Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes

As it is natural to believe many things without proof, so, despite all proof, is it natural to disbelieve others.

It is equally a fault to believe all men or to believe none.

I don't believe anything till I have seen the proof. For anything without proof, I think we should believe the theory that gives us peace. It doesn't matter whether the theory is true or not.

He that believes all misseth; he that believes nothing, hits not.

I don't discount belief. I just discount most of the things that people believe in.

What should I believe? thought Shadow, and the voice came back to him from somewhere deep beneath the world, in a bass rumble: Believe everything.

I do not believe in Belief.

More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing in nothing, than by believing too much.

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.

You must see first before you can believe.

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

Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

We are responsible for our incredulity.

I respect and believe skeptics.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth of falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it?

It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.

It was the schoolboy who said, ""Faith is believing what you know ain't so.""

GIVE ME YOUR REASON TO BELIeVE

The typical person has no trouble believing without knowing. What people need to realize is simply that you do not need to believe to know.

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.

True belief is not about blind submission. It is about open-eyed acceptance, and acceptance requires persistent distance from the truth, and that distance is doubt. Doubt, in other words, can feed faith, rather than destroy it. And it forces us, even while believing, to recognize our fundamental duty with respect to God's truth: humility. We do not know. Which is why we believe.

A private man has always the liberty (because thought is free) to believe or not believe in his heart those acts that have been given out for miracles, according as he shall see what benefits can accrue by men's belief, to those that pretend, or countenance them, and thereby conjecture whether they be miracles or lies.

Atheism was natural enough, but heresy seemed strange. For, surely, if one could believe anything, one could believe everything.

I hate doubt, yet I am certain that doubt is the only way to approach anything worth believing in.