I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
—Thomas Jefferson
I recently invented a new theory: ambitheism. This is the doctrine that God both does and doesn't exist. I have noticed that when I try to believe in God, I am filled with sudden moments of despair that God is absent, but when I try to be an atheist, I slowly come to believe in a divine will. Thus, I have concluded that both ideas are true. God simultaneously is and isn't.
—Michael Gorelick
A person who believes… that there is a whole of which one is part, and that in being a part, one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
It was quite incomprehensible to me… why in my evening prayers I should pray for human beings only. So when my mother had prayed with me and had kissed me goodnight, I used to add silently a prayer that I had composed myself for all living creatures. It ran thus: "O Heavenly Father, protect and bless all things that have breath; guard them from all evil, and let them sleep in peace. "
—Albert Schweitzer
The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
—H. L. Mencken
I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.
—Richard Feynman
We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.
—Samuel Johnson
True faith is belief in the reality of absolute values.
—William Ralph Inge
How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?
—Woody Allen
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
—Joseph Conrad
Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down.
—Natalie Goldberg
Contrary to general belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.
—Peter Ustinov
I believe in rules. Sure I do. If there weren't any rules, how could you break them?
—Leo Durocher
I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.
—Marcel Duchamp
Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.
—Thomas Wolfe