Remy de Gourmont Quotes

Men willingly believe what they wish.

People are going to believe what they want to believe.

Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.

Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic.

My point is that perceptual bias can affect nut jobs and scientists alike. If we hold too rigidly to what we think we know, we ignore or avoid evidence of anything that might change our mind.

The first step to believing something is true is wanting to believe it is true... or being afraid it is.

Most men, when they think they are thinking, are merely rearranging their prejudices.

We are all very ready to believe what we like.

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

You and I do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.

The simplest principles become difficult of practice, when habits, formed in error, have been fixed by time, and the simplest truths hard to receive when prejudice has warped the mind.

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experience. No one can eliminate prejudices—just recognize them.

We believe what we want to believe, what we like to believe, what suits our prejudices and fuels our passions.

Men can reason themselves into almost any sort of opinion if they are so inclined.

Most men … can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty — conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives

Most people when they come after you for advice come to have their own opinions strengthened, not corrected.

Man tends to treat all of his opinions as principles.

Somehow even a popular fallacy has an aspect of truth when it suits one's own case.

As our inclinations, so our opinions.

Common sense, to most people, is nothing more than their own opinions.

Truthiness is what you want the facts to be as opposed to what the facts are. What feels like the right answer as opposed to what reality will support.

Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before you reach eighteen.

No man can see his own prejudices.

The obscurity is much oftener in the passions and prejudices of the reasoner than in the subject.