78 Inspirational Quotes On Beliefs

In a world filled with diverse perspectives and personal journeys, beliefs form the essence of who we are and guide us through life's myriad paths. They shape our thoughts, influence our actions, and endure through changing times. In our quest for understanding and motivation, we often seek the wisdom of those who have articulated profound insights on beliefs. This collection of 78 inspirational quotes offers a glimpse into the minds of influential thinkers, leaders, and visionaries. Each quote is a testament to the power of belief to transform lives, inspire change, and foster resilience. Join us as we explore these timeless words, and perhaps find your own beliefs reflected back with new clarity and strength.

1. “Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!” - Lewis Carroll

2. “I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.” - Margaret Mead

3. “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

4. “Every man gives his life for what he believes. Every woman gives her life for what she believes. Sometimes people believe in little or nothing, and so they give their lives to little or nothing. One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it…and then it’s gone.But to surrender who you are and to live without belief is more terrible than dying – even more terrible than dying young.” - Joan of Arc

5. “You can never be really sure of how much you believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life or death to you.” - C.S. Lewis

6. “Moreover, most people, assuming they had not altogether abandoned religious observances, or did not combine them naively with a thoroughly immoral way of living, had replaced normal religious practice by more or less extravagant superstitions.” - Albert Camus

7. “All religions lead to the same God, and all deserve the same respect. Anyone who chooses a religion is also choosing a collective way for worshipping and sharing the mysteries. Nevertheless, that person is the only one responsible for his or her actions along the way and has no right to shift responsibility for any personal decisions on to that religion.” - Paulo Coelho

8. “There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the far-fetched, and those who believe that 'belief' must be discarded and replaced by the 'scientific method.' Between these two extremes there is enough scope for believing the reasonable and reasoning on sound beliefs.” - Max Born

9. “Doubt everything. Find your own light.” - Gautama Buddha

10. “Los científicos e individuos de finales del siglo veinte son altamente creyentes, tanto como los científicos de antaño, lo único que ha cambiado es el objeto de su fe, los tradicionales creían en principios universales que regían el cosmos visible e invisible, enseñanzas y técnicas trasmitidas de generación en generación por hombres que se dedicaban a la concentración, la meditación y el estudio, que vivían en el bosque o en monasterios y templos apartados del dinero y del ruido. Los científicos actuales creen con la misma intensidad que sus antepasados, pero no en esos principios metafísicos y universales que les parecen supercherías, sino en el poder de medicaciones químicas, aunque se retiren años después; en el poder de protección de vacunas y antibióticos... en el poder del dinero para crear la realidad más falsa de todas por definición... y en definitiva en el Sistema que es quien les ha creado, quien les mantiene y el que un día les fagocitará.” - Dr. Enrique Costa Vercher

11. “God’s word is not just to be heard and repeated, it is to be breathed, lived, and emulated with each action.” - Steve Maraboli

12. “Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.” - Flannery O'Connor

13. “It is a better world. A place where we ate responsible for our actions, where we can be kind to one another because we want to and becauseit is the right thing to do instead of being frightened into behaving by the threat of divine punishment.” - Christopher Paolini

14. “Not everything that can be counted counts.Not everything that counts can be counted.” - William Bruce Cameron

15. “A long time ago people believed that the world is flat and the moon is made of green cheese. Some still do, to this day. The man on the moon is looking down and laughing.” - Vera Nazarian

16. “I live alone," he said simply. "I live in the open. I hear the waves at night and see the black patterns of the pine boughs against the sky. With sound and silence and color and solitude, of course I see visions. Anyone would.""But you don't believe in them?" Doc asked hopefully."I don't find it a matter for belief or disbelief," the seer said. "You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks into the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself everytime that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it? Don't you see visions?""No," said Doc.” - John Steinbeck

17. “Religious people of any serious kind made her nervous: they were like men in raincoats who might or might not be flashers.” - Margaret Atwood

18. “When it comes to controlling human beings there is no better instrument than lies. Because, you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts.” - Michael Ende

19. “I had a standing agreement with god. I'd agree to believe in him, barely, so long as he let me sleep in on Sundays.” - Richelle Mead

