An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has been formed by the labours and struggles of our forefathers, which enables us to breathe amid the various and complex circumstances of our life.
William Kingdon Clifford
belief circumstances life
If I steal money from any person, there may be no harm done from the mere transfer of possession; he may not feel the loss, or it may prevent him from using the money badly. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself dishonest.
wrongs money man help
Namely, we have no right to believe a thing true because everybody says so unless there are good grounds for believing that some one person at least has the means of knowing what is true, and is speaking the truth so far as he knows it.
rights truth
This sense of power is the highest and best of pleasures when the belief on which it is founded is a true belief, and has been fairly earned by investigation.
belief power
A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions.
belief action experience
To consider only one other such witness: the followers of the Buddha have at least as much right to appeal to individual and social experience in support of the authority of the Eastern saviour.
rights experience
Every rustic who delivers in the village alehouse his slow, infrequent sentences, may help to kill or keep alive the fatal superstitions which clog his race.
race help
Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every man who has speech of his fellows. A awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create the world in which posterity will live.
belief posterity man help
Our lives our guided by that general conception of the course of things which has been created by society for social purposes.
purpose society
The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.
wrongs danger society
The harm which is done by credulity in a man is not confined to the fostering of a credulous character in others, and consequent support of false beliefs.
belief man character
He who truly believes that which prompts him to an action has looked upon the action to lust after it, he has committed it already in his heart.
action
When an action is once done, it is right or wrong for ever; no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that.
rights wrongs failure action
Nor is it that truly a belief at all which has not some influence upon the actions of him who holds it.
belief action
No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe.
duty obscurity simplicity mind
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