This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"A belief is not merely an idea the mind possesses; it is an idea that possesses the mind." - Robert Oxton Bolt
"It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." - Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy
"Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. n." - Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy
"Belief is better than anything else, and it is best when rapt - above paying its respects to anybody's doubt whatsoever." - Robert Frost
"Why abandon a belief merely because it ceases to be true? Cling to it long enough and it will turn true again, for so it goes. Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor." - Robert Frost
"The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions." - Robert Lynd, fully Robert Wilson Lynd
"Addictive spirituality creates dependence in the practitioner (frequently to authoritarian leaders and their communities), an avoidance of personal responsibility, and loss of individuality through social controls, such as fear, guilt, or greed for power or bliss. It also tends to suppress rational inquiry into the teachings. Healthy spirituality, on the other hand, supports the practitioner's freedom, autonomy, self-esteem, and social responsibility. It is based on experience, rather than belief or dogma; it does not create idols out of spiritual teachers; and it empowers students by emphasizing democratic forms of learning and teaching, rather than the authoritarian model that has dominated spiritual life for millennia." - Ronald S. Miller
"People who have no strong belief in a life after this one will create a society fixated on short-term results, without much thought for the consequences of their actions." - Sogyal Rinpoche
"The revolutionists did not succeed in establishing human freedom; they poured the new wine of belief in equal rights for all men into the old bottle of privilege for some; and it soured." - Suzanne LaFollette, fully Suzanne Clara La Follette
"Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"People normally cut reality into compartments, and so are unable to see the interdependence of all phenomena. To see one in all and all in one is to break through the great barrier which narrows one’s perception of reality, a barrier which Buddhism calls the attachment to the false view of self... means belief in the presence of unchanging entities which exist on their own. To break through this false view is to be liberated from every sort of fear, pain, and anxiety." - Thich Nhất Hanh
"He does not believe who does not live according to his belief." - Thomas Fuller
"The safety of morality lies neither in the adoption of this or that philosophical speculation, or this or that theological creed, but in a real and living belief in that fixed order of nature which sends social disorganization upon the track of immorality, as surely as its sends physical disease after physical trespasses." - Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
"The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, mono-medicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity." - Thomas Szasz, fully Thomas Stephen Szasz
"Man is like an island, a circle within circles. Man is separated from these outer circles by his mind, his beliefs, and the limitations put upon him by a life away from the Earth. The circle of man, the island of self, is the place of logic, the ‘I,’ the ego, and the physical self. That is the island that man has chosen to live within today, and in doing so he has created a prison for himself. The walls of the island prison are thick, made up of doubts, logic and lack of belief. His isolation from his greater circles of self is suffocating and prevents him from seeing life clearly and purely. It is a world of ignorance where the flesh is the only reality, the only god... Beyond man’s island of ego, his prison, lies the world of the spirit-that-moves-in-all-things, the force that is found in all things. It is a world that communicates to all entities of Creation and touches the creator. It is a circle of life that houses all man’s instinct, his deepest memory, his power to control his body and mind, and a bridge that helps man transcend flesh. It is a world that expands man’s universe and helps him to fuse himself to the earth. Most of all, it is a world that brings man to his higher self and to spiritual rapture." - Tom Brown, Jr.
"No one, no thing, is without a spirit. The spirit of a man who knows no spiritual things still exists, but is only resting in the reality of spirit, waiting to be awakened and used. All we have to do is to find that spirit through the guidance of Inner Vision and then awaken that spirit. Even those who once showed no spiritual knowledge know their spirit has been touched. If you can then heal the spirit, and heal that spirit with enough belief and power, then the power transcends the spirit and makes itself manifest in the flesh. But remember, we are just a bridge, a vessel, to be used by the Creator, and it is not us who decide to use the power." - Tom Brown, Jr.
"Modern thought is the prison of the soul and stands between man and his spiritual mind. The logical mind cannot know absolute faith, nor can it know pure thought, for the logic feeds upon logic and does not accept things that cannot be known and proven by the flesh. Thus man has created a prison for himself and for his spirit, because he lacks belief and purity of thought. Faith needs no proof nor logic, yet man needs proof before he can have faith. Man then has created a cycle which cannot be broken, for where proof is needed, there can be no faith." - Tom Brown, Jr.
