#belief

"What do people mean when they say, 'I am not afraid of God because I know He is good'? Have they never even been to a dentist?"

"Believe what you believe and it will be, believe what others believe and they will consume you!"

"The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency -- the belief that the here and now is all there is."

"Belief is the wound that knowledge heals."

"What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite."

"It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition."

"I'm convinced that most men don't know what they believe, rather, they only know what they wish to believe. How many people blame God for man's atrocities, but wouldn't dream of imprisoning a mother for her son's crime?"

"Theology, philosophy, metaphysics, and quantum physics are merely ways for God to have his smart people believe in him"

"[When a religious couple wrote to Sagan about fulfilled prophecies, he wrote back in May 1996:]If ‘fulfilled prophecy’ is your criterion, why do you not believe in materialistic science, which has an unparalleled record of fulfilled prophecy? Consider, for example, eclipses."

"If you drop your beliefs, you drop your success. God's mighty people begin to fall even as achievers when they begin to drop the beliefs they pursue at first."

"You may find that knowledge is not so great a thing as belief or hope."

"I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.(John 11:25-26)"

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby."

"Nobody really cares if you’re miserable, so you might as well be happy, and make the most of where you are"

"Each moment of worry, anxiety or stress represents lack of faith in miracles, for they never cease."

"Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits. It is intellectual bankruptcy."

"Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them."

"Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous."

"There are just certain things that turn my head. It may be a girl's sense of humor, it may be her wit, or her belief system; it could be a lot of different things."

"I think a funny picture would have a caption that read, “Believe in yourself,” with an accompanying image of a wilting flower."