Henry David Thoreau Quotes

If you can believe in God you can believe in a witch, it is the same package. If you can believe in one kind of nonsense, you can believe in all kinds of nonsense.

The man who believes in giraffes would swallow anything.

People will believe absurd things - in the 19th century and now.

One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we've developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.

I'm not one of those superstitious people.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

I don't believe in astrology. It's a lot of crap. I just think that's another thing you should throw out the window. Mysticism. Cheap. It's amazing that people still hang on to that after all these years.

Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.

A man must not only have faith but intellectual faith too. To make a man take up everything and believe it, would be to make him a lunatic.

Superstitious notions propagated in infancy are hardly ever totally eradicate, not even in minds grown strong enough to despise the like credulous folly in others.

Men who cannot believe in the mystery of our Saviour's redemption can believe that spirits from the dead have visited them in a stranger's parlour, because they see a table shake and do not know how it is shaken; because they hear a rapping on a board, and cannot see the instrument that raps it; because they are touched in the dark, and do not know the hand that touches them.

Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.

Those who believe in this type of thing [Paul the Octopus, who ‘predicted’ the result of World Cup matches] cannot be the leaders of the global nations that aspire, like Iran, to human perfection, basing themselves in the love of all sacred values.

We are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the Middle Ages, and an example of modern credulity is the widespread belief that the Earth is round. The average man can advance not a single reason for thinking that the Earth is round. He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth century mentality.

In all superstition wise men follow fools.

Why is it that the less intelligence people have, the more spiritual they are? They seem to fill all the vacant, ignorant spaces in their heads with soul. Which explains how it is that the less knowledge they have, the more religion.

We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.

Books of entertainment first led Adam Clarke to believe in a spiritual world.

We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism -- a Mongoloid metaphysic.

It's human nature - we want to believe our children, our families, our President!

The gazing populace receive greedily, without examination, whatever soothes superstition and promotes wonder.

The will to believe chases out the rational mind, whenever and wherever the two come into conflict.

Christians are like a thirteen year old kid who still believes in Santa.

Religion began when the first scoundrel met the first fool.

Some of what these pamphlets [of astrological forecasts] say will turn out to be true, but most of it time and experience will expose as empty and worthless. The latter part will be forgotten literally: written on the winds while the former will be carefully entered in people's memories, as is usual with the crowd.