"One thing alone I charge you. As you live, believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the great end comes slowly, because time is long." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
"Religious doctrine were determined not by the logic of a few but by the needs of the many; they were a frame of belief within which the common man, inclined by nature to a hundred unsocial actions, could be formed in to a being sufficiently disciplined and self-controlled to make society and civilization possible." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young." - W. Somerset Maugham, fully William Somerset Maugham
"Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"Neither acquiescence in skepticism nor acquiescence in dogma is what education should produce. What it should produce is a belief that knowledge is attainable in a measure, though with difficulty; that much of what passes for knowledge at any given time is likely to be more or less mistaken, but that the mistakes can be rectified by care and industry... Knowledge, like other good things, is difficult, but not impossible; the dogmatist forgets the difficulty, the skeptic denies the possibility. Both are mistaken, and their errors, when widespread, produce social disaster." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"The verbal Christian belief in the sanctity of life has not been affected by the impersonal barbarism of twentieth century war." - C. Wright Mills, fully Charles Wright Mills
"Belief is thought at rest." - C. S. Peirce, fully Charles Sanders Peirce
"Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled… purpose. " - D. H. Lawrence, fully David Herbert "D.H." Lawrence
"Faith is not belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active. " - Edith Hamilton
"Most executives, many scientists, and almost all business school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong. The mind can only see what it is prepared to see. " - Edward de Bono
"In the dominant Western religious system, the love of God is essentially the same as the belief in God, in God’s existence, God’s justice, God’s love. The love of God is essentially a thought experience. In the Eastern religions and in mysticism, the love of God is an intense feeling experience of oneness, inseparably linked with the expression of this love in every act of living." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"With his discovery of the discrepancy between thinking and being, Freud not only undermined the Western tradition of idealism in its philosophical and popular forms, he also made a far-reaching discovery in the field of ethics. Until Freud, sincerity could be defined as saying what one believed. Since Freud this is no longer a sufficient definition. The difference between what I say and what I believe assumes a new dimension, namely that of my unconscious belief or my unconscious striving...Since Freud, the sentence I meant well has lost its function as an excuse. " - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"People are given a false alternative: the choice between an unenlightened belief and an enlightened unbelief. Most intellectuals seem to pay homage to the second variant." - Eugen Drewermann
"A belief which does not spring from a conviction in the emotions is no belief at all" - Evelyn Scott, also wrote under pseudonyms Ernest Souza and Elsie Dunn
"The man who has a certain religious belief and fears to discuss it, lest it may be proved wrong, is not loyal to his belief, he has but a coward's faithfulness to his prejudices. If he were a lover of truth, he would be willing at any moment to surrender his belief for a higher, better, and truer faith." - William George Jordan
"A necessary consequent of religious belief is the attaching ideas of merit to that belief, and of demerit to its absence. " - Frances Wright, known as Fanny Wright
"Our religious belief usurps the place of our sensations, our imaginations of our judgment. We no longer look to actions, trace their consequences, and then deduce the rule; we first make the rule, and then, right or wrong, force the action to square with it. " - Frances Wright, known as Fanny Wright
"The man of belief is necessarily a dependent man... He does not belong to himself, but to the author of the idea he believes... At every step, one has to wrestle for truth; one has to surrender to it almost everything to which the heart, to which our love, our trust in life clings otherwise. That requires greatness of soul: the service of truth is the hardest service...faith makes blessed: consequently, it lies. " - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm." - F. A. Hayek, fully Friedrich August Hayek or von Hayek
"If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once. Moreover, there would be nothing immoral then, everything would be permitted. " - Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
