#belief

Some people will tell you werewolves can only shapechange under a full moon, but people also say there's no such things as ghosts. ↗

— Patricia Briggs

#ghosts #werewolves #werewolves

Every mental act is composed of doubt and belief, but it is belief that is the positive, it is belief that sustains thought and holds the world together. ↗

— Søren Kierkegaard

#doubt #positivity

I tell you, money can't build your spire for you. Build it of gold and it would simply sink deeper. ↗

— William Golding

#impossibility #money #power #money

Debt . . . . that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#debt #story #money

The mind is constituted to accept the god of the more powerful. If you have to choose between the god of the slave owner and the god of the enslaved, naturally you will choose the former . . . ↗

— Barry Unsworth

#god #morality #power #nature

Men are more resilient than that, I think. Our belief is often strongest when it should be weakest. That is the nature of hope. ↗

— Brandon Sanderson

#hope #inspirational #mistborn #nature #people

By what criteria can one decide which of a person's countless beliefs are primitive? The essential factor is that they are taken for granted: a person's primitive beliefs represent the basic truths he holds about physical reality, social reality, and himself and his own nature. Like all beliefs, conscious or unconscious, they have a personal aspect: they are rooted in the individual's experience and in the evidence of his senses. Like all beliefs, they also have a social aspect: with regard to every belief a person forms, he also forms some notion of how many other people have the experience and the knowledge necessary to share it with him, and of how close the agreement is among this group. Unlike other beliefs, however, primitive beliefs are normally not open to discussion or controversy. Either they do not come up in conversation because everyone shares them and everyone takes them for granted, or, if they do come up, they are virtually unassailable by outside forces. The criterion of social support is totally rejected; it is as if the individual said: "Nobody else could possibly know or have experienced what I have." Or, to quote a popular refrain: "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen."  A person's primitive beliefs thus lie at the very core of his total system of beliefs, and they represent the subsystem in which he has the heaviest emotional commitment. ↗

— Milton Rokeach

#primitive #social-psychology #the-problem-of-identity #experience

What have I always believed? That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#decency #honesty #morality #religion #religion

In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing. ↗

— Mark Twain

#politics #religion #religion

If you were an atheist, Birbal," the Emperor challenged his first minister, "what would you say to the true believers of all the great religions of the world?" Birbal was a devout Brahmin from Trivikrampur, but he answered unhesitatingly, "I would say to them that in my opinion they were all atheists as well; I merely believe in one god less than each of them." "How so?" the Emperor asked. "All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own," said Birbal. "And so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none." -- From "The Shelter of the World ↗

— Salman Rushdie

#religion