Believe! In witticisms about belief.

I learn a lot in the bathroom, thanks largely to Funny Times – which habitually resides in a drawer within convenient reach of my white pondering place.

The May issue features quotes about belief in the Curmudgeon column (using content from "The Big Curmudgeon").

I liked these quotations, because I believe them. The others obviously are wrong, so I left them out.

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The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. – George Bernard Shaw

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. – H.L. Mencken

The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums. – G.K. Chesterton

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind. – H.L. Mencken

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones. – Bertrand Russell

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. – Voltaire

Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand. – Mark Twain

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong. – Bertrand Russell

We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant. – Daniel J. Boorstin

Not knowing is much more interesting than believing an answer which might be wrong. – Richard Feynman

The final delusion is the belief that one has lost all delusions. – Maurice Chapelain

Certitude is not the test of certainty. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand. – Kurt Vonnegut

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Nice quotes. But an obvious omission is the best one-sentence metaphysics ever written. At least, that's what I believe.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. – Philip K. Dick

Comments

[tucson]

a few sayings:

*Losing oneself in what is here is finding that 'here' is what one is.

*My absence as a conceptual object is my presence as inconceivable subject.

*Disciples and devotees..What are most of them doing? Worshipping the tea pot instead of drinking the tea!

*We are conditioned to suppose that what we are is the presence of what is present, which is the absence of what is absent. But when we apperceive what we are we find that what we are is the absence of what is present, and the presence of what is absent.

*What you are looking for is what is looking.

*There cannot be either self nor other for there is no self that is not other nor any other that is not self.

*Apparently absent in relativity, I am present absolutely.

*Enlightenment, instead of altering our state, discloses what we have always been.

*We are told to destroy the ego, beat it down and smother it. This will certainly keep us busy, but don't you have to find it first? Isn't there a saying about catching your goose before you cook it? The great difficulty is there isn't one.

*The seeker is the found and the found is the seeker as soon as it is apperceived that there is no time.

*Perceptions employed as a base for building up positive concepts are the origin of all ignorance. Apperceiving that there is nothing to perceive is deliverance.

*Objectifying what is functioning while objectifying is all that 'bondage' could be.

[tucson]

I DO NOT BELIEVE

I do not BELIEVE in the existence of any object, in the actual existence of anything perceived by the senses that can be interpreted conceptually as an object..including that of any dream, vision, hallucination or of any other living experience in a sober, sleeping or drugged state.

I do not BELIEVE in the existence of any objective person or entity that might be interpreted as writing these lines, nor in the factual existence of the words with which they are written.

Why?

I do not BELIEVE that whatever appears to be subjected to duration in time or extension in space could be other than just an appearance in mind.

Then who is responsible for these statements?

I am responsible, as I am responsible for every appearance. And every other being whether man, bird, skunk or ant can say it also or know it without being able to say it.

Because in the void of Basic Nature, so it is. And I, whoever says it, am the immanence phenomenally whose transcendence noumenally is what I am.