Faith

From BillionQuotes

Quotations about faith

Sourced

• "Faith: The opposite of dogmatism." -John Ralston Saul
  • Source: The Doubter's Companion - "Faith"

• "Faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate." ~ Richard Dawkins

• " Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe." ~ St. Augustine

• "Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable." ~ H.L. Mencken

• "Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge about things without parallel." ~ Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

• "I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning." ~ Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies

• "I've never understood how God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion by faith -— it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe." ~ Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

• "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. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. 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." -William Kingdon Clifford, The Ethics of Belief (1877)

• "Orthodoxy is the abillity to say two and two make five when faith requires it." ~ George Orwell, 1984

• "That's the thing about faith. If you don't have it you can't understand it. And if you do, no explanation is necessary." ~ Major Kira Nerys (from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)

• The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. ~ Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, 1758

• "We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness and toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other...except through faith." ~ Stephen King, Danse Macabre (1981)

• "Most people will never know anything beyond what they see with their own two eyes." ~ Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler in the film X2

Attributed

• "A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

• A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

• "A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass; he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable." ~ H.L. Mencken

• "A reasonable scale of probability--what is likely--forbids believing a whole range of imaginative possibilities, even though we do not know anything for sure." ~ Jennifer Michael Hecht

• "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense." ~ Buddha

• "Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it." ~ Buddha

• "Faith" is a fine invention, when gentlemen can see
  But microscopes are prudent, in an emergency. ~ Emily Dickinson

• Faith is a wondrous thing; it is not only capable of moving mountains, but also of making you believe that a herring is a race horse. ~ Arthur Koestler

• "Faith is being sure of what we hope for, and certain of what we do not see." The Bible

• "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." ~ Mark Twain, Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

• Faith is essentially intolerant ... essentially because necessarily bound up with faith is the illusion that one's cause is also God's cause. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach

• "Faith means not wanting to know what is true." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Variant: Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

• "Faith sees God's face in every human face." ~ Catherine Doherty

• "I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

• "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" ~ Douglas Adams

• "Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt." ~ H. L. Mencken

• "Not knowing is much more interesting than believing an answer which might be wrong." ~ Richard Feynman

• "Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear." ~ Thomas Jefferson

• "Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom." ~ Clarence Darrow

• "Skepticism is the highest of duties, and blind faith the one unpardonable sin." ~ T. H. Huxley

• "The Church says that the Earth is flat, but I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow of the earth on the moon and I have more faith in the Shadow than in the Church." -Ferdinand Magellan

• "The most pernicious of absurdities is that weak, blind, stupid faith is better than the constant practice of every human virtue." ~ Walter Savage Landor

• To those searching for truth -- not the truth of dogma and darkness but the truth brought by reason, search, examination, and inquiry, discipline is required. For faith, as well intentioned as it may be, must be built on facts, not fiction -- faith in fiction is a damnable false hope. ~ Thomas Edison

• "What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite." ~ Bertrand Russell

• Faith, Hope, Love. Each a factor which leads us to do the most foolish, and prehaps the most extraordinary. ~ Darian Rebsomen

See also

• The Bible
• God
• Religion

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