Belief - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

There was the class of superstitious people; they are not content simply to ignore what is true, they also believe what is not true.

- Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon (1865), translated by Walter James Miller (1978)

Feeling is believing.

- Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884)

Of course she believed the blessed lie, for in times of extreme peril it is human to be optimistic.

- R. F. Starzl, ''The Planet of Despair'' (1931)

People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.

- Aldous Huxley, Brave NewWorld (1932)

People make mistakes in life through believing too much, but they have a damned dull time if they believe too little.

- James Hilton, Lost Horizon (1933)

The capacity of humans to believe in what seems to me highly improbable - from table tapping to the superiority of their children - has never been plumbed. Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)

I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.

- Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961), translated by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox (1970)

Disbelief is catching. It rubs off on people.

- Ray Bradbury, ''A Miracle of Rare Device'' (1962)

He hungered to believe in the marvelous. (Who doesn't?)

- Edgar Pangborn, ''The Children's Crusade'' (1974)

There must be few indeed who don't cherish a faith in some things, because all knowledge remains incomplete; even though faith is only the fantasy of things hoped for, the invention of things not seen. I have faith in the good will of myself and certain others, faith in the rightness of love and virtue and mercy. That faith will sustain me as it has in the past, while I live.

- Edgar Pangborn, ''The Children's Crusade'' (1974)

A personal god, a father-model, man needs that. Dave draws strength from it and we lean on him. Maybe leaders have to believe.

- James Tiptree, Jr., ''Houston, Houston, Do You Read?'' (1976)

An exaggerated and solemn respect always indicates a loss of faith.

- GeneWolfe, ''Seven American Nights'' (1978)

The truths, the great truths - and most of the lesser ones as well - they are unbearable for most men.We find our shield in faith. Your faith, my faith, any faith. It doesn't matter, so long as we believe, really and truly believe, in whatever lie we cling to. [. . .] They may believe in Christ or Buddha or Erika Stormjones, in reincarnation or immortality or nature, in the power of love or the platform of a political faction, but it all comes to the same thing. They believe. They are happy. It is the ones who have seen truth who despair, and kill themselves.

- George R. R. Martin, ''TheWay of Cross and Dragon'' (1979)

Some things were too hard to believe, however entertaining they might be to hear or read.

- Hal Clement, The Nitrogen Fix (1980)

In reduced circumstances you have to believe all kinds of things. I believe in thought transference now, vibrations in the ether, that sort of junk.

- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1986)

This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones we really believe, and those we never think to question.

- Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead (1986)

The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device. [. . .] Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

- Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987)

Belief is a force. It's a weak force, by comparison with gravity; when it comes to moving mountains, gravity wins every time. But it still exists.

- Terry Pratchett, Pyramids (1989)

It is always hard when reality intrudes on belief.

- Alan Dean Foster, CyberWay (1990)

Religious revivals have been endemic on the Number OneWorld ever since the gods retired and went to live in the sun. Nobody is exactly sure why. One view is that mankind has a desperate need to believe in something, preferably something so blatantly absurd that only blind, unquestioning faith 33 Belief will suffice

- for example, the belief which sprang up in the late nineteenth century and was still widely current in Jason Derry's time and which held that human beings were not in fact created at all but were somehow the descendants of bald, mutant monkeys. The other view is that there is never anything much on television during the summer.

- Tom Holt, Ye Gods! (1992)

To learn a belief without belief is to sing a song without the tune. A yielding, an obedience, a willingness to accept these notes as the right notes, this pattern as the true pattern, is the essential gesture of performance, translation, and understanding. The gesture need not be permanent, a lasting posture of the mind or heart; yet it is not false. It is more than the suspension of disbelief needed to watch a play, yet less than a conversion. It is a position, a posture in the dance.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling (2000)

Belief is the wound that knowledge heals, and death begins the Telling of our life.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling (2000)

Storm: Sometimes anger can help you survive. Nightcrawler: So can faith.

- Michael Dougherty, Dan Harris, and David Hayter, X2: X-Men United (film, 2003)