occupy one and the same place in the physical world.

100. What I believe is not what I say I believe; what I believe is what I do.