Experience is a dumb, dead thing;
The victory's in believing. [ Lowell ]

Fools are stubborn in their way,
As coins are hardened by the allay;
And obstinacy's never so stiff
As when 'tis in a wrong belief. [ Butler ]

He who knows most believes the least. [ Buckle ]

Superstition is but the fear of belief. [ Lady Blessington ]

What ardently we wish, we soon believe. [ Young ]

One in whom persuasion and belief
Had ripened into faith, and faith became
A passionate intuition. [ Wordsworth ]

Now God be praised, that to believing souls,
Gives light in darkness, comfort in despair! [ William Shakespeare ]

All the great ages have been ages of belief. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Sweet letters of the angel tongue,
I've loved ye long and well.
And never have failed in your fragrance sweet
To find some secret spell -
A charm that has bound me with witching power,
For mine is the old belief,
That midst your sweets and midst your bloom,
There's a soul in every leaf! [ M. M. Ballou ]

Custom forms us all.
Our thoughts, our morals, our most fixed belief
Are consequences of our place of birth. [ Hill ]

Belief in a future life is the appetite of reason. [ Landor ]

It is as wise to moderate our belief as our desires. [ Landor ]

Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know. [ Montaigne ]

Belief is not a matter of choice, but of conviction. [ R. G. Ingersoll ]

You believe that easily which you hope for earnestly. [ Terence ]

Men believe that willingly which they wish to be true. [ Caesar ]

You do not believe, you only believe that you believe. [ Coleridge ]

No belief which is contrary to truth can be really useful. [ J. S. Mill ]

Being alone when one's belief is firm, is not to be alone. [ Auerbach ]

The proper task of literature lies in the domain of belief. [ Carlyle ]

He does not believe, that does not live according to his belief. [ Proverb ]

Superstition is but the fear of belief; religion is the confidence. [ Lady Blessington ]

The practical effect of a belief is the real test of its soundness. [ Froude ]

The region of the senses is the unbelieving part of the human soul. [ George MacDonald ]

So vain is the belief that the sequestered path has fewest flowers. [ Thomas Doubleday ]

We are slow to believe that which if believed would hurt our feelings. [ Ovid ]

All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen. [ Emerson ]

Our belief or disbelief of a thing does not alter the nature of the thing. [ Tillotson ]

With most men unbelief in one thing is founded on blind belief in another. [ Lichtenberg ]

Belief and love, - a believing love, will relieve us of a vast load of care. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

The more sincere we are in our belief, as a rule, the less demonstrative we are. [ Beecher ]

Happy the man who sees a God employed in all the good and ills that checker life. [ Cowper ]

Till their own dreams at length deceive them, And oft repeating, they believe them. [ Prior ]

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

The want of belief is a defect which ought to be concealed where it cannot be overcome. [ Swift ]

With the majority of men unbelief in one thing is founded on blind belief in another thing. [ Lichtenberg ]

The belief and hope of heaven, is a sufficient encouragement to virtue, when all others fail. [ Proverb ]

Belief in compensation, or, that nothing is got for nothing, characterizes all valuable minds. [ Emerson ]

Begin by regarding every thing from a moral point of view, and you will end by believing in God. [ Dr. Arnold ]

Why is it that we entertain the belief that for every purpose odd numbers are the most effectual? [ Pliny ]

The eloquent man is he who is no eloquent speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief. [ Emerson ]

The nearest we can come to perfect happiness is to cheat ourselves with the belief that we have got it. [ H. W. Shaw ]

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

Jewels! It's my belief that when woman was made, jewels were invented only to make her the more mischievous. [ Douglas Jerrold ]

Who can blame me if I cherish the belief that the world is still young, - that there are great possibilities in store for it? [ Tyndall ]

Without a belief in personal immortality, religion surely is like an arch resting on one pillar, like a bridge ending in an abyss. [ Max Muller ]

Intellectually the difficulties of unbelief are as great as those of belief, while morally the argument is wholly on the side of belief. [ Dr. T. Arnold ]

'Tis only from the belief of the goodness and wisdom of a Supreme Being that our calamities can be borne in that manner which becomes a man. [ Mackenzie ]

I have heard that death takes us away from ill things, not from good. I have heard that when we pronounce the name of man we pronounce the belief of immortality. [ Emerson ]

No belief of ours will change the facts or reverse the laws of the spiritual universe; and it is our first business to discover the laws and to learn how the facts stand. [ Dr. Dale ]

He who does not respect confidence, will never find happiness in his path. The belief in virtue vanishes from his heart, the source of nobler actions becomes extinct in him. [ Auffenberg ]

A belief in the Bible, the fruit of deep meditation, has served me as the guide of my moral and literary life. I have found it a capital safely invested, and richly productive of interest. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Contrary to popular belief, the most dangerous animal is not the lion or tiger or even the elephant. The most dangerous animal is a shark riding on an elephant, just trampling and eating everything they see. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]

That mere will and industry can enable any man to accomplish anything is a belief common enough amongst imperfectly educated man. But no one of really cultivated intellect denies the variety of natural endowments. [ Hamerton ]

It is not true that a man can believe or disbelieve what he will. But it is certain that an active desire to find any proposition true will unconsciously tend to that result, by dismissing importunate suggestions which run counter to the belief, and welcoming those which favor it. The psychological law, that we only see what interests us, and only assimilate what is adapted to our condition, causes the mind to select its evidence. [ G. H. Lewes ]

Morals are an acquirement - like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis - no man is born with them. I wasn't myself, I started poor. I hadn't a single moral. There is hardly a man in this house that is poorer than I was then. Yes, I started like that - the world before me, not a moral in the slot. Not even an insurance moral. I can remember the first one I ever got. I can remember the landscape, the weather, the - I can remember how everything looked. It was an old moral, an old second-hand moral, all out of repair, and didn't fit, anyway. But if you are careful with a thing like that, and keep it in a dry place, and save it for processions, and Chautauquas, and World's Fairs, and so on, and disinfect it now and then, and give it a fresh coat of whitewash once in a while, you will be surprised to see how well she will last and how long she will keep sweet, or at least inoffensive. When I got that mouldy old moral, she had stopped growing, because she hadn't any exercise; but I worked her hard, I worked her Sundays and all. Under this cultivation she waxed in might and stature beyond belief, and served me well and was my pride and joy for sixty-three years; then she got to associating with insurance presidents, and lost flesh and character, and was a sorrow to look at and no longer competent for business. She was a great loss to me. Yet not all loss. I sold her - ah, pathetic skeleton, as she was - I sold her to Leopold, the pirate King of Belgium; he sold her to our Metropolitan Museum, and it was very glad to get her, for without a rag on, she stands 57 feet long and 16 feet high, and they think she's a brontosaur. Well, she looks it. They believe it will take nineteen geological periods to breed her match. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]