80 Belief Quotes

Beliefs shape our lives in profound ways, guiding our decisions, inspiring our actions, and framing our perspectives. Whether they stem from personal experiences, cultural backgrounds, or philosophical musings, the power of belief is undeniable. In exploring the top 80 belief quotes, we dive deep into the wisdom of thinkers, leaders, and visionaries who have articulated the essence of belief with eloquence and insight. Get ready to be inspired, challenged, and perhaps even transformed, as we journey through a compilation of words that capture the heart and soul of what it means to believe.

1. “My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.” - Bertrand Russell

2. “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

3. “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

4. “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

5. “I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance.” - Adlai E. Stevenson II

6. “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

7. “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

8. “I am an anarch – not because I despise authority, but because I need it. Likewise, I am not a nonbeliever, but a man who demands something worth believing in.” - Ernst Jünger

9. “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

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

11. “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

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

13. “Total Enlightenment is 'Vision without Purpose'.” - Stanley Victor Paskavich

14. “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

15. “I'm not out to disturb anybody's faith. I happen to be happy and comfortable with a belief system that has a dual deity and operates on a lunar schedule. It suits my needs. If you happen to be happy and comfortable with a belief system that features a single masculine deity and operates on a solar schedule, fine. I don't give a fat damn. What matters is what you do, not who's name you do it in.” - Mercedes Lackey

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

17. “If you don't believe in the things you're doing, the answer isn't fooling yourself into thinking you believe it. If you don't believe in what you're doing, then you just shouldn't be doing it.” - Jason Myers

18. “The most formidable chains are forged from beliefs. Ah, beliefs! Beliefs tear out the eyes and leave us blind and groping in the dark. If I believe in one proposition, I have become locked behind the door of that belief, and all other doors to learning and freedom, although standing open and waiting for me to enter, are now closed to me. If I believe in one God, one religion, yes, if I believe in God at all, if I have closed my mind to magic, to spirit, to salvation, to the unknown dimension that exist in the firmament, I have plunged my mind into slavery. Test all beliefs. Distrust all beliefs.” - Gerry Spence

19. “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

20. “I asked myself what I believed. I had never prayed a lot. I hoped hard, wished hard, but I didn't pray. I had developed a certain distrust of organised religion growing up, but I felt I had the capacity to be a spiritual person, and to hold some fervent beliefs. Quite simply, I believed I had a responsibility to be a good person, and that meant fair, honest, hardworking and honorable. If I did that, if I was good to my family, true to my friends, if I gave back to my community or to some cause, if I wasn't a liar, a cheat, or a thief, then I believed that should be enough. At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptised.” - Lance Armstrong

21. “It's one of the great temptations, you see--wanting to prove the strength of your own faith by making others believe what you believe. It shows you're right. But it doesn't prove anything of the sort. All it proves is that you're condescending and arrogant and good at doing what half-decent actors can do, or advertising agents, or pop stars, or politicians, or con men, or any of the professional persuaders. They sell illusions. And that's all they do. And they feel good when they succeed. That's what their lives depend on. Which isn't true about religion. Or shouldn't be. Your belief shouldn't depend on what other people think about it. And it certainly should not depend on whether other people believe the same as you.” - Aidan Chambers

22. “At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn't.” - Paul Graham

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “If anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing from amongst all the nations in the world the set of beliefs which he thought best, he would inevitably—after careful considerations of their relative merits—choose that of his own country. Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best.” - Herodotus

27. “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

28. “Human beings believe just as they breathe - in order to survive.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

29. “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

30. “So the question becomes, If you are ever faced with this choice are you willing to die for what you believe in? For that is the only way you will deny him. [...] It's a difficult question and not one you can answer until you're faced with it. Keep in mind that many people have died for their beliefs; it's actually quite common. The real courage is in living and suffering for what you believe.” - Christopher Paolini

31. “The dismaying truth is that birtherism is part of a larger pattern of rejection of reality that has taken hold of intimidating segments of one of the two political parties that alternate in power in our governing institutions. It is akin to the view that global warming is a hoax, or that the budget can be balanced through spending cuts alone, or that contraception causes abortion, or that evolution is just another theory, on a par with the theory that the earth is six thousand years old.” - Hendrik Hertzberg

