Belief

Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true.

Sourced

• I would rather work with five people who really believe in what they are doing rather than five hundred who can't see the point.
  • Patrick Dixon in Building a Better Business, p. 14

• He who believes needs no explanation.
  • Euripides, Dionysus in "The Bacchae"

• He does not believe that does not live according to his belief
  • Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia (1732)

• Dream,believe,achieve
  • Paul White

• People want to believe in something-even if they know it is false.
  • "Tanis Half-Elven", in Dragonlance

• To succeed, we must first believe that we can.
  • Michael Korda, as quoted in Marketing Construction Services (2000) by Paul Pryor, p. 14

• Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.
  • Montaigne, Essays (1580-88)

• If there is anything I have learned in my travels across the Planes, it is that many things may change the nature of a man. Whether regret, or love, or revenge or fear - whatever you believe can change the nature of a man, can. I’ve seen belief move cities, make men stave off death, and turn an evil hag's heart half-circle. This entire Fortress has been constructed from belief. Belief damned a woman, whose heart clung to the hope that another loved her when he did not. Once, it made a man seek immortality and achieve it. And it has made a posturing spirit think it is something more than a part of me.
  • "The Nameless One" in Planescape: Torment

• Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good ground for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
  • Bertrand Russell, in "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish" in Unpopular Essays (1950)

• One needs something to believe in, something for which one can have whole-hearted enthusiasm. One needs to feel that one's life has meaning, that one is needed in this world.
  • Hannah Szenes, in Hannah Senesh : Her Life and Diary (1938)

• For the heart, it needs to believe.
  • Simon Soloveychik, in Parenting for Everyone (1989)

• For those who believe, no explanation is necessary; for those who do not believe, no explanation is possible.
  • Franz Werfel, as quoted in Philippine Studies (1953) by Ateneo de Manila, p. 269; also in Everest : The Mountaineering History (2000) by Walt Unsworth, p. 100

• Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.
  • Robert Anton Wilson, in Cosmic Trigger I : Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977)

• The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.
  • Frank Lloyd Wright, as quoted in My Favorite Quotations (1990) by Norman Vincent Peale

• Hold somebody's hand and feel its warmth. Gram per gram, it converts 10 000 times more energy per second that the sun. You find this hard to believe? Here are the numbers: an average human weighs 70 kilograms and consumes about 12 600 kilojoules / day; that makes about 2 millijoules / gram.second, or 2 milliwatts / gram. For the sun it's miserable 0.2 microjoules / gram.second. Some bacteria, such as the soil bacterium "Azotobacter" convert as much as 10 joules / gram.second, outperformung the sunby a factor 50 million. I am wam because inside each of my body cells there are dozens, hundreds or even tousands of mitochondria that burn the food I eat.
  • Gottfried Schatz in "Jeff's view on science and scientists", Amsterdam, Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, 2006, ISBN 978-0-444-52133-0, ISBN 0-444-52133-X (pbk.), p. 43, "The tragic matter"

• Belief is a beautiful armor, but makes for the heaviest sword; like punching underwater, you never can hit who you're trying for.
  • "Belief" - John Mayer

Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).

• What is meant by believing in Christ but just going with trusting and loving hearts, and committing to His love and power ourselves, our souls, and all that concerns us for time and eternity?
  • A. H. Boyd, p. 22.

• Begin by regarding every thing from a moral point of view, and you will end by believing in God.
  • Dr. Thomas Arnold, p. 22.

• To believe is to be happy; to doubt is to be wretched. To believe is to be strong. Doubt cramps energy. Belief is power. Only so far as a man believes strongly, mightily, can he act cheerfully, or do any thing that is worth the doing.
  • Frederick William Robertson p. 23.

• If you wish to be assured of the truth of Christianity, try it. Believe, and if thy belief be right, that insight which gradually transmutes faith into knowledge will be the reward of thy belief.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p. 23.

• He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend, must have a very long head, or a very short creed.
  • C. C. Colton, p. 23.

• The man who goes through life with an uncertain doctrine not knowing what he believes, what a poor, powerless creature he is! He goes around through the world as a man goes down through the street with a poor, wounded arm, forever dodging people he meets on the street for fear they may touch him.
  • Phillips Brooks, p. 23.

• If that impression does not remain on this intrepid and powerful people, into whose veins all nations pour their mingling blood, it will be our immense calamity. Public action, without it, will lose the dignity of consecration. Eloquence, without it, will miss what is loftiest, will give place to a careless and pulseless disquisition, or fall to the flatness of political slang. Life, without it, will lose its sacred and mystic charm. Society, without it, will fail of inspirations, and be drowned in an animalism whose rising tides will keep pace with its wealth.
  • R. S. Storrs, p. 23.

• Now God be praised, that to believing souls, Gives light in darkness, comfort in despair!
  • William Shakespeare, p. 23.