“Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire.”
As quoted in Subcontact : Slap the Face of Fear and Wake Up Your Subconscious (2001) by Dian Benson, p. 149
Variant: Everyone believes very easily whatever he fears or desires.
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Jean De La Fontaine 47
French poet, fabulist and writer. 1621–1695Related quotes

Attributed to Kafka in Ambiguous Spaces (2008) by NaJa & deOstos (Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo de Ostos), p. 7, and a couple other publications since, this is actually from Report to Greco (1965) by Nikos Kazantzakis, p. 434
Misattributed

As quoted in Self-Motivation Through Risk Taking! : Are You Leading Or Do You Wither with Problems? (2005) by M. Nadarajan Munisamy

“I believe that if everyone would follow what they want it would be a very different world.”
Stated in "Authority Magazine by Yitzi Weiner", Medium.com (Dec 12, 2019) https://medium.com/authority-magazine/rising-star-giovanni-morassutti-never-take-it-personally-it-is-part-of-the-business-95c911201d09.

Speech to the Young Conservative Conference in Eastbourne (13 February 1977), quoted in The Times (14 February 1977), p. 3
Leader of the Opposition

"On Three Ways of Writing for Children" (1952) — in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1967), p. 25
Context: Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.