Such evidence is not the only kind which produces belief; though positivism maintains that it is the only kind which ought to produce so high a degree of confidence as all minds have or can be made to have through their agreements.
Chauncey Wright

The same tools that make any writer good, plus a cheerful willingness to suspend belief.
Fred Saberhagen

If a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of the future.
William Kingdon Clifford

Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.
Andre Dubus

Nor is it that truly a belief at all which has not some influence upon the actions of him who holds it.
William Kingdon Clifford

A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate.
Christopher Hampton

If we cling to the institution of Islam, then we tend to defend it against whatever we see as a danger to it, so because of this we see now that many people are defending states, defending territories, defending everything institutional in the belief that they defend Islam.
Abdurrahman Wahid

My belief is the majority of people in politics are just interested in pursuing this career in politics, and doing what's necessary to get themselves re-elected. And if that happens to coincide with the public good, great. But if it doesn't, the public good loses out.
Dick Murphy

I had an immense advantage over many others dealing with the problem inasmuch as I had no fixed ideas derived from long-established practice to control and bias my mind, and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right.
Henry Bessemer

Science rests on reason and experiment, and can meet an opponent with calmness; but a belief is always sensitive.
James Anthony Froude

A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.
David Hockney

Give up the belief that mind is, even temporarily, compressed within the skull, and you will quickly become more manly or womanly. You will understand yourself and your Maker better than before.
Mary Baker Eddy

The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
Richard Adams

Belief is such a powerful thing - but because it is, it can also be very destructive and it's very easily manipulated.
Jena Malone

Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else.
Charles Sanders Peirce

Religion was nearly dead because there was no longer real belief in future life; but something was struggling to take its place - service - social service - the ants creed, the bees creed.
John Galsworthy

My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.
Peggy Noonan

The practical effect of a belief is the real test of its soundness.
James Anthony Froude

This country has been unconscious, and it's got to awake. That's my belief.
Charles Olson

'Beauty' is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West is is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact.
Naomi Wolf