Moby Quotes

When did ignorance become a point of view?

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

He who thinks half-heartedly will not believe in God; but he who really thinks has to believe in God.

With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.

Not that believing such things has anything to do with whether they are true. You see that, don't you?

The natural cause of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

A search for truth seems to me to be full of pitfalls. We all have different understandings of what truth is, and we'll each believe - or we are in danger of each believing - that our truth is the one and only absolute truth, which is why I say it's full of pitfalls.

Once you reject evidence as a source of knowledge, you don't gotta believe nothin' you don't like.

The first lesson about trusting your senses is: don't. Just because you believe something to be true, just because you know it's true, that doesn't mean it is true.

If I wanted to doubt, then I could doubt endlessly, but at some point a person has to stop questioning and act, and at that point you have to trust something to be true. You have to act as if something is true, and so you choose the thing you have the most reason to believe in, you have to live in the world that you have the most hope in.

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them.

No," said the priest, "you don't need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary." "Depressing view," said K. "The lie made into the rule of the world.

In the minds of most men, the kingdom of opinion is divided into three territories,--the territory of yes, the territory of no, and a broad, unexplored middle ground of doubt.

Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion.

The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.

I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. There must be some human truth that is beyond religion.

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

The problem I want to talk to you about tonight is the problem of belief. What does it mean to believe? We use this word all the time, and I think behind it lurk some really extraordinary taboos and confusions. What I want to argue tonight is that how we talk about belief- how we fail to criticize or criticize the beliefs of others, has more importance to us personally, more consequence to us personally and to civilization than perhaps anything else that is in our power to influence.

When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself.

Truth does not demand belief.

Knowledge is something which you can use. Belief is something which uses you.