20. “I also learned that a person was not necessarily bad just because you did not agree with him, and that if you believed in something, you had better be prepared to defend it.” - Hillary Clinton

21. “Yet rather than calling the earliest religions, which embraced such an open acceptance of all human sexuality, 'fertility cults,' we might consider the religions of today as strange in that they seem to associate shame and even sin with the very process of conceiving new human life. Perhaps centuries from now scholars and historians will be classifying them as 'sterility cults.” - Merlin Stone

22. “Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons they give are various, but the ultimate justification for most religious people’s beliefs is a simple one: we believe what we believe because our holy scriptures say so. But how, then, do we know that our holy scriptures are factually accurate? Because the scriptures themselves say so. Theologians specialize in weaving elaborate webs of verbiage to avoid saying anything quite so bluntly, but this gem of circular reasoning really is the epistemological bottom line on which all 'faith' is grounded. In the words of Pope John Paul II: 'By the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals.' It goes without saying that this begs the question of whether the texts at issue really were authored or inspired by God, and on what grounds one knows this. 'Faith' is not in fact a rejection of reason, but simply a lazy acceptance of bad reasons. 'Faith' is the pseudo-justification that some people trot out when they want to make claims without the necessary evidence.But of course we never apply these lax standards of evidence to the claims made in the other fellow’s holy scriptures: when it comes to religions other than one’s own, religious people are as rational as everyone else. Only our own religion, whatever it may be, seems to merit some special dispensation from the general standards of evidence.And here, it seems to me, is the crux of the conflict between religion and science. Not the religious rejection of specific scientific theories (be it heliocentrism in the 17th century or evolutionary biology today); over time most religions do find some way to make peace with well-established science. Rather, the scientific worldview and the religious worldview come into conflict over a far more fundamental question: namely, what constitutes evidence.Science relies on publicly reproducible sense experience (that is, experiments and observations) combined with rational reflection on those empirical observations. Religious people acknowledge the validity of that method, but then claim to be in the possession of additional methods for obtaining reliable knowledge of factual matters — methods that go beyond the mere assessment of empirical evidence — such as intuition, revelation, or the reliance on sacred texts. But the trouble is this: What good reason do we have to believe that such methods work, in the sense of steering us systematically (even if not invariably) towards true beliefs rather than towards false ones? At least in the domains where we have been able to test these methods — astronomy, geology and history, for instance — they have not proven terribly reliable. Why should we expect them to work any better when we apply them to problems that are even more difficult, such as the fundamental nature of the universe?Last but not least, these non-empirical methods suffer from an insuperable logical problem: What should we do when different people’s intuitions or revelations conflict? How can we know which of the many purportedly sacred texts — whose assertions frequently contradict one another — are in fact sacred?” - Alan Sokal

23. “Somewhere I’d heard, or invented perhaps, that the only pleasures found during a waning moon are misfortunes in disguise. Superstition aside, I avoid pleasure during the waning or absent moon out of respect for the bounty this world offers me. I profit from great harvests in life and believe in the importance of seasons.” - Roman Payne

24. “Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.” - Salman Rushdie

25. “It's a fact—everyone is ignorant in some way or another.Ignorance is our deepest secret.And it is one of the scariest things out there, because those of us who are most ignorant are also the ones who often don't know it or don't want to admit it.Here is a quick test:If you have never changed your mind about some fundamental tenet of your belief, if you have never questioned the basics, and if you have no wish to do so, then you are likely ignorant.Before it is too late, go out there and find someone who, in your opinion, believes, assumes, or considers certain things very strongly and very differently from you, and just have a basic honest conversation.It will do both of you good.” - Vera Nazarian

26. “Being hurt personally triggered a curiosity about how such beliefs are formed.” - Philip Zimbardo

27. “Image is only temporal. Substance endures. Who said, "Image is everything"? And who believed it?” - T.F. Hodge