"Although Freedom is, primarily, an undeveloped idea, the means it uses are external and phenomenal; presenting themselves in History to our sensuous vision. The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole springs of action — the efficient agents in this scene of activity. Among these may, perhaps, be found aims of a liberal or universal kind — benevolence it may be, or noble patriotism; but such virtues and general views are but insignificant as compared with the World and its doings. We may perhaps see the Ideal of Reason actualized in those who adopt such aims, and within the sphere of their influence; but they bear only a trifling proportion to the mass of the human race; and the extent of that influence is limited accordingly. Passions, private aims, and the satisfaction of selfish desires, are on the other hand, most effective springs of action. Their power lies in the fact that they respect none of the limitations which justice and morality would impose on them; and that these natural impulses have a more direct influence over man than the artificial and tedious discipline that tends to order and self-restraint, law and morality. When we look at this display of passions, and the consequences of their violence; the Unreason which is associated not ,only with them, but even (rather we might say especially) with good designs and righteous aims; when we see the evil, the vice, the ruin that has befallen the most flourishing kingdoms which the mind of man ever created, we can scarce avoid being filled with sorrow at this universal taint of corruption: and, since this decay is not the work of mere Nature, but of the Human Will — a moral embitterment — a revolt of the Good Spirit (if it have a place within us) may well be the result of our reflections." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"Anarchism is a creed inspired and ridden by paradox, and thus, while its advocates theoretically reject tradition, they are nevertheless very much concerned with the ancestry of their doctrine. This concern springs from the belief that anarchism is a manifestation of natural human urges, and that it is the tendency to create authoritarian institutions which is the transient aberration. If one accepts this view, then anarchism cannot merely be a phenomenon of the present; the aspect of it we perceive in history is merely one metamorphosis of an element constant in society." - George Woodcock
"It is certain that the two World Wars in which I have participated would not have occurred had we been prepared. It is my belief that adequate preparation on our part would have prevented or materially shortened all our other wars beginning with that of 1812. Yet, after each of our wars, there has always been a great hue and cry to the effect that there will be no more wars, that disarmament is the sure road to health, happiness, and peace; and that by removing the fire department, we will remove fires. These ideas spring from wishful thinking and from the erroneous belief that wars result from logical processes. There is no logic in wars. They are produced by madmen. No man can say when future madmen will reappear. I do not say that there will be no more wars; I devoutly hope that there will not, but I do say that the chances of avoiding future wars will be greatly enhanced if we are ready." - George S. Patton, fully George Smith Patton, Jr.
"The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds." - Gerald G. Jampolsky
"The only thing that has kept the race of men from the mad extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club and the lethal chamber, has been mysticism — the belief that logic is misleading, and that things are not what they seem." - Gilbert Keith "G.K." Chesteron
"The belief of our Reason is an Exercise of Faith, and Faith is an Act of Reason. " - Joseph Glanvill
"That though we are certain of many things, yet that Certainty is no absolute Infallibility, there still remains the possibility of our being mistaken in all matters of humane Belief and Inquiry. " - Joseph Glanvill
"When the government puts its imprimatur on a particular religion it conveys a message of exclusion to all those who do not adhere to the favored beliefs. A government cannot be premised on the belief that all persons are created equal when it asserts that God prefers some." - Harry Blackmun, fully Harold "Harry" Andrew Blackmun
"Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to cooperate with the good, that it may prevail. I try to increase the power God has given me to see the best in everything and every one, and make that Best a part of my life." - Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
"I understand how it was possible for Spinoza to find deep and sustained happiness when he was excommunicated, poor, despised and suspected alike by Jew and Christian; not that the kind world of men ever treated me so, but that his isolation from the universe of sensuous joys is somewhat analogous to mine. He loved the good for its own sake. Like many great spirits he accepted his place in the world, and confided himself childlike to a higher power, believing that it worked through his hands and predominated in his being. He trusted implicitly, and that is what I do. Deep, solemn optimism, it seems to me, should spring from this firm belief in the presence of God in the individual; not a remote, unapproachable governor of the universe, but a God who is very near every one of us, who is present not only in earth, sea and sky, but also in every pure and noble impulse of our hearts, 'the source and centre of all minds, their only point of rest.'" - Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
"Corrective learning begins with the awakening of spirit, and the turning away from belief in physical sight." - Helen Schucman, born Helen Cohn