Robert Rankin Quotes

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.

I delight not in spreading any thing mysterious, for I consider it all lost time; but the things that all of us can see and know if we will.

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.

... common sense is very rare.

You can get so well educated in America that your thoughts become detached from common sense. You can get so complicated in your thinking that the obvious isn't real to you anymore.

It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.

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.

Between what I think, what I want to say, what I believe I say, what I say, what you want to hear, what you believe to hear, what you hear, what you want to understand, what you think you understand, what you understand...They are ten possibilities that we might have some problem communicating. But let's try anyway...

Clarity is the most important thing to me - in thinking - and so I try in the books to be as clear as possible.

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

I think Abraham Lincoln said believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see.

Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe.

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

Obviousness is always the enemy of correctness.

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

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.

He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.

Sometimes I'm confused by what I think is really obvious. But what I think is really obvious obviously isn't obvious.

I don't think about life everlasting. If something doesn't have scientific evidence to back it up, I don't believe it. I'm a straight shooter.

My brain is very simple. Like when you break everything down. I see things in a simple way. And that simplicity for some reason becomes funny to other people because they don't look at it that way.

If you want to "get in touch with your feelings," fine, talk to yourself. We all do. But if you want to communicate with another thinking human being, get in touch with your thoughts. Put them in order, give them a purpose, use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce. The secret way to do this is to write it down, and then cut out the confusing parts.

And oft, though wisdom wake, suspicion sleeps At wisdom's gate, and to simplicity Resigns her charge, while goodness thinks no ill Where no ill seems.

It amused me to think that one can tell the truth when one is drunk and nobody will believe it.