A Quote by Shirley Jackson
It might be suggested, and not easily disproven that anything, no matter how exotic, can be believed by someone. On the other hand, abstract belief is largely impossible; it is the concrete, the actuality of the cup, the candle, the sacrificial stone, which hardens belief; the statue is nothing until it cries, the philosophy is nothing until the philosopher is martyred.
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I drifted into a career in academic philosophy because I couldn't see anything outside the academy that looked to be anything other than drudgery. But I wouldn't say I 'became a philosopher' until an early mid-life crisis forced me to confront the fact that, while 'philosophy' means 'love of wisdom', and 'wisdom' is the knowledge of how to live well, the analytic philosophy in which I had been trained seemed to have nothing to do with life.
Every man feels that perception gives him an invincible belief of the existence of that which he perceives; and that this belief is not the effect of reasoning, but the immediate consequence of perception. When philosophers have wearied themselves and their readers with their speculations upon this subject, they can neither strengthen this belief, nor weaken it; nor can they shew how it is produced. It puts the philosopher and the peasant upon a level; and neither of them can give any other reason for believing his senses, than that he finds it impossible for him to do otherwise.
There are some concrete ways to create a winning attitude. But nothing beats practicing it. When you prepare to win, belief comes easily.
Until the content of a belief is made clear, the appeal to accept the belief on faith is beside the point, for one would not know what one has accepted. The request for the meaning of a religious belief is logically prior to the question of accepting that belief on faith or to the question of whether that belief constitutes knowledge.
Sometimes you've got to #? believe in someone else's belief in you until your #? belief kicks in.
How miserable a solipsist is! It is rather senseless for him to even assert his belief in solipsism, for, on the one hand, if his belief is false it is like committing intellectual suicide, and, on the other hand, if his belief is true it is an act of intellectual insanity.
An idiot will do anything, no matter how stupid, because he is afraid of what everybody will think of him if he does nothing. A genius, on the other hand, is content to do nothing, no matter what people think, if he can’t find anything worth doing.
You cannot make a demand on your life that exceeds your belief about it. Your belief is creating a personal law. It’s not the truth, but a lie believed will act like a law until it’s neutralized.
We did not choose to believe that personal choice is the highest human virtue. Rather, we were taught, formed, forced to believe nothing is important in life other than that which we have personally chosen. The irony is that the belief that nothing is important in life other than that which we have personally chosen is a belief that we have not personally chosen! The supermarket and shopping mall have been our school.
Without self belief nothing can be accomplished. With it, nothing is impossible.
A philosopher may try to prove the truth of something he believed before he was a philosopher, but even if he succeeds, his belief never regain the untroubled character, and the settled place in his mind, which it had at first.
Nothing seems to me to be rarer today then genuine hypocrisy. I greatly suspect that this plant finds the mild atmosphere of our culture unendurable. Hypocrisy has its place in the ages of strong belief: in which even when one is compelled to exhibit a different belief one does not abandon the belief one already has.
I certainly respect the belief of the Hobby Lobby owners. On the other hand, they have no constitutional right to foist that belief on the hundreds and hundreds of women who work for them who don't share that belief.
If you have a belief and you come against an experience which the belief says is not possible, or, the experience is such that you have to drop the belief, what are you going to choose — the belief or the experience? The tendency of the mind is to choose the belief, to forget about the experience. That’s how you have been missing many opportunities when God has knocked at your door.
I shall not convert you at the end of my argument. I think the argument is sound. I hold that belief in God is not merely as reasonable as other belief, or even a little or infinitely more probably true than other belief; I hold rather that unless you believe in God you can logically believe in nothing else.
A belief is not a belief until you can visualize it, unless you can create a picture of it in your minds eye, especially if you have no doubts that reality can be - or is - possible.
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