Faith Quotes

Faith here means both belief in God and belief in anything at all, and the page does not try to separate them. Abraham Joshua Heschel is the most-quoted author. After him come Martin Luther, Shakespeare, Jesus and Paul, along with a good number of sceptics.

The sceptics are often the more quotable. H. L. Mencken, in Prejudices, Third Series (1922): “Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.” Douglas Adams, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979), asks whether it is not enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe there are fairies at the bottom of it. Montaigne, in the Essais: “Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.”

Two popular lines are flagged as misattributed: the one about the mind conceiving and believing, credited to W. Clement Stone, and the one about the NHS lasting as long as people have the faith to fight for it, credited to Aneurin Bevan.

Random quote on Faith

Most quoted on faith:

Faith is a vice pretending to be a virtue, its lies and errors and frothy nonsense deluding us and distracting us from action. There's no salvation in wishful thinking, only inertia. Faith is the enemy of reason. The one thing every single one of us here must be united in despising is faith. It's the barren refuge of the vacuous, the fearful, the frauds, and the obstacles to accomplishment.

PZ Myers

The fact that believers have found joy and peace in believing gives us the right to say that the doctrine is a comfortable doctrine, and pleasant to the soul; but it does not give us the right to say that it is true. And the question which our conscience is always asking about that which we are tempted to believe is not, "Is it comfortable and pleasant?" but, "Is it true?"

William Kingdon Clifford The Ethics of Belief (1877)

I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance. That is my religion, and every day I am sorely, grossly, heinously and deeply offended, wounded, mortified and injured by a thousand different blasphemies against it. When the fundamental canons of truth, honesty, compassion and decency are hourly assaulted by fatuous bishops, pompous, illiberal and ignorant priests, politicians and prelates, sanctimonious censors, self-appointed moralists and busy-bodies, what recourse of ancient laws have I? None whatever. Nor would I ask for any. For unlike these blistering imbeciles my belief in my religion is strong and I know that lies will always fail and indecency and intolerance will always perish.

Stephen Fry

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.

Eric Hoffer The True Believer (1951)

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

Maya Angelou The Truth in Words (2005)