Believe not every spirit. [ St. John ]
Believe well and have well. [ Proverb ]
Believe one who has tried it. [ Virgil ]
Believe not each accusing tongue,
As most weak persons do;
But still believe that story wrong
Which ought not to be true. [ Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan ]
Believe one who has had experience. [ Virgil ]
'Tis said that absence conquers love;
But oh! believe it not.
I've tried, alas! its power to prove,
But thou art not forgot. [ Frederick W. Thomas ]
We are apt to believe what we wish for. [ Proverb ]
What ardently we wish, we soon believe. [ Young ]
To love is to believe, to hope, to know;
'Tis an essay, a taste of heaven below! [ Edmund Waller ]
I cannot believe you, you speak so fair. [ Proverb ]
Oh, Love! no habitant of earth thou art -
An unseen seraph, we believe in thee. [ Byron ]
For they can conquer who believe they can. [ Dryden ]
If you believe in evil, you have done evil. [ A. de Musset ]
More strange than true, I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. [ William Shakespeare ]
When fiction rises pleasing to the eye,
Men will believe, because they love the lie;
But truth herself, if clouded with a frown,
Must have some solemn proof to pass her down. [ Churchill ]
I believe absence is a great element of charm. [ Beaconsfield ]
He has the power whom the majority believe in. [ Raupach ]
About Jesus we must believe no one but himself. [ Amiel ]
If you are wise, and prize your peace of mind,
Believe me true, nor listen to your Jealousy,
Let not that devil which undoes your sex,
That cursed curiosity seduce you
To hunt for needless secrets, which, neglected,
Shall never hurt your quiet, but once known
Shall sit upon your heart, pinch it with pain,
And banish sweet sleep forever from you. [ Rowe ]
We believe easily what we fear of what we desire. [ La Fontaine ]
To believe with certainty we must begin to doubt. [ Stanislaus ]
I have play'd the fool, the gross fool, to believe
The bosom of a friend will hold a secret
Mine own could not retain. [ Massinger ]
I can believe anything, provided it is incredible. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
Let us believe what we can, and hope for the rest. [ De Finod ]
The eyes believe themselves, the ears other people. [ German Proverb ]
Fields are won by those who believe in the winning. [ T. W. Higginson ]
Whoso is apt to believe, shall frequently repent it. [ Proverb ]
Believe that each day is the last to shine upon thee. [ Horace ]
If you would be good, first believe that you are bad. [ Epictetus ]
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 ]
If you wish to be good, first believe that you are bad. [ Epictetus ]
You will not believe him bald, till you see his brains. [ Proverb ]
You may believe anything that is good of a grateful man. [ Proverb ]
Believe that each day which shines upon you is the last. [ Horace ]
Do not believe any man more than yourself about yourself. [ Proverb ]
Husband, don't believe what you see, but what I tell you. [ Proverb ]
To believe a business impossible, is the way to make it so. [ Proverb ]
There are persons always standing ready to believe a scandal. [ Ovid ]
There is nothing that fear or hope does not make men believe. [ Vauvenargues ]
I believe the first test of a truly great man is his humility. [ John Ruskin ]
You will not believe a man is dead, till you see his brains out. [ Proverb ]
He does not believe, that does not live according to his belief. [ Proverb ]
When men speak ill of you, live so that nobody will believe them. [ Burke ]
To believe and go forward is the key to success and to happiness. [ Lilian Whiting ]
One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul. [ Balzac ]
Believe these tears, which from my wounded heart bleed at my eyes. [ Dryden ]
I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit. [ Shakespeare ]
We are slow to believe that which, if believed, would work us harm. [ Ovid ]
I believe the promises of God enough to venture an eternity on them. [ Watts ]
Love is a fever, of which the delirium is to believe itself eternal. [ Mme. Cottin ]
Shallow men believe in luck, strong men believe in cause and effect. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Where love enters to season a dish, I believe it will please any one. [ Plaut ]
We are slow to believe that which if believed would hurt our feelings. [ Ovid ]
The age does not believe in great men, because it does not possess any. [ Beaconsfield ]
If you believe in fate to your harm, believe it, at least, for your good. [ Emerson ]
We believe that out of the public school grows the greatness of a nation. [ Mark Twain, "Public Education Association" Speech ]
Literature is full of coincidences which some love to believe plagiarisms. [ O. W. Holmes ]
Good and evil come unexpected to man; even if foretold, we believe it not. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
He that does not speak truth to me, does not believe me when I speak truth. [ Proverb ]
Evil is so common in the world that it is easy to believe it natural to man. [ F. Soulie ]
There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds. [ Alfred Tennyson ]
Fewer possess virtue than those who wish us to believe that they possess it. [ Cicero ]
Books of entertainment first led Adam Clarke to believe in a spiritual world. [ G. W. Curtis ]
Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe. [ Thoreau ]
Today, we are all adrift, having nothing more either to venerate or to believe. [ Mme. Louise Colet ]
No man whatever believes, or can believe, exactly what his grandfather believed. [ Carlyle ]
Till their own dreams at length deceive them, And oft repeating, they believe them. [ Prior ]
I believe that a man may write himself out of reputation when nobody else can do it. [ Thomas Paine ]
Only a woman will believe in a man who has once been detected in fraud and falsehood. [ Dumas, Pere ]
We believe at once in evil; we only believe in good upon reflection. Is not this sad? [ Madame Deluzy ]
Virtue hath some perverseness, for she will neither believe her good nor other's ill. [ Donne ]
We believe that we have a good government, worth fighting for, and, if need be, dying for. [ U. S. Grant ]
The second childhood of a saint is the early infancy of a happy immortality, as we believe. [ Wm. Mountford ]
Women never lie more astutely than when they tell the truth to those who do not believe them.
