“That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge , book Biographia Literaria

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XIV

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge 220

English poet, literary critic and philosopher 1772–1834

Lionel Trilling (1905–1975) American academic

"The Novel Alive or Dead," A Gathering of Fugitives: New Essays (1956)

“Since the eighteenth century the immense expansion of the worlds wealth has come about as a result of a correspondingly immense expansion of credit, which in turn has demanded increasingly stupendous suspensions of disbelief.”

Lewis H. Lapham (1935) American journalist

Source: Money And Class In America (1989), Chapter 8, Holy Dread, p. 197-198

“Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Of Love and Other Demons

Source: Of Love and Other Demons

“The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien book On Fairy-Stories

On Fairy-Stories (1939)
Context: The story-maker proves a successful 'sub-creator'. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed.

“Question: What is the opposite of faith?

Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief.

Doubt.”

Salman Rushdie book The Satanic Verses

Source: The Satanic Verses

“The paramount relation between poetry and painting today, between modern man and modern art, is simply this: that in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost. Men feel that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith: the reigning prince.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value

“Miracles come in moments. Be ready and willing.”

Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer

“Alienation is the most common state of the knowledgeable movie audience, and though it has the peculiar rewards of low connoisseurship, a miser’s delight in small favors, we long to be surprised out of it — not to suspension of disbelief nor to a Brechtian kind of alienation, but to pleasure, something a man can call good without self-disgust.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

“What the poet has in mind . . . is that poetic value is an intrinsic value. It is not the value of knowledge. It is not the value of faith. It is the value of imagination.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
Context: What the poet has in mind... is that poetic value is an intrinsic value. It is not the value of knowledge. It is not the value of faith. It is the value of imagination. The poet tries to exemplify it, in part as I have tried to exemplify it here, by identifying it with an imaginative activity that diffuses itself throughout our lives.

“The chief good is the suspension of the judgment, which tranquillity of mind follows like its shadow.”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

Pyrrho, 11.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 9: Uncategorized philosophers and Skeptics

“That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge 220

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