Quotes about Credulity

Confidence is a plant of slow growth in an aged bosom, youth is the season of credulity.

Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.

Faith is sometimes equated with credulity, but it can be so equated only when the profound mistake is made of thinking of faith as primarily a matter of intellectual assent. As the New Testament uses the word, faith is trust, acceptance, commitment, vision. It is not a belief in this or that creed, it is a quality which lies rather in the realm of intuition than the intellect. Faith has indeed an element of true simplicity; it is one of the qualities - perhaps the fundamental quality - of the child-like spirit without which no man can enter the Kingdom of God.

The only disadvantage of an honest heart is credulity.

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow, - attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.

Among the calamities of war may be numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates, and credulity encourages.

. . . There can be no doubt about faith and not reason being the ultima ratio. Even Euclid, who has laid himself as little open to the charge of credulity as any writer who ever lived, cannot get beyond this. He has no demonstrable first premise. He requires postulates and axioms which transcend demonstration, and without which he can do nothing. His superstructure indeed is demonstration, but his ground his faith. Nor again can he get further than telling a man he is a fool if he persists in differing from him. He says "which is absurd," and declines to discuss the matter further. Faith and authority, therefore, prove to be as necessary for him as for anyone else.

I prefer credulity to skepticism and cynicism, for there is more promise in almost anything than in nothing at all.

History shows that there is nothing so easy to enslave and nothing so hard to emancipate as ignorance, hence it becomes the double enemy of civilization. By its servility it is the prey of tyranny, and by its credulity it is the foe of enlightenment

The most positive men are the most credulous.

Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous.

Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us. Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny.

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

The characteristic of the present age is craving credulity.