Belief Quotes

A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.

Franz Kafka

The only thing that stands between a man and what he wants from life is often merely the will to try it and the faith to believe that it is possible.

Richard M. DeVos

You can change your beliefs so they empower your dreams and desires. Create a strong belief in yourself and what you want.

Marcia Wieder

You must see first before you can believe.

Raymond Holliwell

And if we now cast our eyes over the nations of the earth, we shall find that, instead of possessing the pure religion of the Gospel, they may be divided either into infidels, who deny the truth; or politicians who make religion a stalking horse for their ambition; or professors, who walk in the trammels of orthodoxy, and are more attentive to traditions and ordinances of men than to the oracles of truth.

Samuel Adams

William James used to preach the will-to-believe. For my part, I should wish to preach the will-to-doubt. None of our beliefs are quite true; all at least have a penumbra of vagueness and error.

Bertrand Russell

Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barrier of systems.

George Eliot

The battle that never ends is the battle of belief against unbelief.

Thomas Carlyle

Conviction never so excellent, is worthless until it coverts itself into conduct.

Thomas Carlyle

When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.

Bertrand Russell

One reason why the Enemy found this so east was that, without knowing it, I was already desperately anxious to get rid of my religion; and that for a reason worth recording. By a sheer mistake - and I still believe it to have been an honest mistake - in spiritual technique I had rendered my private practice of that religion a quiet intolerable burden. It came about in this way. Like everyone else I had been told as a child that one must not only say one's prayers but think abut what one was saying. Accordingly, when I came to a serious belief, I tried to put this into practice. At first it seemed plain sailing. But soon the false conscience (St. Paul's 'Law', Herbert's 'prattler') came into play. One had no sooner reached 'Amen' than it whispered, 'Yes. But are you sure you were really thinking about what you said?'; then, more subtly, 'Were you, for example, thinking about it as well as you did last night?' The answer, for reasons I did not then understand, was nearly always No. 'Very well,' said the voice, 'hadn't you, then, better try it over again?' And one obeyed; but of course with no assurance that the second attempt would be any better...I set myself a standard. No clause of my prayer was to be allowed to pass muster unless it was accompanied by what I called a 'realization,' by which I meant a certain vivedness of the imagination and the affections. My nightly task was to produce by sheer will power a phenomenon which will power could never produce, which was so ill-defined that I could never say with absolute confidence whether it had occurred, and which, even when it did occur, was of very mediocre spiritual value.

C.S. Lewis

Of course the cat will growl and spit at the operator and bite him if she can. But the real question is whether he is a vet or a vivisector.

C.S. Lewis

Man makes holy what he believes.

Ernest Renan

If you don't believe in yourself, then who will believe in you? The next man's way of getting there might not necessarily work for me, so I have to create my own ways of getting there.

Martin Lawrence

Loving is half of believing.

Victor Hugo

Credulity is belief in slight evidence, with no evidence, or against evidence.

Tryon Edwards

Men freely believe that which they desire.

Julius Caesar

Men willingly believe what they wish.

Julius Caesar

What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also.

Julius Caesar

We won't even attempt to achieve what we do not believe at a deep level we can have or deserve.

Ruth Ross