Useful Belief Quotes & Sayings

A belief is not true simply because it is useful. — Henri Frederic Amiel

A belief is not true because it is useful — Henri Frederic Amiel

A comprehensive utopia may be out of reach, but the effort to realise it shapes the world for the better all the same. The belief may not be true, but it is useful. Belief makes the world. — Rebecca Solnit

...a useful coorective to the triumphalism of some scientists. For example, Maddox went out of his way to emphasise the provisional nature of much physics - he referred to black holes as 'putative' only, to the search for theories of everything as 'the embodiment of a belief, even a hope' and stated that the reason why the quantum gravity project is 'becalmed' right now is because 'the problem to be solved is not yet fully understood' and that the idea that the universe began with a Big Bang 'will be found to be false'. — Peter Watson

In practice, the goal of skepticism is not the discovery of truth, but the exposure of other people's errors. It plays a useful role in science, religion, scholarship, and common sense. But we need to remember that it is a weapon serving belief or self-interest; we need to be skeptical of skeptics. The more militant the skeptic, the stronger the belief. — Rupert Sheldrake

I envy no quality of the mind or intellect in others; not genius, power, wit, nor fancy; but, if I could choose what would be most delightful, and, I believe, most useful to me, I should prefer a firm religious belief to every other blessing. — Humphry Davy

If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement. — Orson Scott Card

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me. — Bertrand Russell

[Religious belief is] outmoded and ridiculous. [Belief in gods was a] worn out but once useful crutch in mankind's journey towards truth. We consider the time has come for that crutch to be abandoned.
It is a vacuous answer ... To say that 'God made the world' is simply a more or less sophisticated way of saying that we don't understand how the universe originated. A god, in so far as it is anything, is an admission of ignorance.
Religion utterly failed to provide an explanation of the biosphere other than that 'God made it all'. Then Darwin thundered over the horizon and in a few decades of observation and thought ... arrived at an answer.
I regard teaching religion as purveying lies. I came here today to de-corrupt you all. — Peter Atkins

There is no place in contemporary Karate-do for different schools. Some instructors, I know, claim to have invented new and unusual kata, and so they arrogate to themselves the right to be called founders of "schools". Indeed, I have heard myself and my colleagues referred to as the Shoto-kan school, but I strongly object to this attempt at classification. My belief is that all these "schools" should be amalgamated into one so that Karate-do may pursue and orderly and useful progress into man's future. — Gichin Funakoshi

Not to mention the fact that the belief in conspiracy theories is already a form of conspiracy theory in itself. It's to me not quite clear on what basis you would assume that one conspiracy is no conspiracy, and the others are. Capitalism drives on conspiracy theories as well: they believe in a certain power that creates a "free market" and that you can sit and grow forever on finite resources. This newspaper article obviously did not mean 'conspiracy theory' but 'urban legend', because the question if there are ufos landing on earth and whether you want to believe this seems to have little to do with conspiracy. And whether that is an urban legend worthy of belief is not undisputed. I think people who believe in such things are actually less illogical than people who believe housing associations are useful. — Martijn Benders

England is, after all, the land where children were beaten, wives and babies bashed, football hooligans crunch, and Miss Whip and Miss Lash ply their trade as nowhere else in the western world. Despite our belief [that] we are a 'gentle' people we have, in reality, a cruel and callous streak in our sweet natures, reinforced by a decadent puritan strain which makes some of us believe that suffering, whether useful or not, is a fit scourge to the wanton soul. — Colin MacInnes

I think a trillion dollars of student loans and a massive skills gap are precisely what happens to a society that actively promotes one form of education as the best course for the most people. I think the stigmas and stereotypes that keep so many people from pursuing a truly useful skill, begin with the mistaken belief that a four-year degree is somehow superior to all other forms of learning. — Mike Rowe

I am confident that those who believe in belief are wrong. That is, we no more need to preserve the myth of God in order to preserve a just and stable society than we needed to cling to the Gold Standard to keep our currency sound. It was a useful crutch, but we've outgrown it. Denmark, according to a recent study, is the sanest, healthiest, happiest, most crime-free nation in the world, and by and large the Danes simply ignore the God issue. We should certainly hope that those who believe in belief are wrong, because belief is waning fast, and the props are beginning to buckle. — Daniel Dennett

