Generally, the theories we believe we call facts, and the facts we disbelieve we call theories.

—Felix Cohen

In religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

 —Mark Twain

This is how humans are: we question all our beliefs, except for the ones we really believe, and those we never thing to question.

 —Orson Scott Card

Holding on to beliefs limits our experience of life. That doesn’t mean that beliefs or ideas are the problem. The stubborn attitude of insisting things be a particular way; the way we cling to our beliefs and thoughts: these are the problems.

 —Pema Chodron

It is better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so.

 —Josh Billings

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

 —H.L. Mencken

Human beings are, perhaps, never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.

 —Laurens van der Post

Martyrdom has always been proof of the intensity, never the correctness, of a belief.

 —Arthur Schweitzer

It is easier to believe than to doubt.                              —E.D. Martin

One comes to believe whatever one repeats to oneself sufficiently often, whether the statement be true or false. It comes to be the dominating thought of one’s mind.

—Robert Collier

A belief is not mere an idea the mind possesses; it is an idea that possesses the mind.

 —Robert Oxton Bolt

What a person believes is not as important as how a person believes.

 —Timothy Virkkala

Man is what he believes.                                           —Anton Chekhov