Johannes Kepler Quotes

Some guys-a lot of guys-don't believe what they are seeing, especially if it gets in the way of what they want to eat or drink or believe. Me, I don't believe in God. But if i saw him, I would. I wouldn't just go around saying, "Jesus, that was a great special effect." The definition of an asshole is a guy who doesn't believe what he's seeing.

As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty.

It amazes me to find an intelligent person who fights against something which he does not at all believe exists.

The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

People believed what they wanted to believe, no matter what was right in front of their eyes.

This is always history's greatest failure, its inability to believe what it sees, what, almost always, someone sees.

Facts do not find their way into the world in which our beliefs reside; they did not produce our beliefs, they do not destroy them; they may inflict on them the most constant refutations without weakening them, and an avalanche of afflictions or ailments succeeding one another without interruption in a family will not make it doubt the goodness of its God or the talent of its doctor.

It is our knowledge - the things we are sure of - that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning.

The definition of an asshole is someone who doesn't believe what he is seeing.

We have a never sated appetite for self deception.

America is in a state of somnolence. It's an avoidance of paranoia through ignoring reality.

There are some people in politics and in the press who can't be confused by the facts. They just will not live in an evidence-based world. And that's regrettable.

If you don't believe what other people believe, then they'll accuse you of being nihilistic.

We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.

The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.

People who believe their unquestioned thoughts cannot see what is obvious and directly in front of their faces at all times, because they are invested in what they believe to be true. As long as they live out of an unquestioned mind, they must continue to argue with what they believe is happening rather than the reality of what is really happening.

The agnostic, the skeptic, is neurotic, but this does not imply a false philosophy; it implies the discovery of facts to which he does not know how to adapt himself. The intellectual who tries to escape from neurosis by escaping from the facts is merely acting on the principle that “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.

Professional opinion is skeptical about anything that doesn't fit in with the version of reality it has been programmed to believe in. The skepticism comes from a lack of understanding and the need to defend the status quo and not from actual knowledge of the subject.

There is nothing so absurd or ridiculous that has not at some time been said by some philosopher. Fontenelle says he would undertake to persuade the whole public of readers to believe that the sun was neither the cause of light or heat, if he could only get six philosophers on his side.

How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one's senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality.

People have a habit of inventing fictions they will believe wholeheartedly in order to ignore the truth they cannot accept.

There’s no point in believing in things that exist.

It is not... That some people do not know what to do with truth when it is offered to them, But the tragic fate is to reach, after patient search, a condition of mind-blindness, in which. The truth is not recognized, though it stares you in the face.

What the eye doesn't see and the mind doesn't know, doesn't exist.