William Butler Yeats Quotes

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth of falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it?

I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I'm wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.

It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.

It was the schoolboy who said, ""Faith is believing what you know ain't so.""

No one is infallible, and no one can claim a monopoly on truth or virtue. It would be contradictory for skepticism to seek to translate itself into a new faith.

God isn't afraid of our doubts; He's way more concerned when we fake it.

You cannot be a man of faith unless you know how to doubt.

If your faith is threatened by something that's true, then it wasn't much of a faith to begin with, was it?

It would be the height of absurdity to label ignorance tempered by humility "faith"! (Institutio III.2.3)

Skepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.

Doubtful prayer is no prayer at all.

I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.

Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.

Action will furnish belief,-but will that belief be the true one? This is the point, you know.

The agnostic does not simply say, "l do not know." He goes another step, and he says, with great emphasis, that you do not know. He insists that you are trading on the ignorance of others, and on the fear of others. He is not satisfied with saying that you do not know, -- he demonstrates that you do not know, and he drives you from the field of fact -- he drives you from the realm of reason -- he drives you from the light, into the darkness of conjecture -- into the world of dreams and shadows, and he compels you to say, at last, that your faith has no foundation in fact.

He who thinks half-heartedly will not believe in God; but he who really thinks has to believe in God.

Though as he'd say, what is 'belief' but a willingness to suspend the negatives?

The path to holiness lies through questioning everything.

There is no faith, without a critical mind

I don't want to believe. I want to know.

Faith can move mountains; true: mountains of stupidity.

Credulity as a character trait is encouraged in every child who grows up with religious training, which invariably insists on the virtue of blind faith and the sinfulness of doubting and questioning.

Every science in a certain degree starts from faith, and, on the contrary, faith, which does not lead to science, is mistaken faith or superstition, but real, genuine faith it is not.

He who shall teach the child to doubtThe rotting grave shall ne'er get out.