38 Beliefs Quotes

Customs form us all, our thoughts, our morals, our most fixed beliefs; are consequences of our place of birth.

You have your thoughts and I have mine. This is the fact and you can't change it even if you kill me.

One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

I had learnt from experience that many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones, without in the least altering the habits of mind of which false opinions are made.

You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it.

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.

Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it.

Sometimes the knowledge you've been given in school or by an elder - 'this is just the way it is' - keeps you from accomplishing because it traps you in a box in your mind and limits your freedom to deliver.

The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the 'wrong' beliefs.

Religious and philosophical beliefs are, indeed, as dangerous as fire, and nothing can take from them that beauty of danger. But there is only one way of really guarding ourselves against the excessive danger of them, and that is to be steeped in philosophy and soaked in religion.

What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.

What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.

Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down by the mind before you reach eighteen.

I went to Sunday School and liked the stories about Christ and the Christmas star. They were beautiful. They made you warm and happy to think about. But I didn't believe them. The Sunday School teacher talked too much in the way our grade school teacher used to when she told us about George Washington. Pleasant, pretty stories, but not true.

To raise the standard of living of the whole world to that of Britain would not be a greater undertaking than the war we have just fought. I don't claim, and I don't know who does, that that wouldn't solve anything in itself. It is merely that privation and brute labour have to be abolished before the real problems of humanity can be tackled. The major problem of our time is the decay of the belief in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of the secret police. How right the working classes are in their 'materialism'! How right they are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time! Understand that, and the long horror that we are enduring becomes at least intelligible.

In fine, I repeat, you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject anything, because any other persons, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable, not for the rightness, but uprightness of the decision.

We Bokonists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon 'If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons,' writes Bokonon, 'that person may be a member of your karass.' At another point in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, 'Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass.' By that he means that a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries. It is as free form as an amoeba.

Man gives indifferent names to one and the same thing from the difference of their own passions; as they that approve a private opinion call it opinion; but they that mislike it, heresy: and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.

I went in thinking: 'I'm not going to find out that Darwinism is a fraud. I'll probably find out these (intelligent design proponents) are frauds.' But I wound up knowing a lot more than when I started. I learned that Darwinism is being overhyped, and that it doesn't really convey what's going on. Sometimes if you follow a 'truth' far enough, it becomes a lie.

Integrity: 'Don't make the mistake of thinking that you have to agree with people and their beliefs to defend them from injustice.'

I learned to understand their language and to speak it a little. Immediately the news spread throughout the kingdom that two little wild men had been discovered. We were smaller than everybody else because the wilderness had provided us with such bad food. And it was a genetic defect that caused us to have forelimbs that weren't strong enough to support us. This belief gained strength through repetition despite the priests of the country. They opposed it, saying that it was an awful impiety to believe that not only animals but monsters might be of the same species as they.

Salvation would not be a question of accepting a creed, but of acquiring insight.

It's not what you don't know that hurts you. It's what you know that just ain't so.

People's beliefs don't exist in isolation. Everyone's firmly held beliefs exert an enormous pressure on everyone else

In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination.

All our beliefs are being challenged now, and rightfully so - they're stupid.

Your pride can't hurt me - I have no beliefs!

'All our suffering comes from a deficiency to stand up for our beliefs.'

What we now need is a multitude of participants to take part in the great discussion and to join in the search for the larger truth and the more fruitful patterns of belief which we confidently believe is waiting to be elicited.

Look, I'm a person, an individual with a character and part of my character is about what I believe in and part of my beliefs obviously is a religious conviction. I simply hesitate whenever I get drawn into this territory because I have found, over time, that it either leads to people misunderstanding the basis upon which you are taking decisions or it leads to people trying to colonise God or religion for one particular political position. I make no claims to that at all.