Belief Quotes

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

~ Ansel Adams

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widely spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.

~ Bertrand Russell

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

~ George Bernard Shaw

Oh, my dear, if you only knew how strange is the matter regarding which I am here, it is you who would laugh. 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

Your greatness is revealed not by the lights that shine upon you, but by the light that shines within you.

~ Ray A. Davis

There are those who say that seeing is believing. I am telling you that believing is seeing.

~ Neale Donald Walsch

There are so many things I can't believe. That people deserve what they get, both bad and good. That one day I'll live in a world where people are judged by what they do instead of who they are. That happy endings don't have contingencies and conditions.

~ Jodi Picoult

Nothing will shake a man-or at any rate a man like me-out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.

~ C.s. Lewis

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.

~ David Hume

And one more thing: you still believe that man can be good. If that weren't the case, you wouldn't have invented all this nonsense to convince yourself otherwise.

~ Paulo Coelho

Don't you bully me with your politeness! Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?

~ Yann Martel

I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall neve

~ Anonymous

I'm not a believer in predetermined fates, being rewarded for one's efforts. I'm not a believer in karma. The reason why I try to be a good person is because I think it's the right thing to do. If I commit fewer bad acts there will be fewer bad acts, maybe other people will join in committing fewer bad acts, and in time there will be fewer and fewer of them.

~ Daniel Handler

Sometimes we fight who we are, struggling against ourselves and our natures. But we must learn to accept who we are and appreciate who we become. We must love ourselves for what and who we are, and believe in our talents.

~ Harley King

IT'S THE EXPRESSION ON THEIR LITTLE FACES I LIKE, said the Hogfather. You mean sort of fear and awe and not knowing whether to laugh or cry or wet their pants? YES. NOW THAT IS WHAT I CALL BELIEF.

~ Terry Pratchett

By first believing in Santa Claus, then the Easter Bunny, then the Tooth Fairy, Rant Casey was recognizing that those myths are more than pretty stories and traditions to delight children. Or to modify behavior. Each of those three traditions asks a child to believe in the impossible in exchange for a reward. These are stepped-up tests to build a child's faith and imagination. The first test is to believe in a magical person, with toys as the reward. The second test is to trust in a magical animal, with candy as the reward. The last test is the most difficult, with the most abstract reward: To believe, trust in a flying fairy that will leave money. From a man to an animal to a fairy. From toys to candy to money. Thus, interestingly enough, transferring the magic of faith and trust from sparkling fairy-dom to clumsy, tarnished coins. From gossamer wings to nickels... dimes... and quarters. In this way, a child is stepped up to greater feats of imagination and faith as he or she matures. Beginning with Santa in infancy, and ending with the Tooth Fairy as the child acquires adult teeth. Or, plainly put, beginning with all the possibility of childhood, and ending with an absolute trust in the national currency.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

There’s no point in believing in things that exist.

~ Terry Pratchett

There's something wrong in not appreciating one's own special abilities, my girl. Find your own limitations, yes, but don't limit yourself with false modesty.

~ Anne Mccaffrey

Micro meditations should be performed with very little activity. These practices should not be associated with any goal, concept or belief.

~ Amit Ray

WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU HADN'T SAVED HIM?Yes! The sun would have risen just the same, yes?NOOh, come on. You can't expect me to believe that. It's an astronomical fact.THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN....Really? Then what would have happened, pray?A MERE BALL OF FLAMING GAS WOULD HAVE ILLUMINATED THE WORLD.

~ Terry Pratchett

[S]he believed that the Buddhists were right–that if you want, you will suffer; if you love, you will grieve. (68)

~ Anne Lamott

Because the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination.

~ Betty Smith

The trouble with deep belief is that it costs something And there is something inside me, some selfish beast of a subtle thing that doesn't like the truth at all because it carries responsibility, and if I actually believe these things I have to do something about them. It is so, so cumbersome to believe anything. And it isn't cool.

~ Donald Miller

In a brutal country like ours, where human life is 'cheap', it's stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs? High ideas? Only people in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.

~ Orhan Pamuk

The leap of faith is this: You have to believe, or at least pretend you believe until you really believe it, that you are strong enough to take life face on. Eating disorders, on any level, are a crutch. They are also an addiction and illness, but there is no question at all that they are quite simply a way of avoiding the banal, daily, itchy pain of life. Eating disorders provide a little drama, they feed into the desire for constant excitement, everything becomes life-or-death, everything is terribly grand and crashing, very Sturm and Drang. And they are distracting. You don't have to think about any of the nasty minutiae of the real world, you don't get caught up in that awful boring thing called regular life, with its bills and its breakups and its dishes and laundry and groceries and arguments over whose turn it is to change the litter box and bedtimes and bad sex and all that, because you are having a real drama, not a sitcom but a GRAND EPIC, all by yourself, and why would you bother with those foolish mortals when you could spend hours and hours with the mirror, when you are having the most interesting sado-machistic affair with your own image?

~ Marya Hornbacher

The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration originally payed to the sun.

~ Thomas Paine

I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.

~ Carl Sagan

Sometimes we want to believe something so badly that we allow ourselves to be taken advantage of.

~ Aaron B. Powell

If you feel irritated or threatened by others' beliefs,it's a sign that you're experiencing crisis of confidence.

~ Toba Beta

Sometimes I doubt and sometimes I believe. And I like not making myself believe when I am doubting, and not making myself doubt when I am believing. Surely neither God nor Accident need my consistency.

~ Hugh Prather

But the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies.

~ Orson Scott Card

To quote Gandhi yet again, If I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.

~ Jeff Yeager

A lot of people don't believe in curses.A lot of people don't believe in yellow-spotted lizards either, but if one bites you, it doesn't make a difference whether you believe in it or not.

~ Louis Sachar

Belief, hard work, love–you have those things, you can do anything.

~ Mitch Albom

So little is actually worthy of belief or disbelief. Better to strive to coexist than seek to disapprove . . .

~ David Mitchell

The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.

~ Niels Bohr

What if everything you believe is wrong and you could still be loved and still be forgiven?

~ Cassandra Clare

You don't choose what to believe. Belief chooses you.

~ Steven Galloway

It is not that I was credulous, simply that I belived in all things dark and dangerous. It was part of my young creed that the night was full of ghosts and witches, hungry and flapping and dressed completely in black.

~ Neil Gaiman