32. “However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something more than a punishment or a penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative.” - Alain De Botton

33. “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

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

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

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

37. “It would be difficult to convince me that leaning has no effect whatsoever on the outcome of my bowling.” - Amy Krouse Rosenthal

38. “وانتقل الاسم العجيب في منازل مكّة، اسم جميل حلو، يشبه نغمة حالمة.. كيف ومض هذا الاسم في ذهن سيّد مكّة، ويتساءل بعضهم:ـ وأسماء الآباء.. والأجداد.. لماذا محمّد ؟!تمتم الشيخ:ـ ليكون محموداً في السماء وفي الأرض.” - كمال السيد

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

40. “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

41. “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

42. “Fiction is written with reality and reality is written with fiction. We can write fiction because there is reality and we can write reality because there is fiction; everything we consider today to be myth and legend, our ancestors believed to be history and everything in our history includes myths and legends. Before the splendid modern-day mind was formed our cultures and civilizations were conceived in the wombs of, and born of, what we identify today as "fiction, unreality, myth, legend, fantasy, folklore, imaginations, fabrications and tall tales." And in our suddenly realized glory of all our modern-day "advancements" we somehow fail to ask ourselves the question "Who designated myths and legends as unreality? " But I ask myself this question because who decided that he was spectacular enough to stand up and say to our ancestors "You were all stupid and disillusioned and imagining things" and then why did we all decide to believe this person? There are many realities not just one. There is a truth that goes far beyond what we are told today to believe in. And we find that truth when we are brave enough to break away from what keeps everybody else feeling comfortable. Your reality is what you believe in. And nobody should be able to tell you to believe otherwise.” - C. JoyBell C.

43. “... researchers argue that it's of utmost importance to unravel the nature of black holes, lest we someday begin to worship them. Sounds ridiculous, but whole segments of humankind have often revered the unknowable, venerating that which cannot be tested experimentally. Come to think of it, many still do in twenty-first-century society.” - Eric Chaisson

44. “Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model. Get your model out there where it can be viewed. Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own.” - Donella H. Meadows

45. “- Restons amis !Cette phrase était vraiment pire que tout. - Je suis sûre qu'une fée meurt à chaque fois qu'on prononce ces mots quelque part, dis-je.” - Kerstin Gier

46. “Don't entrust your future on others' hands. Rather make decisions by yourself with the help of God's guidance. Hold your beliefs so tight and never let go of them!” - Hark Herald Sarmiento

47. “[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

48. “[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

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

50. “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

51. “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

52. “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

53. “To feel more fulfilled your actions and activities need to be in alignment with what you deem important.” - Deborah Day

54. “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

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

56. “Speaking to a 'non-theist', 'How do you what you don't believe in if you have never read the Bible?'".” - Belle from Kentucky

57. “He keeps his deepest belief tight to him: that people are good and want to be good, if only you give them a chance.” - Lauren Groff

58. “Our life stories are at one and the same time reality, fallacy and fantasy...” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

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

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

61. “What sets science and the law apart from religion is that nothing is expected to be taken on faith. We're encouraged to ask whether the evidence actually supports what we're being told - or what we grew up believing - and we're allowed to ask whether we're hearing all the evidence or just some small prejudicial part of it. If our beliefs aren't supported by the evidence, then we're encouraged to alter our beliefs.” - Gary Taubes

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

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

64. “Insanity is everyone expecting you not to fall apart when you find out everything you believed in was a lie.” - Shannon L. Alder

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

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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “People believe in God because they don't have any other explanation for things that happen.” - Jodi Picoult

70. “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

71. “I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out. I do not believe that, on the balance, religious belief has been a force for good. Although I am prepared to admit that in certain times and places it has had some good effects, I regard it as belonging to the infancy of human reason, and to a stage of development which we are now outgrowing.” - Bertrand Russell

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. “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

74. “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

75. “If you want to discover the true character of a person, you have only to observe what they are passionate about.” - Shannon L. Alder

76. “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

77. “The most confused you will ever get is when you try to convince your heart and spirit of something your mind knows is a lie.” - Shannon L. Alder

78. “There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it.” - Shannon L. Alder

79. “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

80. “Often the truth is in front of your face, but your eyes and heart are so full of lies that you can't see it.” - Shannon L. Alder