Galileo Galilei Quotes

Faith is the first step to understanding. Either it's the Word of an infallible God, the fallible words of men, or faith in what you personally believe. You've got to have faith in something. Believe me.

I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.

Seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.

I believe in order to understand

Knowing is higher than believing. Knowing means that there is NO doubt.

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.

It is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what Agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to Agnosticism. That which Agnostics deny and repudiate, as immoral, is the contrary doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe without logically satisfactory evidence; and that reprobation ought to attach to the profession of disbelief in such inadequately supported propositions.

There's no believing in God...We either know God, or we don't.

In what concerns divine things, belief is not appropriate. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God.

I shall have to believe even though I cannot understand.

But you see, I can believe a thing without understanding it. It's all a matter of training.

Future contingents cannot be certain to us, because we know them as such. They can be certain only to God whose understanding is in eternity above time. Just as a man going along a road does not see those who come after him; but the man who sees the whole road from a height sees all those who are going along the road at the same time.

What I cannot know by reason, I can know by simply believing.

Pray and doubt; you’ll do without. Pray and believe; you will receive.

Wisdom, properly so called, is nothing else but this: the perfect knowledge of the truth in all matters whatsoever.

We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true.

The truth is the truth. What changes is what we know about it and what we're willing to believe.

I do not try, Lord, to attain Your lofty heights, because my understanding is in no way equal to it. But I do desire to understand Your truth a little, that truth that my heart believes and loves. I do not seek to understand that I may believe; but I believe so that I may understand. For I believe this also, that unless I believe, I shall not understand.

Knowledge of divine things for the most part is lost to us by incredulity.

You cannot hold God hostage (to your questions). He doesn’t owe you an answer. If you want the peace that passes understanding, you’re going to have to give up your right to understanding. It’s called trust.

The greatest part cannot know, and therefore they must believe.

There are, in effect, two things, to know and to believe one knows; to know is science; to believe one knows is ignorance.

My son, I do not say these are foals and those asses, these little monkeys and those great baboons, as you would have me do. As I told you from the first, I regard them as earth's heroes. But I do not wish to believe them without cause, nor to accept those propositions whose antitheses (as you must have understood if you are not both blind and deaf) are so compellingly true.

A man may live long, and die at last in ignorance of many truths, which his mind was capable of knowing, and that with certainty.

Never for a moment have I had one doubt about my religious beliefs. There are people who believe only so far as they can understand--that seems to me presumptuous and sets their understanding as the standard of the universe.