It's useful to be able to recognize whether you're on track or not. To have that belief, but also paranoia about am I tracking against my investment thesis. — Reid Hoffman

It's been very well demonstrated that our belief system effects how we behave and how we perform ... It also effects our lifestyle, so that if we don't believe that we can help ourselves, we probably cannot. If we don't believe that positive information is useful to our health and well being, it probably won't be. — Edgar Mitchell

We have no organ at all for knowledge, for truth: we know (or believe or imagine) precisely as much as may be useful in the interest of the human herd, the species: and even what is here called usefulness is in the end only a belief, something imagined and perhaps precisely that most fatal piece of stupidity by which we shall one day perish. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Even a nonbeliever might find it useful to model himself after God. Very useful, in fact. — Cormac McCarthy

Belief may serve as a useful stopgap measure in the absence of actual experience, but once you see ... [it] becomes unnecessary. — Steve Hagen

Don't try to be useful. Try to be yourself: that is enough & that makes all the difference. — Paulo Coelho

Civilization is always threatened from below, by patterns of belief and emotion that may once have been useful to our ancestors, but that are useful no longer. — Roger Scruton

For pragmatist philosophers such as these, a belief is valued as true because it is useful, because it works, because it brings tangible benefits to human beings and other creatures. Siddhattha Gotama's Four Noble Truths are "true" not because they correspond to something real somewhere, but because, when put into practice, they can enhance the quality of your life. In — Stephen Batchelor

It seems to me a fundamental dishonesty, and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity to hold a belief because you think it's useful and not because you think it's true. — Bertrand Russell

A Course in Miracles rightly points out that, whenever you are unhappy, there is the unconscious belief that the unhappiness "buys" you what you want. If "you" - the mind - did not believe that unhappiness works, why would you create it? The fact is, of course, that negativity does not work. Instead of attracting a desirable condition, it stops it from arising. Instead of dissolving an undesirable one, it keeps it in place. Its only "useful" function is that it strengthens the ego, and that is why the ego loves it. — Eckhart Tolle

Knowing that an asteroid is going to hit the earth is not really useful if you are not planning to launch missiles to knock it out of the sky. You have to work massively overtime on the belief that innovation or massive change is going to happen.' - Tom Martin, former VP of marketing — Heather Simmons

The point at which beliefs meet may be more significant, more useful to contemplate, than their sources. — John Mortimer

By patriotism is meant, not only spontaneous, instinctive love for one's own nation, and preference for it above all other nations, but also the belief that such love and preference are good and useful. — Leo Tolstoy

In adaptive terms, belief has been extraordinarily useful. It is, after all, by believing various propositions about the world that we predict events and consider the likely consequences of our actions. Beliefs are principles of action: whatever they may be at the level of the brain, they are processes by which our understanding (and misunderstanding) of the world is represented and made available to guide our behavior. — Sam Harris

Our democratic societies rest on a meritocratic worldview, or at any rate a meritocratic hope, by which I mean a belief in a society in which inequality is based more on merit and effort than on kinship and rents. This belief and this hope play a very crucial role in modern society, for a simple reason: in a democracy, the professed equality of rights of all citizens contrasts sharply with the very real inequality of living conditions, and in order to overcome this contradiction it is vital to make sure that social inequalities derive from rational and universal principles rather than arbitrary contingencies. Inequalities must therefore be just and useful to all, at least in the realm of discourse and as far as possible in reality as well. — Thomas Piketty

Of the contributions made during the essayist period three call for notice: Weismann deserves mention for his useful work in asking for the proof that "acquired characters" or, to speak more precisely, parental experience can really be transmitted to the offspring. The ocurrence of progressive adaptation by transmission of effects of use had seemed so natural to Darwin and his contemporaries that no proof of the physiological reality of the henomenon was thought necessary. Weismann's challenge revealed the utter inadequacy of the evidence on which the beliefs were based. They are doubtless isolated observations which may be interpreted as favouring the belief in these transmissions, but such meagre indications as exist are by general consent admitted to be too slight to be of much assistance in the attempt to understand how the more complex adaptive mechanisms arose. — William Bateson