# Quote — Clifford D. Simak, A Choice of Gods

> Could it be possible, Hezekiah asked himself, that there was no room for both the faith and truth, that they were mutually exclusive qualities that could not coexist? He shuddered as he thought of it, for if this should be the case, they had spent their centuries of devotion to but little purpose, pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp. Must faith be exactly that, the willingness and ability to believe in the face of a lack of evidence? If one could find the evidence, would then the faith be dead? If that were the situation, then which one did they want? Had it been, he wondered, that men had tried what they even now were trying and had realized that there was no such thing as truth, but only faith, and being unable to accept the faith without its evidence, had dropped the faith as well?

- Author: [Clifford D. Simak](https://www.leafyquotes.com/clifford-d-simak.md)
- Book: [A Choice of Gods](https://www.leafyquotes.com/clifford-d-simak/a-choice-of-gods.md)
- Page: 52
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Clifford_D._Simak#A_Choice_of_Gods_(1972)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/clifford-d-simak/a-choice-of-gods/could-it-be-possible

## More from this book

> These kind never change. The machine does something to a man. It brutalizes him. It serves as a buffer between himself and his environment and he is the worst for it. It arouses an opportunistic instinct and makes possible a greed that makes a man inhuman.

p. 152 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/clifford-d-simak/a-choice-of-gods/these-kind-never.md)

> For the old do not really mind; in a strange way they become sufficient to themselves. They need so very little and they care so very little. They climb the mountain no one else can see and as they climb the old, once-valued things they’ve carried all their lives tend to drop away and as they climb the higher the knapsack that they carry becomes emptier, but perhaps no less in weight than it had ever been, and the few things that are left in it, they find, with some amusement, or those few indispensable belongings which they’ve gathered in a long lifetime of effort and of seeking. They wonder greatly, if they think of it at all, how it was left to age to winnow out the chaff they’ve carried all the years, thinking that it was valuable when it was only chaff. When they reach the mountain top, they find that they can see farther than they’ve ever seen before and with greater clarity and, if by this time they’re not past all caring, may bemoan that they must approach the end of their lives before they can see with this marvelous clarity, which does little for them now, but might, in earlier years, have been of incalculable value.

p. 157 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/clifford-d-simak/a-choice-of-gods/for-the-old.md)

> And how much did he and the others lost when they had turned their backs on magic? Belief, of course, and there might be some value in belief, although there was, as well, delusion and did a man want to pay for the value of belief in the coinage of delusion?

p. 96 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/clifford-d-simak/a-choice-of-gods/and-how-much.md)