Raymond Holliwell 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.

Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude toward reality. After all, if it's there it doesn't require your belief- and if it's not there why should you believe in it?

He was guided by what he saw rather than by what he wanted to believe.

No amount of belief makes something a fact.

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

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

Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence".

Seeing is not believing - it is only seeing.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

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

I did not write half of what I saw, for I knew I would not be believed

Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt.

There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

Proof tells us where to concentrate our doubts.

I have learned that it is just as well to avoid even the appearance of something which you prefer not to have published as a fact! So many things are published as facts in any case which have no foundation in them whatsoever, that I don't suppose it really matters! For fair minded people usually wait until they verify a statement before they believe it, and those who believe it without verification are the ones who want to believe it!

Happily I had very early learned the fallacy of building much on logic and verbal argument. Single sets of truths I knew to be as little conclusive in theology as in physics; and, in one as in the other, no theory to be worth anything, however plausibly backed up with Scripture texts or facts, which was not gathered bona fide from the analysis of all the attainable phenomena, and verified wherever possible by experiment.

Doubt, indulged and cherished, is in danger of becoming denial; but if honest, and bent on thorough investigation, it may soon lead to full establishment of the truth.

I go with what I know and what I see, and I believe in reality.

You have to keep your mind as wide-open as your eyes, because almost nothing is what it seems.

The first lesson about trusting your senses is: don't. Just because you believe something to be true, just because you know it's true, that doesn't mean it is true.

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.