“It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.”
Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism
“People needed to believe in gods, if only because it was so hard to believe in people.”
— Terry Pratchett, book Pyramids
Source: Pyramids
Last update Sept. 29, 2023. History
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Terry Pratchett796
English author 1948–2015Related quotes
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author
Source: Mysteries (1978), p. 125
Context: No matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity. Expressed in a sentence, Fort's principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) Polish-born Jewish-American author
Source: The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer
“When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist
This quotation actually comes from page 211 of Émile Cammaerts' book The Laughing Prophet : The Seven Virtues and G. K. Chesterton (1937) in which he quotes Chesterton as having Father Brown say, in "The Oracle of the Dog" (1923): "It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense." Cammaerts then interposes his own analysis between further quotes from Father Brown: "'It's drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it's coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition.' The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything: 'And a dog is an omen and a cat is a mystery.'" Note that the remark about believing in anything is outside the quotation marks — it is Cammaerts. The correct attribution was reportedly first traced by Pasquale Accardo. http://www.chesterton.org/ceases-to-worship/ It was also credited to Nigel Rees (as cited in First Things, 1997). http://books.google.com/books?id=NuQnAAAAYAAJ&q=%22The+first+effect+of+not+believing+in+God+is+to+believe+in+anything%22&dq=%22The+first+effect+of+not+believing+in+God+is+to+believe+in+anything%22&hl=en&ei=PSzcTvewIefx0gHqmrj0DQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAQ <br class="br">Misattributed
Craig Groeschel (1967) American priest
It – How Churches and Leaders Can Get It and Keep It (2008, Zondervan)
John Von Neumann (1903–1957) Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath
Remark made by von Neumann as keynote speaker at the first national meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1947, as mentioned by Franz L. Alt at the end of "Archaeology of computers: Reminiscences, 1945--1947", Communications of the ACM, volume 15, issue 7, July 1972, special issue: Twenty-fifth anniversary of the Association for Computing Machinery, p. 694.