Neil Gaiman Quotes

Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn't believing. It's where belief stops, because it isn't needed any more.

If faith is what you have to go on, if faith is the link between your beliefs and the world at large, your beliefs are very likely to be wrong. Beliefs can be right or wrong. If you believe you can fly, that belief is only true if indeed you can fly. Somebody who thinks he can fly, and is wrong about it, will eventually discover there's a problem with his view of the world.

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.

It’s critical that we know what we believe, no matter what we feel...that we know what is true, no matter what we see.

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.

You do not believe, you only believe that you believe.

I think maybe it is better to believe than not to believe. But I couldn't tell you why.

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.

... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.

All proofs inevitably lead to propositions which have no proof! All things are known because we want to believe in them.

We must not let go manifest truths because we cannot answer all questions about them.

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

Maybe I don't believe things myself, as well. Truth is such a transient thing.

Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.

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

We cannot infer that because sciences of things divine and human are full of controversies and quarrels, therefore their whole subject-matter is uncertain ; for there have been many persons so enamoured of contradiction, as to turn into ridicule geometrical axioms.

When did ignorance become a point of view?

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.

Belief is nearly the whole of the universe whether based on truth or not.

I've gone through most of my life not believing anything. Either I know or I don't know, or I think.

I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them.

Seeing is not believing - it is only seeing.

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