A man must be a fool, who does not succeed in making a woman believe that which flatters her. [ Balzac ]
Believe me, the gods spare the afflicted, and do not always oppress those who are unfortunate. [ Ovid ]
What we wish we readily believe, and what we think ourselves we imagine that others think also. [ Caesar ]
Intelligent people make many blunders, because they never believe the world as stupid as it is. [ Chamfort ]
Let a disciple live as Christ lived, and he will easily believe in living again as Christ does. [ William Mountford ]
I believe, indeed, that it is more laudable to suffer great misfortunes than to do great things. [ Stanislaus ]
Narrowness of mind is often the cause of obstinacy; we do not easily believe beyond what we see. [ Rochefoucauld ]
How difficult it is to get men to believe that any other man can or does act from disinterestedness. [ B. R. Haydon ]
It is difficult to believe that a true gentleman will ever become a gamester, a libertine, or a sot. [ Chapin ]
It is a fearful mistake to believe that because our wishes are not accomplished they can do no harm. [ Gertrude ]
The mind conscious of Innocence despises false reports: but we are always ready to believe a scandal. [ Ovid ]
I do not believe such a quality as chance exists. Every incident that happens must be a link in a chain. [ Beaconsfield ]
A man protesting against error is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that believe in truth. [ Carlyle ]
I do not myself believe there is any misfortune. What men call such is merely the shadow-side of a good. [ George MacDonald ]
The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]
Cheats easily believe others as bad as themselves; there is no deceiving them, not do they long deceive. [ La Bruyere ]
He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend, must have a very long head, or a very short creed. [ C. C. Colton ]
No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a man to believe or to disbelieve. [ Carlyle ]
We tolerate everybody, because we doubt everything; or else we tolerate nobody, because we believe something. [ Mrs. E. B. Browning ]
We do not believe immortality because we have proved it, but we forever try to prove it because we believe it. [ James Martineau ]
Favourable chance is the god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in. [ George Eliot ]
It is with flowers as with moral qualities; the bright are sometimes poisonous, but I believe never the sweet. [ J. C. Hare ]
Men believe that their reason governs their words; but it often happens the words have power to react on reason. [ Bacon ]
Cannon and firearms are cruel and damnable machines. I believe them to have been the direct suggestion of the devil. [ Luther ]
The cancer of jealousy on the breast can never wholly be cut out, if I am to believe great masters of the healing art. [ Jean Paul ]
I believe not only in special providences,
but in the whole universe as one infinite complexity of special Providences.
