Lucretius Quotes

There are two ways to slice easily thorugh life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.

I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

And that is why the man who wants to see clearly, before he will believe, never starts on the journey.

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

Doubt everything or believe everything: these are two equally convenient strategies. With either we dispense with the need for reflection.

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

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

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to doubt.

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

If fallacies come knocking at my door,I'd rather feed, and shelter full a score,Than hide behind the black portcullis, doubt,And run the risk of barring one Truth out.And if pretension for a time deceive,And prove me one too ready to believe,Far less my shame, than if by stubborn act,I brand as lie, some great colossal Fact.

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

If you don't believe in a line, then you come off as the loser.

Buddha urged people to investigate things - he didn't just command them to believe.

Seeing is not believing - it is only seeing.

Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.

I do not believe in Belief.

To deny, to believe, and to doubt well, are to a man what the race is to a horse.

We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt.