“5426. We are apt to believe what we wish for.”
Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
“What ardently we wish we soon believe.”
Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night VII, Line 1311.
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Edward Young110
English poet 1683–1765Related quotes
François de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680) French author of maxims and memoirs
Ce qui nous fait croire si facilement que les autres ont des défauts, c'est la facilité que l'on a de croire ce qu'on souhaite.
Variant translation: What makes us believe so easily that others have faults is the ease with which we believe what we hope for.
Maxim 25 from the Manuscrit de Liancourt.
Later Additions to the Maxims
“What we need is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite.”
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet
This was not Wordsworth's viewpoint at all. The words are in fact those of Bertrand Russell in his Sceptical Essays (1928), p. 157.
Misattributed
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet
Source: Julian and Maddalo http://www.bartleby.com/139/shel115.html (1819), l. 14
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer
Social Dreaming of the Frin in David G. Hartwell (ed.) Year's Best Fantasy 3, p. 172 (Originally published at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magazine_of_Fantasy_%26_Science_Fiction October/November 2002)
“We are not what happened to us,
we are what we wish to become.”
C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology
“God knows how ardently I wish I had ten lives”
John Herschel (1792–1871) English mathematician, astronomer, chemist and photographer
In a letter to Charles Babbage, as quoted in The Shadow of the Telescope: A Biography of John Herschel by Günther Buttmann, p. 14
“We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe.”
John Henry Newman (1801–1890) English cleric and cardinal
Letter to Mrs William Froude, 27 June 1848.