“5426. We are apt to believe what we wish for.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
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Thomas Fuller (writer) 420
British physician, preacher, and intellectual 1654–1734Related quotes
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.”
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
“Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.”
Book III, Ch. 11. Of Cripples
Essais (1595), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Source: Julian and Maddalo http://www.bartleby.com/139/shel115.html (1819), l. 14
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.”
“We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe.”
Letter to Mrs William Froude, 27 June 1848.