Believe quotes
31K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"There is a continuum that runs from character to productivity. Who you are and what you believe make a difference to those who look to you for leadership. The values you live will reach the bottom line of your company."
"We must come to understand the deep mutual connection or kinship between the various forms of our spirituality. We must recollect our original spiritual and moral substance, which grew out of the same essential experience of humanity. I believe that this is the only way to achieve a genuine renewal of our sense of responsibility for ourselves and for the world. And at the same time, it is the only way to achieve a deeper understanding among cultures that will enable them to work together in a truly ecumenical way to create a new order for the world."
"Climate alarmists believe in their own omnipotency, in knowing better than millions of rationally behaving men and women what is right or wrong, in the possibility to give adequate instructions to hundreds of millions of individuals and institutions and the resulting compliance or non-compliance of those who are supposed to follow these instructions."
"Sartre said that hell is other people, I believe that most of them are"
"I believe all sin, love, glory are this: when you slide down the knotted sheets, escaping from Gestapo headquarters, and she hugs you, there, suspended, and she whispers that she's always dreamed of you. The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetuation of the vile species."
"I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing."
"...we can only add to the world, where we believe it ends, more parts similar to those we already know (an expanse made again and always of water and land, stars and skies)."
"I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story."
"Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned."
"And when someone suggests you believe in a proposition, you must first examine it to see whether it is acceptable, because our reason was created by God, and whatever pleases our reason can but please divine reason, of which, for that matter, we know only what we infer from the processes of our own reason by analogy and often by negation."
"Not that the incredulous person doesn't believe in anything. It's just that he doesn't believe in everything."
"What did I really think fifteen years ago? A nonbeliever, I felt guilty in the midst of all those believers. And since it seemed to me that they were in the right, I decided to believe, as you might decide to take an aspirin: It can't hurt and you might get better."
"I don't know, maybe we're always looking for the right place, maybe it's within reach, but we don't recognize it. Maybe to recognize it, we have to believe in it."
"To escape the power of the unknown, to prove to yourself that you don't believe in it, you accept its spells. Like an avowed atheist who sees the Devil at night, you reason: He certainly doesn't exist; this is therefore an illusion, perhaps a result of indigestion. But the Devil is sure that he exists, and believes in his upside-down theology. What, then, will frighten him? You make the sign of the cross, and he vanishes in a puff of brimstone."
"When we traded the results of our fantasies, it seemed to us-and rightly-that we had proceeded by unwarranted associations, by shortcuts so extraordinary that, if anyone had accused us of really believing them, we would have been ashamed."
""You cannot believe what you are saying." "Well, no. Hardly ever. But the philosopher is like the poet. The latter composes ideal letters for an ideal nymph, only to plumb with his words the depths of passion. The philosopher tests the coldness of his gaze, to see how far he can undermine the fortress of bigotry.""
"If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do."
"... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues."
"You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough."
"It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way."
