Cyril Connolly Quotes

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

As I get older I seem to believe less and less and yet to believe what I do believe more and more.

I have no faith at all. I only hold convictions.

When you don't believe something, you can't make yourself believe it. There's nothing you can do to believe it again. You either believe it or you don't.

Skepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.

People must believe what they can, and those who believe more must not be hard upon those who believe less. I doubt if you would have believed it all yourself if you hadn't seen some of it.

You must believe me when I believe, and not when I doubt.

What did I really think fifteen years ago? A nonbeliever, I felt guilty in the midst of all those believers. And since it seemed to me that they were in the right, I decided to believe, as you might decide to take an aspirin: It can't hurt and you might get better.

I wouldn't like to be a non-believer in anything.

I'm always fascinated when people really fervently believe, because I have such a hard time believing anything. When people have real faith in something, it's fascinating to me. And the fact that so many people, in surveys, so many people say they do. It kind of blows my mind.

Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.

What do we believe? Why do we believe it?

Know why you believe, understand what you believe, and possess a reason for the faith that is in you.

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?

What do I believe? I do not know; I do not know; I do not know.

I don't believe in anything, Mother," I said. "You told Armand long ago that you believe you'll find answers in the great jungles and forests; that the stars will finally reveal a vast truth. But I don't believe in anything. And that makes me stronger than you think

Few really believe. The most only believe that they believe or even make believe.

GIVE ME YOUR REASON TO BELIeVE

Your faith is what you believe, not what you know.

One percent doubt is zero percent faith.

It is no good my telling you. One never believes other people's experiencem and one is only very gradually convinced by one's own.

Carl did not want to believe. He wanted 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.

The believer who has never doubted will hardly convert a doubter.

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