
“5426. We are apt to believe what we wish for.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night VII, Line 1311.
“5426. We are apt to believe what we wish for.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
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
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.”
“God knows how ardently I wish I had ten lives”
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.”
Letter to Mrs William Froude, 27 June 1848.