Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

Human beings will believe in all kinds of things that aren't true, and that's okay. And TV is a part of that.

There isn't anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can't believe it.

What is it men cannot be made to believe!

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.

Oh mortal man, is there anything you cannot be made to believe?

The bulk of mankind, even in those nations which are most celebrated for learning and wisdom, are still carried down the torrents of superstition, and entertain very unworthy apprehensions

The longer you hold a belief, the less likely it is to be true.

There's a lot of things that are good in Scientology, because I wouldn't have been in it. And that's the thing: a lot of people trivialize this thing, like, 'Oh, it's Xenu, and it's a volcano, and it's jumping on couches and acting crazy.' These people are victims. We've been victimized. We believed in something because it starts out very normal.

The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.

One person looks around and sees a universe created by a god who watches over its long unfurling, marking the fall of sparrows and listening to the prayers of his finest creation. Another person believes that life, in all its baroque complexity, is a chemical aberration that will briefly decorate the surface of a ball of rock spinning somewhere among a billion galaxies. And the two of them could talk for hours and find no great difference between one another, for neither set of beliefs make us kinder or wiser.

The idea that when you correct a fact, you erase that fact from people's memories is the reverse of the truth. When you correct a fact, what you do is you further lodge that fact into people's minds, and they remember the error.

I agree with the sentiment that it's probably more dangerous to believe some things that aren't so than to not believe something - you know, to believe in a lie.

On any longer view, man is only fitfully committed to the rational -- to thinking, seeing, learning, knowing. Believing is what he's really proud of.

Belief is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private pleasure of the believer . . . It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

There are those who feel an imperative need to believe, for whom the values of a belief are proportionate not to its truth, but to its definiteness. Incapable of either admitting the existence of contrary judgments or of suspending their own, they supply the place of knowledge by turning other men's conjectures into dogmas.

There was really nothing for serious men to do in cases of wild gossip, for superstitious rustics will say and believe anything.

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons-that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.

The imagined memories had to have as much weight as the real, or we had to at least pretend they did to such a degree that they just very well might have. And so I never questioned Angela about that particular story, or about all the troubling things that it pointed to, content to believe that at least in this version things worked for her better than they did in the one I never heard.

Memory weaves and traps us at the same time according to a scheme in which we do not participate: we should never speak of our memory, for it is anything but ours; it works on its own terms, it assists us while deceiving us or perhaps deceives up to assist us.

Many people believe everything others say, even though what they see with their own eyes, should be enough to tell them otherwise.

I don't believe there are climate skeptics. I think there are people who indulge in a culture of what can be reduced to Fox network thinking. That has nothing to do with the politics that apply to the protection of quality of life in any sense. It's like talking to a member of a cult.

People don't so much believe in God as that they choose not to believe in nothing.

You know, on the spectrum of religious belief, there is atheism - these are people that don't believe. There's theism - these are the believers and agnostics say it's beyond comprehension that the whole issue of God us unknowable. You might be interested to know that perhaps the greatest mind of the 20th century Einstein, the one time that he actually used one of these appellations was in a letter about five years before he died and he referred to himself as an agnostic.

He [God] just seems so man-made to me. There are so many theories, and not everyone can be right. It's human nature to need a religious crutch, and I don't begrudge anyone that. I just don't need one.