Quotes about beliefs

Anathema didn't only believe in leylines, but in seals, whales, bicycles, rain forests, whole grain in loaves, recycled paper, white South Africans out of South Africa, and Americans out of practically everywhere down to and including Long Island. She didn't compartmentalize her beliefs. They were welded into one enormous, seamless belief, compared with which that held by Joan of Arc seemed a mere idle notion. On any scale of mountain moving it shifted at least point five of an alp.*

This is the inevitable fate of the sentimentalist. All his opinions change into their opposites at the first brush of reality.

That’s fairly common. We don’t believe anything we don’t want to believe.

From the same it proceedeth, that men gives different names, to one and the same thing, from the difference of their own passions: As they that approve a private opinion, call it Opinion; but they that mislike it, Haeresie: and yet haeresie signifies no more than private opinion; but has only agreater tincture of choler

Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people's actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be. So the Galapagos Islands could be hell in one moment and heaven in the next, and Julius Caesar could be a statesman in one moment and a butcher in the next, and Ecuadorian paper money could be traded for food, shelter, and clothing in one moment and line the bottom of a birdcage in the next, and the universe could be created by God Almighty in one moment and by a big explosion in the next — and on and on.

If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.

Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession.

Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.

There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.

Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.

Just because you believe it doesn’t make it so.

I believe in everything that seems true to me right now. I just refuse to be surprised when some of those things I believe in now turn out to be false later.