28. “Depression is partly a nocebo effect, in the sense that it can be produced by negative exceptions about oneself and the world. The way in which these negative expectations develop and produce their negative effects provides some clues as to how they can be reversed. Expectancy effects grow, feeding upon themselves. One reason this happens is that our subjective states - our feelings, our moods and sensations - are in constant flux, changing from day to day and from moment to moment. The effects of these fluctuations depend on how we interpret them, and our interpretations depend on our beliefs and expectations. When we expect to feel worse, we tend to notice random small negative changes and interpret them as evidence that we are in fact getting worse. This interpretation makes us actually feel worse, and it strengthens the belief that we are getting worse, leading to a vicious cycle in which our expectations and negative emotions feed on each other, cascading into a full-blown depressive episode. .. Positive expectancies have the opposite effect. They can set in motion a begin cycle, in which random fluctuations in mood and well being are interpreted as evidence of treatment effectiveness, thereby instilling a further sense of hope and countering the feeling of hopelessness that are so central to clinical depression.” - Irving Kirsch

29. “It is more substantial to represent a purpose, rather than just a title.” - T.F. Hodge

30. “We all ought to understand we're on our own. Believing in Santa Claus doesn't do kids any harm for a few years but it isn't smart for them to continue waiting all their lives for him to come down the chimney with something wonderful. Santa Claus and God are cousins.” - Andy Rooney

31. “Beware: open-mindedness will often say, 'Everything is permissible except a sharp opinion.” - Criss Jami

32. “I would rather have strong enemies than a world of passive individualists. In a world of passive individualists nothing seems worth anything simply because nobody stands for anything. That world has no convictions, no victories, no unions, no heroism, no absolutes, no heartbeat. That world has rigor mortis.” - Criss Jami

33. “The whole war between the atheist and the theist comes down to this: the atheist believes a 'what' created the universe; the theist believes a 'who' created the universe.” - Criss Jami

34. “...into hate, into refusal, against hope and without fear” - Lauren Oliver

35. “Just like your body and lifestyle can be healthy or unhealthy, the same is true with your beliefs. Your beliefs can be your medicine or your poison.” - Steve Maraboli

36. “[I]f you seek in every way to minimise my firm beliefs by your anti-feminist attacks, please recall that a small dagger or knife point can pierce a great, bulging sack and that a small fly can attack a great lion and speedily put him to flight.” - Christine de Pizan

37. “[S]ince you are angry at me without reason, you attack me harshly with, "Oh outrageous presumption! Oh excessively foolish pride! Oh opinion uttered too quickly and thoughtlessly by the mouth of a woman! A woman who condemns a man of high understanding and dedicated study, a man who, by great labour and mature deliberation, has made the very noble book of the Rose, which surpasses all others that were ever written in French. When you have read this book a hundred times, provided you have understood the greater part of it, you will discover that you could never have put your time and intellect to better use!" My answer: Oh man deceived by willful opinion! I could assuredly answer but I prefer not to do it with insult, although, groundlessly, you yourself slander me with ugly accusations. Oh darkened understanding! Oh perverted knowledge ... A simple little housewife sustained by the doctrine of Holy Church could criticise your error!” - Christine de Pizan

38. “I think honesty is the most heroic quality one can aspire to.” - Daniel Radcliffe

39. “Its impossible to initiate a rational dialogue with some one about beliefs and concepts if he has not acquired them through reason. It doesn't matter whether we are looking at God, race, or national pride.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

40. “Elder mocked me for praying once, and i spent an hour berating him for that. He ended up throwing up his hands, laughing, and telling me i could believe whatever i wanted if i was going to hold onto my beliefs so hard.” - Beth Revis

41. “I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck... I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.” - Neil Gaiman

42. “What you believe matters, however. It’s all anyone has to act on. And since what you do is who you are, your actions define you. If you don’t believe anything is true simply because you can’t logically prove what’s true, you won’t do anything. You won’t be anything. You’ll end up spending your life in a rocking chair looking out at the horizon waiting for an answer that never comes. You might as well be dead. It’s an old philosophical problem.” - Russell Banks

43. “I may not be sure if monsters exist, but I’d rather live my life in doubt than be persuaded by a real experience of one.” - Gregory Maguire

