Jesse Ball Quotes

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

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.

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.

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.

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 interest I have to believe a thing is no proof that such a thing exists.

With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.

When did ignorance become a point of view?

He was guided by what he saw rather than by what he wanted to believe.

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.

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.

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

I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. How can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science.

Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything.

Seeing is not believing - it is only seeing.

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

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

The problem I want to talk to you about tonight is the problem of belief. What does it mean to believe? We use this word all the time, and I think behind it lurk some really extraordinary taboos and confusions. What I want to argue tonight is that how we talk about belief- how we fail to criticize or criticize the beliefs of others, has more importance to us personally, more consequence to us personally and to civilization than perhaps anything else that is in our power to influence.

Paradigms power perception and perceptions power emotions. Most emotions are responses to perception - what you think is true about a given situation. If your perception is false, then your emotional response to it will be false too. So check your perceptions, and beyond that check the truthfulness of your paradigms - what you believe. Just because you believe something firmly doesn't make it true. Be willing to reexamine what you believe.

I must remind you that our credulity is not to be measured by the truth of the things we believe. When men believed that the earthwas flat, they were not credulous: they were using their common sense, and, if asked to prove that the earth was flat, would have said simply, "Look at it." Those who refuse to believe that it is round are exercising a wholesome skepticism.

Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know.

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

We need discernment in what we see and what we hear and what we believe.

The belief of our Reason is an Exercise of Faith, and Faith is an Act of Reason.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.