top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every man who has speech of his fellows. A awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create the world in which posterity will live."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Belief quotes
"Rather than feeling lost and unimportant and meaningless, set against galaxies which go beyond the reach of the furthest telescopes, I feel that my life has meaning. Perhaps I should feel insignificant, but instead I feel a soaring in my heart that the God who could create all this - and out of nothing - can still count the hairs of my head."
"Though man needs to live to believe, he does not need to believe to live."
"Most people believe most of the things they believe only because they believe that most people believe them."
"It is one thing to believe and another to know."
"Night poured over the desert. It came suddenly, in purple. In the clear air, the stars drilled down out of the sky, reminding any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way."
Explore more quotes by William Kingdon Clifford
"In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts."
"The harm which is done by credulity in a man is not confined to the fostering of a credulous character in others, and consequent support of false beliefs."
"To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."
"The rule which should guide us in such cases is simple and obvious enough: that the aggregate testimony of our neighbours is subject to the same conditions as the testimony of any one of them."
"This sense of power is the highest and best of pleasures when the belief on which it is founded is a true belief, and has been fairly earned by investigation."
"The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery."
"To consider only one other such witness: the followers of the Buddha have at least as much right to appeal to individual and social experience in support of the authority of the Eastern saviour."
"He who truly believes that which prompts him to an action has looked upon the action to lust after it, he has committed it already in his heart."
"A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions."
"We may always depend on it that algebra, which cannot be translated into good English and sound common sense, is bad algebra."
bottom of page