philosophical belief Quotes

Agnosticism is not properly described as a "negative" creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle which is as much ethical as intellectual.

I am not a logician. I am an existentialist. I believe in this meaningless, beautiful chaos of existence, and I am ready to go with it wherever it leads.

I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending.

I was born into Bolívar's labyrinth, and so I must believe in the hope of Rabelais' Great Perhaps.

There are only two kinds of people in the modern world who know what they are after. One, quite frankly, is the Communist. The other, equally frankly, is the convinced Christian. The rest of the world are amiable nonentities.

There was once a philosopher who said, 'I don't believe in God, but I fear him greatly.' That's about where I am.

I don't really believe in dialogue; I am too Nietzschean for that. We need to have a warrior conception of philosophy.

I am a religious person, although I am not a believer.

I gave up Christianity at about 14. Came back to it when getting on for 30. Not an emotional conversion; almost purely philosophical. I didn't want to. I'm not in the least a religious type. I want to be let alone, to feel I'm my own master; but since the facts seemed to be just the opposite, I had to give in.

An idea is something you have; an ideology is something that has you

... there are some who, believing that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds, and that to-morrow is necessarily better than to-day, may think that if culture is a good thing we shall infallibly be found to have more of it that we had a generation since; and that if we can be shown not to have more of it, it can be shown not to be worth seeking.

The highest court is in the end one's own conscience and conviction-that goes for you and for Einstein and every other physicist-and before any science there is first of all belief. For me, it is belief in a complete lawfulness in everything that happens.

I am a great believer rather than the popular scientific way of dealing with things that 'Nothing exists unless you can prove it'. I am pretty much the other way that pretty much anything can exist unless you can disprove it.

As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.

This dogma (the soul) has been present in human psychology from earliest antiquity. No one has ever touched the soul, or has seen one in a test tube, or has in any way come into a relationship with it as he has with the other objects of his daily experience.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief in denying them.

All ages of belief have been great; all of unbelief have been mean.

I don't quite see the 20th century as one of chaos. But I believe in certain inevitable outcomes of a materialist nature.