[ Charles Kingsley ]
It is dangerous to say to the people that their laws are unjust, for they obey them only because they believe them just. [ Pascal ]
In our age of down-pulling and disbelief, the very devil has been pulled down; you cannot so much as believe in a devil. [ Carlyle ]
Some men will believe nothing but what they can comprehend; and there are but few things that such are able to comprehend. [ St. Evremond ]
A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free. [ Abraham Lincoln ]
The conditions of conquest are always easy. We have but to toil awhile, endure awhile, believe always, and never turn back. [ Simms ]
Give me the liberty to know, to think, to believe, and to utter freely, according to conscience, above all other liberties. [ Milton ]
It is a common vanity of the aged to believe that they have always been more exemplary than those who have come after them. [ A. de Musset ]
I believe this earth on which we stand is but the vestibule to glorious mansions through which a moving crowd forever press. [ Joanna Baillie ]
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - that is genius. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty. [ Emerson ]
There can hardly, I believe, be imagined a more desirable pleasure than that of praise unmixed with any possibility of flattery. [ Steele ]
Many believe the article of remission of sins, but they believe it without the condition of repentance or the fruits of holy life. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
We call some books immortal! Do they live? If so, believe me, Time hath made them pure. In Books, the veriest wicked rest in peace. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. [ Bacon ]
We tell the ladies that good wives make good husbands; I believe it is a more certain position that good brothers make good sisters. [ Johnson ]
I had rather believe all the fables in the Legends and the Talmud and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind. [ Bacon ]
Forgiveness, that noblest of all selfdenial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another. [ Colton ]
It is quite easy for stupid people to be happy; they believe in fables, and they trot on in a beaten track like a horse on a tramway. [ Ouida ]
No man can have much kindness for him by whom he does not believe himself esteemed, and nothing so evidently proves esteem as imitation. [ Johnson ]
It is safer to believe evil of everyone until people are found out to be good, but that requires a great deal of investigation nowadays. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]
I believe it to be true that dreams are the true interpreters of our inclinations; but there is art required to sort and understand them. [ Montaigne ]
Affliction of itself does not sanctify any body, but the reverse. I believe in sanctified afflictions, but not in sanctifying afflictions. [ C. H. Spurgeon ]
I believe it will be found that those who marry late are best pleased with their children; and those who marry early, with their partners. [ Dr. Johnson ]
We look at death through the cheapglazed windows of the flesh, and believe him the monster which the flawed and cracked glass represents him. [ Lowell ]
Do not too many believe no zeal to be spiritual but what is censorious or vindictive? Whereas no zeal is spiritual that is not also charitable. [ Thomas Sprat ]
We believe that the dress that shows taste and sentiment is elevating to the home, and is one of the most feminine means of beautifying the world. [ Miss Oakey ]
Whatever distrust we may have of the sincerity of those who converse with us, we always believe they will tell us more truth than they do to others. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
I believe that remorse is the least active of all a man's moral senses, - the very easiest to be deadened when wakened, and in some never wakened at all. [ Thackeray ]
I don't believe that the way to make a man love heaven is to disgust him with earth. Let us love all that is bright and beautiful and good in this world. [ Beecher ]
I believe one reason why women are generally so much more cheerful than men is because they can work with the needle, and so endlessly vary their employment. [ Sydney Smith ]
I do not believe in luck in war, any more than in luck in business. Luck is a small matter; may affect a battle or a movement, but not a campaign or a career. [ U. S. Grant ]
I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into this world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden. [ Richard Rumbold ]
Do not believe that a book is good, if in reading it thou dost not feel more contented with thy existence, if it does not rouse up in thee most generous feelings. [ Lavater ]
I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes. [ O. W. Holmes ]
It is equally dangerous to believe and to disbelieve; therefore search diligently into the truth rather than suffer an erroneous impression to pervert your judgment. [ Phaedr ]
Talent for literature, thou hast such a talent? Believe it not, be slow to believe it! To speak or to write, Nature did not peremptorily order thee; but to work she did. [ Carlyle ]
Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I cannot reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead. [ Louisa May Alcott ]
That is the true season of love, when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will love in the same way after us. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Because men believe not in Providence, therefore they do so greedily scrape and hoard. They do not believe in any reward for charity, therefore they will part with nothing. [ Barrow ]
I have never believed that friendship supposed the obligation of hating those whom your friends did not love, and I believe rather it obliges me to love those whom they love. [ Morellet ]
We do everything by custom, even believe by it; our very axioms, let us boast of our Freethinking as we may, are oftenest simply such beliefs as we have never heard questioned. [ Carlyle ]
I long to believe in immortality. If I am destined to be happy with you here - how short is the longest life. I wish to believe in immortality - I wish to live with you forever. [ Keats ]
