What is wanted is not the will-to-believe, but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite.
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.
Faith in a better than that which appears, is no less required by art than by religion.
Now God be praised, that to believing souls,
Gives light in darkness, comfort in despair!
God comes down in the rain,
And the crop grows tall—
This is the country faith,
And the best of all.
Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.