Believe quotes
31K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside believe — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"If some lose their whole fortunes, they will drag many more down with them . . . believe me that the whole system of credit and finance which is carried on here at Rome in the Forum, is inextricably bound up with the revenues of the Asiatic province. If Those revenues are destroyed, our whole system of credit will come down with a crash."
"Renouncing things is less difficult than people believe: it's all a matter of getting started. Once you've succeeded in dispensing with something you thought essential, you realize you can also do without something else, then without many other things."
"There is still one of which you never speak.' Marco Polo bowed his head. 'Venice,' the Khan said. Marco smiled. 'What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?' The emperor did not turn a hair. 'And yet I have never heard you mention that name.' And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice."
"Whatever distrust we may have of the sincerity of those who converse with us, we always believe they will tell us more truth than they do to others."
"The most effectual way to be deceived is to believe oneself more cunning than one's neighbors."
"My only hope to receive love is to let you see who I am, then I may believe you."
"My dad, a mathematician, raised me to believe that mathematics is beautiful, so math is a part of my imaginative terrain. In my late 20s I wrote several 11-line poems because I wanted to create poems that couldn't be uniformly divided into couplets, tercets, or quatrains, 11 being a prime number."
"You can feel nothing but a torment, and believe nothing but a lie. You will not raise your head to look at all the miracles of life that surround you; but you will run ten miles to see a fight or a death."
"A dinner! How horrible! I am to be made the pretext for killing all those wretched animals and birds, and fish! Thank you for nothing. Now if it were to be a fast instead of a feast; say a solemn three days' abstention from corpses in my honour, I could at least pretend to believe that it was disinterested. Blood sacrifices are not in my line"
"I do not, like the Fundamentalists, believe that creation stopped six thousand years ago after a week of hard work. Creation is going on all the time."
"I believe you can joke about anything."
"It is hard to believe long together that anything is "worth while," unless there is some eye to kindle in common with our own, some brief word uttered now and then to imply that what is infinitely precious to us is precious alike to another mind."
"No one who has ever known what it is to lose faith in a fellow-man whom he has profoundly loved and reverenced, will lightly say that the shock can leave the faith in the Invisible Goodness unshaken. With the sinking of high human trust, the dignity of life sinks too; we cease to believe in our own better self, since that also is part of the common nature which is degraded in our thought; and all the finer impulses of the soul are dulled."
"Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed."
"If there is a difference between what is said and what is done, only a fool believes what was said."
"All proofs inevitably lead to propositions which have no proof! All things are known because we want to believe in them."
"The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn't believe in God, and so he had no hang-ups about souls."
"He who believes in goodness has the essence of all faith. He is a man of cheerful yesterdays and confident to-morrows."
"I don't believe in telling all to the public, but I feel a certain gratitude to them for having provided me with a fine material base that enables me to do pretty much what I want, possibly, for the rest of my life."
"I always wanted to be the strongest man on the field. Most of the time, they said I was lifting too much but I didn't believe in that at all."