I would have every zealous man examine his heart thoroughly, and I believe he will often find that what he calls a zeal for his religion is either pride, interest, or ill-repute. [ Addison ]
Science is teaching man to know and reverence truth, and to believe that only so far as he knows and loves it can he live worthily on earth, and vindicate the dignity of his spirit. [ Moses Harvey ]
A man without earnestness is a mournful and perplexing spectacle. But it is a consolation to believe, as we must of such a one, that he is the most effectual and compulsive of all schools. [ Sterling ]
Until every good man is brave, we must expect to find many good women timid - too timid even to believe in the correctness of their own best promptings, when these would place them in a minority. [ George Eliot ]
The secret of force in writing lies not so much in the pedigree of nouns and adjectives and verbs, as in having something that you believe in to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it. [ Lowell ]
In my enthusiasm I may have exaggerated the details a little, but you will easily forgive me that fault, since I believe it is the first time I have ever deflected from perpendicular fact on an occasion like this. [ Mark Twain, from The Story Of A Speech ]
I believe that everyone, sometime or other, dreams that he is reading papers, books, or letters; in which case the invention prompts so readily that the mind is imposed upon, and mistakes its own suggestions for the composition of another. [ Addison ]
We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels go. We do not see that they only go out that archangels may come in. We are idolaters of the old. We do not believe in the richness of the soul, in its proper eternity and omnipresence. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
I have often heard it said, and I believe it to be true, that even the most eloquent man living, and however deeply impressed with the subject, could scarcely find utterance if he were to be standing up alone, and speaking only against a dead wall. [ Erskine ]
Ages of ignorance and simplicity are thought to be ages of purity. But the direct contrary I believe to be the case. Rude periods have that grossness of manners, which is as unfriendly to virtue as luxury itself. Men are less ashamed as they are less polished. [ Warton ]
Scepticism commonly takes up the room left by defect of imagination, and is the very quality of mind most likely to seek for sensual proof of supersensual things. If one came from the dead it could not believe; and yet it longs for such a witness, and will put up with a very dubious one. [ Lowell ]
Pain itself is not without its alleviations. It may be violent and frequent, but it is seldom both violent and long-continued; and its pauses and intermissions become positive pleasures. It has the power of shedding a satisfaction over intervals of ease, which, I believe, few enjoyments exceed. [ Paley ]
One man affirms that he has rode post a hundred miles in six hours: probably it is a lie; but supposing it to be true, what then? Why, he is a very good post-boy; that is all. Another asserts, and probably not without oaths, that he has drunk six or eight bottles of wine at a sitting; out of charity I will believe him a liar; for, if I do not, I must think him a beast. [ Chesterfield ]
There was a proposition in a township there to discontinue public schools because they were too expensive. An old farmer spoke up and said if they stopped the schools they would not save anything, because every time a school was closed a jail had to be built. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. He'll never get fat. I believe it is better to support schools than jails. [ Mark Twain, "Public Education Association" Speech ]
A beautiful eye makes silence eloquent, a kind eye makes contradiction an assent, an enraged eye makes beauty deformed. This little member gives life to every other part about us; and I believe the story of Argus implies no more than that the eye is in every part; that is to say, every other part would be mutilated were not its force represented more by the eye than even by itself. [ Joseph Addison ]
If the man be really the weaker vessel, and the rule is necessarily in the Wife's hands, how is it then to be? To tell the truth, I believe that the really loving, good wife never finds it out. She keeps the glamor of love and loyalty between herself and her husband, and so infuses herself into him that the weakness never becomes apparent either to her or to him or to most lookers-on. [ Charlotte M. Yonge ]
Where are Shakespeare's imagination, Bacon's learning, Galileo's dream? Where is the sweet fancy of Sidney, the airy spirit of Fletcher, and Milton's thought severe? Methinks such things should not die and dissipate, when a hair can live for centuries, and a brick of Egypt will last three thousand years. I am content to believe that the mind of man survives, somehow or other, his clay. [ Barry Cornwall ]
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 ]
There are many persons of combative tendencies, who read for ammunition, and dig out of the Bible iron for balls. They read, and they find nitre and charcoal and sulphur for powder. They read, and they find cannon. They read, and they make portholes and embrasures. And if a man does not believe as they do, they look upon him as an enemy, and let fly the Bible at him to demolish him. So men turn the word of God into a vast arsenal, filled with all manner of weapons, offensive and defensive. [ H. W. Beecher ]
The importance of the romantic element does not rest upon conjecture. Pleasing testimonies abound. Hannah More traced her earliest impressions of virtue to works of fiction; and Adam Clarke gives a list of tales that won his boyish admiration. Books of entertainment led him to believe in a spiritual world; and he felt sure of having been a coward, but for romances. He declared that he had learned more of his duty to God, his neighbor and himself from Robinson Crusoe than from all the books, except the Bible, that were known to his youth. [ Willmott ]
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 ]