All Quotes

A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions. ”

An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has been formed by the labours and struggles of our forefathers, which enables us to breathe amid the various and complex circumstances of our life. ”

To consider only one other such witness: the followers of the Buddha have at least as much right to appeal to individual and social experience in support of the authority of the Eastern saviour. ”

Nor is it that truly a belief at all which has not some influence upon the actions of him who holds it. ”

He who truly believes that which prompts him to an action has looked upon the action to lust after it, he has committed it already in his heart. ”

When an action is once done, it is right or wrong for ever; no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that. ”

We may always depend on it that algebra, which cannot be translated into good English and sound common sense, is bad algebra. ”

In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. ”

Namely, we have no right to believe a thing true because everybody says so unless there are good grounds for believing that some one person at least has the means of knowing what is true, and is speaking the truth so far as he knows it. ”

This sense of power is the highest and best of pleasures when the belief on which it is founded is a true belief, and has been fairly earned by investigation. ”