44. “If your body is screaming in pain, whether the pain is muscular contractions, anxiety, depression, asthma or arthritis, a first step in releasing the pain may be making the connection between your body pain and the cause. “Beliefs are physical. A thought held long enough and repeated enough becomes a belief. The belief then becomes biology.” - Marilyn Van M. Derbur

45. “Your choice is to be active or passive in your responses.” - Deborah Day

46. “Distances and days existed in themselves then; they all had a story. They were not barriers. If a person wanted to get to the moon, there is a way; it all depended on whether you knew the directions... on whether you knew the story of how others before you had gone. He had believed in the stories for a long time, until the teachers at Indian school taught him not to believe in that kind of "nonsense". But they had been wrong.” - Leslie Marmon Silko

47. “Look everywhere. There are miracles and curiosities to fascinate and intrigue for many lifetimes:the intricacies of nature and everything in the world and universe around us from the miniscule to the infinite; physical, chemical and biological functionality; consciousness, intelligence and the ability to learn; evolution, and the imperative for life; beauty and other abstract interpretations; language and other forms of communication; how we make our way here and develop social patterns of culture and meaningfulness;how we organise ourselves and others; moral imperatives; the practicalities of survival and all the embellishments we pile on top; thought, beliefs, logic, intuition, ideas; inventing, creating, information, knowledge; emotions, sensations, experience, behaviour.We are each unique individuals arising from a combination of genetic, inherited, and learned information, all of which can be extremely fallible.Things taught to us when we are young are quite deeply ingrained. Obviously some of it (like don’t stick your finger in a wall socket) is very useful,but some of it is only opinion – an amalgamation of views from people you just happen to have had contact with.A bit later on we have access to lots of other information via books, media, internet etc, but it is important to remember that most of this is still just opinion, and often biased.Even subjects such as history are presented according to the presenter’s or author’s viewpoint, and science is continually changing. Newspapers and TV tend to cover news in the way that is most useful to them (and their funders/advisors), Research is also subject to the decisions of funders and can be distorted by business interests. Pretty much anyone can say what they want on the internet, so our powers of discernment need to be used to a great degree there too.Not one of us can have a completely objective view as we cannot possibly have access to, and filter, all knowledge available, so we must accept that our views are bound to be subjective. Our understanding and responses are all very personal, and our views extremely varied. We tend to make each new thing fit in with the picture we have already started in our heads, but we often have to go back and adjust the picture if we want to be honest about our view of reality as we continually expand it. We are taking in vast amounts of information from others all the time, so need to ensure we are processing that to develop our own true reflection of who we are.” - jay woodman

48. “Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

49. “If I do not believe as you believe, it proves that you do not believe as I believe, and that is all that it proves.” - Thomas Paine

50. “As Christians it is not just for us to know what we believe, but why we believe it".~R. Alan Woods [2012]” - R. Alan Woods

51. “Co-opted convictions will always betray you.” - Charles M. Blow

52. “Children who are victimized through sexual abuse often begin to develop deeply held tenets that shape their sense of self: 'My worth is my sexuality. I'm dirty and shameful. I have no right to my own physical boundaries.' That shapes their ideas about the world around them: 'No one will believe me. Telling the truth results in bad consequences. People can't be trusted.' It doesn't take long for children to being to act in accordance with these belief systems.For girls who have experienced incest, sexual abuse, or rape, the boundaries between love, sex, and pain become blurred. Secrets are normal, and shame is a constant.” - Rachel Lloyd

53. “There was no need for a term like ‘magical thinking’ in the Golden Age of Man...there was only genuine everyday magic and mysticism. Children were not mocked or scolded in those days for singing to the rain or talking to the wind.” - Anthon St. Maarten

54. “Yo no sé nada de Dios (...), pero sí sé algo de la tradición. Tú y yo somos gente literal. Sea cual sea la interpretación más obvia, ésa es nuestra verdad. Cuando las iglesias antiguas proclamaron sus leyes, sentaron un precedente. Ellos creen que la tierra consagrada rechaza nuestras almas y, puesto que su convicción es tan fuerte, nuestros cuerpos sienten dolor.” - Brenna Yovanoff

