"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it."
— Oscar Wilde

"I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."
— Neil Gaiman (American Gods)

"Do not think that love in order to be genuine has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired. Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies."
— Mother Teresa

"Some things have to be believed to be seen."
— Madeleine L'Engle (Many Waters)

"You must remember, my dear lady, the most important rule of any successful illusion: First, the people must want to believe in it."
— Libba Bray (The Sweet Far Thing)

"The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is."
— Allan Bloom

"People believe, thought Shadow. It's what people do. They believe, and then they do not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjuration. People populate the darkness; with ghost, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe; and it is that rock solid belief, that makes things happen."
— Neil Gaiman (American Gods)

"Believing takes practice."
— Madeleine L'Engle (A Wrinkle in Time)

"You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become?"
— Terry Pratchett (Hogfather)

"This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek.""
— Terry Tempest Williams (Leap)

"That's the thing about magic; you've got to know it's still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you."
— Charles de Lint

"If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?"
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

"It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey."
— Søren Kierkegaard

"Every mental act is composed of doubt and belief,
but it is belief that is the positive, it is belief
that sustains thought and holds the world together."
— Søren Kierkegaard

"Man is what he believes."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"If you were an atheist, Birbal," the Emperor challenged his first minister, "what would you say to the true believers of all the great religions of the world?" Birbal was a devout Brahmin from Trivikrampur, but he answered unhesitatingly, "I would say to them that in my opinion they were all atheists as well; I merely believe in one god less than each of them." "How so?" the Emperor asked. "All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own," said Birbal. "And so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none."

-- From "The Shelter of the World"
— Salman Rushdie (The Enchantress of Florence)

"I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief."
— Gerry Spence (How to Argue & Win Every Time: At Home, At Work, In Court, Everywhere, Everyday)

"The soul is like an uninhabited world
that comes to life only when
God lays His head
against us.
"
— Thomas Aquinas

"We are willing to believe anything other than the truth."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

"(reply to the Diet of Worms) Since your majesty and your lordships desire a simple reply, I will answer without horns or teeth. Unless I am convinced by Scripture and by plain reason (I do not believe in the authority of either popes or councils by themselves, for it is plain that they have often erred and contradicted each other) in those Scriptures that I have presented, for my conscience is captive to the Word of God, I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand; I can do no other. God help me. Amen."
— Martin Luther

"It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window."
— Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason)

"We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe."
— John Henry Newman

"I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions."
— Robert Anton Wilson

"Every time a child says 'I don't believe in fairies' there is a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead."
— J.M. Barrie

"What do I believe that I deserve in this life?"
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"Nonsense is that which does not fit into the prearranged patterns which we have superimposed on reality...Nonsense is nonsense only when we have not yet found that point of view from which it makes sense."
— Gary Zukav

"And one more thing: you still believe that man can be good. If that weren't the case, you wouldn't have invented all this nonsense to convince yourself otherwise."
— Paulo Coelho (The Devil and Miss Prym: A Novel of Temptation)

"There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group."
— Erich Fromm (Psychoanalysis and Religion: The Terry Lectures Series)

"Sometimes I doubt and sometimes I believe. And I like not making myself believe when I am doubting, and not making myself doubt when I am believing. Surely neither God nor Accident need my consistency."
— Hugh Prather (I Touch the Earth, the Earth Touches Me)

"If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative."
— Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without certainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of Gad, and not in God himself."
— Unamuno

"Belief creates behaviors."
— Neale Donald Walsch (The New Revelations: A Conversation with God)

"Is it folly to believe in something that is intangible? After all, some of the greatest intangibles are Love, Hope, and Wonder.

Another is Deity.

The choice to be a fool is yours."
— Vera Nazarian

"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."
— Eric Hoffer (The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements)

"I think it's important that people stand up for what they believe in."
— Steve Nash

"We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

""It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window.""
— Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason)

"With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another."
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

"A man that believes in signs is going to spend most of his time lost."
— Donald Hays (The Dixie Association)

"It is not by believing but by doubting that one can attain to the truth, which is ever changing form and condition."
— Augusto Roa Bastos (I, the Supreme)