Ella Wheeler Wilcox Quotes

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.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies. The fearful thing about it is that, not knowing what truth may be, we can still recognize lies.

My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.

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

I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I'm wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.

In philosophy you're never 100% sure. You're always undermining what you think you know. That's always been my philosophy and my intellectual ethos.

If there's something you really want to believe, that's what you should question the most.

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

No one is infallible, and no one can claim a monopoly on truth or virtue. It would be contradictory for skepticism to seek to translate itself into a new faith.

The few have said, Think! The many have said, Believe! The first doubt was the womb and cradle of progress, and from the first doubt, man has continued to advance.

It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.

Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about.

Any belief that puts itself beyond doubt nurtures its own collapse.

If you haven't doubted, you probably haven't thought very hard about what you believe.

The thing I believe in most in the world is my own fallibility, so I am willing to believe that I may be wrong too.

We don't need to invest all of our faith in every concept, in every symbol, in every opinion that forms the totality of our knowledge. Faith means to believe in something 100% without a doubt, and to doubt our own knowledge can seem like the most frightening thing that can happen to us.

A man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.

Faith never means gullibility. The man who believes everything is as far from God as the man who refuses to believe anything.

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

Why is it people who want the truth never believe it when they hear it?

Why can you believe the lie, but not the truth?

Belief is in ignorance. If you know, you know. And it is good that if you don’t know, know that you don’t know — the belief can deceive you. The belief can create an atmosphere in your mind, where, without knowing, you start thinking that you know. Belief is not trust, and the more strongly you say that you believe totally, the more you are afraid of the doubt within you.

It would be the height of absurdity to label ignorance tempered by humility "faith"! (Institutio III.2.3)

Sceptics are yet the most credulous.