55. “Faith requires following the power of a whisper.” - Shannon L. Alder

56. “People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

57. “When you change what you believe, you change what you do... which changes what you get.” - Odille Rault

58. “To think because you have been “saved” that you are now sane is insanity. God doesn’t fix the mind. He only gives you opportunities to have moments of clarity. It is your job to climb the mountain and see above the clouds for yourself, not to believe the congregation's interpretation of the view.” - Shannon L. Alder

59. “I have always found the hardest mind to change is one that is religious.” - Shannon L. Alder

60. “The beliefs of your country mostly become your own beliefs! Not the reason but the empty tales shape you!” - Mehmet Murat ildan

61. “We each have our own beliefs. What is important is not to piush your beliefs onto others.” - Samina Ali

62. “How you look at it is pretty much how you'll see it” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

63. “Do not make the mistake of thinking that you have to agree with people and their beliefs to defend them from injustice.” - Bryant McGill

64. “We only give credence to that which we can prove exists. Since we cannot find evidence that gods, miracles, and other supernatural things are real, we do not trouble ourselves about them. If that were to change, if Helzvog were to reveal himself to us, then we would accept the new information and revise our position.""It seems a cold world without something . . . more.""On the contrary," said Oromis, "it is a better world. A place where we are responsible for our own actions, where we can be kind to one another because we want to and because it is the right thing to do, instead of being frightened into behaving by the threat of divine punishment. I won't tell you what to believe, Eragon. It is far better to be taught to think critically and then be allowed to make your own decisions than to have someone else's notions thrust upon you. You asked after our religion, and I have answered you true. Make of it what you will.” - Christopher Paolini

65. “I touched the small sacred images. I shook my head and bit my lip, as if to say, How awful that he should have stolen these! But I also found it very funny. And further proof that God had no power over me.” - Anne Rice

66. “As a writer of philosophy, it's good to ask oneself, 'Will I still believe this a week from now, or months, or even years?” - Criss Jami

67. “They are moved less by the direct presence of their gods than by the more indirect feeling that they would somehow like their gods to be present.” - Daniel L. Pals

68. “I think you are wise. You haven't got what it takes for this job. You are like Rosemary's father. He couldn't understand Lenin's dictum: 'Away with softness.'"I thought of Hercule Poirot's words."I'm content," I said, "to be human...."We sat there in silence, each of use convinced that the other's point of view was wrong.” - Agatha Christie

69. “An ideology can provide a satisfying narrative that explains chaotic events and collective misfortunes in a way that flatters the virtue and competence of believers, while being vague or conspiratorial enough to withstand skeptical scrutiny.” - Steven Pinker

70. “My belief is the belief of no beliefs. That's my belief.” - T. Scott McLeod

71. “Hope is a Heaven to keep you out of Hell. It's hard work believing that it's there.” - Ashly Lorenzana

72. “It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living. It is clear also that thought is not free if all the arguments on one side of a controversy are perpetually presented as attractively as possible, while the arguments on the other side can only be discovered by diligent search.” - Bertrand Russell

73. “When you devalue ethics and morals by proclaiming that our attitude toward them should be casual or lenient, you can't be surprised by a rising generation who then behaves disrespectfully, treating life, people, and choices as if they possess little value or worth.  For whether or not that was the intention, society has taught them to believe thusly.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

74. “Our minds of infinite possibilities have been plowed, seeded and cultivated by every word, institution and sacred belief we hold dear, to produce a foul harvest of exclusion, apathy, brute domination and death.” - Bryant McGill

75. “Nationalism is form of collective narcissism, where the citizens possess an inflated self-love of "their own people," to the exclusion of other human beings.” - Bryant McGill

76. “I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C" and "D." Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of "conservatism.” - Barry Goldwater

77. “It is the socially determined norms and traditions of gender roles, which must be challenged, and challenged with vigor. In nearly all countries, including America, the truth is that women have a low social status, and are considered inferior.” - Bryant McGill

78. “The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Often, love is a tangled web of lies that only a broken heart would weave. Seldom is dishonesty the whole person, rather it's the pain.” - Shannon L. Alder