"Well, I shall tell you. My thesis is this, I want you to believe." "To believe what?" "To believe in things that you cannot."

To believe is to be happy; to doubt is to be wretched. To believe is to be strong. Doubt cramps energy. Belief is power. Only so far as a man believes strongly, mightily, can he act cheerfully, or do any thing that is worth the doing.

Belief and doubt are living attitudes, and involve conduct on our part. Our only way, for example, of doubting, or refusing to believe, that a certain thing is, is continuing to act as if it were not.

To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.

It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative; it is not till the second or third thought that doubt begins. Belief is so vital and necessary that one would say the tendency was made strong at the perpetual risk of extra belief and superstition; it were better to believe too much than not enough. Hence mankind have always believed too much, as if to make sure that the anchor hold. To believe just enough, to free his mind from all cant and from all illusion, and see things just as in themselves they are, is the aim of the philosopher or of the true skeptic.

"He respected the power of faith, the benevolence of churches, the strength religion gave so many people . . . and yet, for him, the one intellectual suspension of disbelief that was imperative if one were truly going to "believe" had always proved too big an obstacle for his academic mind. "I want to believe," he heard himself say."

To believe with certainty we must begin with doubting.

I show you doubt, to prove that faith exists.

I want you to believe...to believe in things that you cannot.

I think maybe it is better to believe than not to believe. But I couldn't tell you why.

Unbelief is as much of a choice as belief is. What makes it in many ways more appealing is that whereas to believe in something requires some measure of understanding and effort, not to believe doesn't require much of anything at all.

"Even if I say something, do not believe this nonsense, but do not disbelieve it either. Just see, "Someone is willing to sit in front of so many people and talk absolute nonsense, something that is totally absurd. Let me see what this is about." If you keep that much openness, the possibility is alive in your life. If you believe it, you will kill it. If you disbelieve it, you will kill it."

To believe is to know that one believes, and to know that one believes is no longer to believe.

Willing Suspension of Disbelief