David Foster Wallace
Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
Max Lucado
Faith is not the belief that God will do what you want. It is the belief that God will do what is right.
Margaret Atwood
Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
Margaret Atwood
Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
Margaret Atwood
I'm a strict, strict agnostic. It's very different from a casual, 'I don't know.' It's that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can't present it as fact.
David Sedaris
We were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well made cocktail.
Steven Spielberg
The Japanese had a very strong belief in Bushido, death before dishonour. They were fighting for their country; they were the aggressors in World War II.
Charles Lamb
The most common error made in matters of appearance is the belief that one should disdain the superficial and let the true beauty of one's soul shine through. If there are places on your body where this is a possibility, you are not attractive - you are leaking.
Joseph Conrad
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Woman's degradation is in mans idea of his sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man.
Bertrand Russell
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.
Allan Bloom
The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency -- the belief that the here and now is all there is.
It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.
Christian Bale
In everyday life, my wife is the most wonderful. We're in love with each other beyond belief.
Daisaku Ikeda
Having lived through the transition from totalitarianism, I am acutely mindful of the need to never take for granted the basic freedoms of thought, expression and belief that democracy brings.
William James
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
John Krasinski
I usually save these answers [on the institution of marriage] for my Barbara Walters Special, but she didn't call so I've never been engaged, despite popular belief.
George Carlin
Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.
Joseph Conrad
Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.
Viktor Frankl
Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
Miyamoto Musashi
All man are the same except for their belief in their own selves, regardless of what others may think of them
John Maynard Keynes
Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
Richard Dawkins
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
Sigmund Freud
The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.
Andy Biersack
I was a little chubby kid that no girls ever talked to. I had little chance of becoming an internationally known rock star. Music was my escape and my belief system.
Gloria Steinem
The Miss America Pageant reinforces a belief that women are merely how they look and how they please.
Fidel Castro
Religious faith, like political belief, should be based on reasoning, on the development of thought and feelings. The two things are inseparable.
Joseph Conrad
I couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life...
Bertrand Russell
Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
Malcolm Gladwell
If you want to bring a fundamental change in people's belief and behavior...you need to create a community around them, where those new beliefs can be practiced and expressed and nurtured.
William James
To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds,
Narendra Modi
It is my absolute belief that Indians have unlimited talent. I have no doubt about our capabilities.
Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
Viktor Frankl
Being tolerant does not mean that I share another one's belief. But it does mean that I acknowledge another one's right to believe, and obey, his own conscience.
Mahatma Gandhi
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.
Arnold Vinick
And I think belief is one of those things that comes to people in their own way. And just because I believe in something doesn't mean I think that you should.
One day the absurdity of the almost universal human belief in the slavery of other animals will be palpable. We shall then have discovered our souls and become worthier of sharing this planet with them.
Theodore Roosevelt
Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth.
Christian Bale
In everyday life, my wife is the most wonderful. We're in love with each other beyond belief.
Winona Ryder
My father is an atheist. My mother is Buddhist. They encouraged my siblings and me to take the best part of other religions to make our own belief system.
Michelle Obama
We are a nation founded as a rebuke to tyranny. A nation of revolutionaries who refused sovereign reign from afar. Hear me - we're a nation that says give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. A nation built on our differences, guided by the belief that we're all created equal.
Salman Rushdie
Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief. Doubt.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
We are very defensive, and therefore aggressive, when we hold on to a particular belief, a dogmas, or when we worship our particular nationality, with the rag that is called the flag.
Andre Dubus
Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.
Wallace Stevens
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.
Michael Chabon
No; he could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.
Anthony Trollope
And, above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you very much at your own reckoning.
Albert Ellis
When people change their irrational beliefs to undogmatic flexible preferences, they become less disturbed.
Brian May
I have to build my own boat this time. It's a big sea out there, and I have a pretty small boat. I have a lot of belief in it.
Richard Dawkins
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.
Carl Sagan
You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe
Everyone prefers belief to the exercise of judgement.
Bertrand Russell
It seems to me a fundamental dishonesty, and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity to hold a belief because you think it's useful and not because you think it's true.
Frank Lloyd Wright
The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.
David Foster Wallace
Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
Galileo Galilei
In regard to the philosophers, if they be true philosophers, i.e., lovers of truth, they should not be irritated that the earth moves. Rather, if they realize that they have held a false belief, they should thank those have shown them the truth; and if their opinion stands firm that the earth doesn't move, they will have reason to boast than be angered.
Denis Diderot
A nation which thinks that it is belief in God and not good law which makes people honest does not seem to me very advanced.
The true basis of religion is not belief, but intuitive experience. Intuition is the soul’s power of knowing God. To know what religion is really all about, one must know God.
Jack Welch
The idea flow from the human spirit is absolutely unlimited. All you have to do is tap into that well. I don't like to use the word efficiency. It's creativity. It's a belief that every person counts.
Brian May
I go through major crises every few months, but then I have great peaks of belief and creativity. I'm a weird kind of animal.
Michael Jordan
My mother is my root, my foundation. She planted the seed that I base my life on, and that is the belief that the ability to achieve starts in your mind.
William Golding
I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
Robert Anton Wilson
Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.
Bertrand Russell
Belief in God and a future life makes it possible to go through life with less of stoic courage than is needed by skeptics.
Samuel P. Huntington
In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.
Robert Greene
Our natural tendency is to project onto other people our own belief and value systems, in ways in which we are not even aware.
Bertrand Russell
Whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants.
Agatha Christie
It is odd how, when you have a secret belief of your own which you do not wish to acknowledge, the voicing of it by someone else will rouse you to a fury of denial.
Alberto Moravia
This thought strengthened in me my belief that all men, without exception, deserve to be pitied, if only because they are alive.
Eric Hoffer
Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.
Harry S. Truman
You know that being an American is more than a matter of where your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal and that everyone deserves an even break.
Michael Faraday
I will simply express my strong belief, that that point of self-education which consists in teaching the mind to resist its desires and inclinations, until they are proved to be right, is the most important of all, not only in things of natural philosophy, but in every department of dally life.
Derrick Jensen
Question four: What book would you give to every child? Answer: I wouldn't give them a book. Books are part of the problem: this strange belief that a tree has nothing to say until it is murdered, its flesh pulped, and then (human) people stain this flesh with words. I would take children outside and put them face to face with chipmunks, dragonflies, tadpoles, hummingbirds, stones, rivers, trees, crawdads. That said, if you're going to force me to give them a book, it would be The Wind In The Willows, which I hope would remind them to go outside.
