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When you aren't sincere you need to pretend, and by pretending you end up believing yourself; that's the basic principle of every faith.

— Alberto Moravia

Quando non si è sinceri bisogna fingere, a forza di fingere si finisce per credere; questo è il principio di ogni fede.

Original text (Italian)

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Faith

More quotes by Alberto Moravia

Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.

An uncertain evil causes anxiety because, at the bottom of one's heart, one goes on hoping till the last moment that it may not be true; a certain evil, on the other hand, instills, for a time, a kind of dreary tranquillity.

In the beginning was boredom, commonly called chaos. God, bored with boredom, created the earth, the sky, the waters, the animals, the plants, Adam and Eve; and the latter, bored in their turn in paradise, ate the forbidden fruit. God became bored with them and drove them out of Eden.

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Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

William James The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

Thomas Jefferson Letter to Peter Carr (1787)

I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them.

Colin Wilson Postscript to the Outsider (1967)

Love is the active, working principle in all true faith. It is its very soul, without which it is dead. "Faith works by love."

Jonathan Edwards Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Alberto Moravia (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.