Christopher Paolini Quotes

I know friends of mine who have never changed their mind about anything in their lives, despite evidence from all directions. And I think if you can keep an open mind and some understanding, that helps you stay young.

To have a very strong opinion all the time is corrosive to a person's intellect. It becomes your default position.

Our opinions become fixed at the point where we stop thinking.

The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.

Since opinions do not find in me a ready soil to thrust and spread their roots into, no premise shocks me, no belief hurts me, no matter how opposite to my own they may be.

Whoever has once been truly unsettled by a work of the imagination will never give loyalty to a single idea, belief system, religious faith or party.

I reserve the right to think many different things and to change my mind and to even be wrong.

The more educated we are, the less we are prepared to tolerate views contrary to our own.

Examine what you believe to be impossible, and then change your beliefs.

Change your mind as often as possible. Just because you thought something yesterday doesn't mean you have to think it today. Don't ever become a prisoner of your own opinion

I would say that I'm 98 percent skeptical, but the other 2 percent [is] open for the possibility of things.

I don't [believe in God]. I have a problem with religion or anything else that says, 'We have all the answers,' because there's no such thing as 'the answers.' We're complex. We change our minds on issues all the time. Religion leaves no room for human complexity.

Ideologies are too seductive anyway. It does a man good to see things from a different point of view.

It's OK to have beliefs, just don't believe in them.

The real man of intelligence will not cling to any ideology - for what? He will not carry a load of readymade answers. He knows that he has enough intelligence so that whatever situation arises, he will be able to respond to it. Why carry an unnecessary load from the past? What is the point of carrying it?

If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call in question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it - the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.

How prone we are to come to the consideration of every question with heads and hearts pre-occupied! How prone to shrink from any opinion, however reasonable, if it be opposed to any, however unreasonable, of our own! How disposed are we to judge, in anger, those who call upon us to think, and encourage us to enquire! To question our prejudices seems nothing less than sacrilege; to break the chains of our ignorance, nothing short of impiety!

if you don't have doubts you're either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants-in-the-pants of faith. They keep it alive and moving.

The most essential mental quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent and on a large scale, is much stupidity.

I prefer to think of faith, as Coleridge says of poetry, not as the taking up of belief but as "the willing suspension of disbelief". . . a willingness to be open, to explore, to investigate.

Mortal danger is an effective antidote for fixed ideas.

It is well for people who think, to change their minds occasionally in order to keep them clean.

No one ever died from an open mind.

If we are to use our minds rightly, we must live in an attitude of constant openness and learning.

We're too smart to know there aren't easy answers. But we're not dumb enough to accept that there aren't better answers.