Belief Revision Quotes

We choose what and how we believe, and our beliefs are tools that we then use to make things happen ... or not.

I'm totally open to changing my beliefs. I could grow up to be a total communist. I could grow up to be a Neocon. I'm looking to have my views challenged. I'm looking to be corrected.

Generally, people don't change their minds about fundamentally deeply held beliefs; it doesn't happen in an instant - it's a process.

So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You'd better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can't rearrange the universe.

If you can do one thing you thought was utterly impossible, it causes you to rethink your beliefs. Life is both subtler and more complex than some of us like to believe. So if you haven't done so already, review your beliefs and decide which ones you might change now and what you would change those beliefs to.

If the past is any guide our [current] beliefs will be wrong as our past beliefs have been wrong.

I also held that view for about 50 years, but lately I have been rethinking it and now believe I was wrong.

When you once see something as false which you have accepted as true, as natural, as human, then you can never go back to it.

Perception can be changed

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

Unlike Descartes, we own and use our beliefs of the moment, even in the midst of philosophizing, until by what is vaguely called scientific method we change them here and there for the better. Within our own total evolving doctrine, we can judge truth as earnestly and absolutely as can be, subject to correction, but that goes without saying.

When people try to use religion to address the natural world, science pushes back on it, and religion has to accommodate the results. Beliefs can be permanent, but beliefs can also be flexible. Personally, if I find out my belief is wrong, I change my mind. I think that's a good way to live.

When experience contradicts firmly held judgments of self-efficacy, people may not change their beliefs about themselves if the conditions of performance are such as to lead them to discount the import of the experience

There is nothing more powerful than a changed mind.

Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.

It science involves an intelligent and persistent endeavor to revise current beliefs so as to weed out what is erroneous, to add to their accuracy, and, above all, to give them such shape that the dependencies of the various facts upon one another may be as obvious as possible.

Reverend Hale is so interesting because at first he's like, "Oh, she's got the mark." Then by the end he's like, "You're all crazy."

There is a great difference between believing in something and believing in it again.

What could be more foolish than to base one's entire view of life on ideas that, however plausible at the time, now appear to be quite erroneous? And what would be more important than to find our true place in the universe by removing one by one these unfortunate vestiges of earlier beliefs?

I saw a Divine Being. I'm afraid I'm going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.

We're not aware of changing our minds even when we do change our minds. And most people, after they change their minds, reconstruct their past opinion - they believe they always thought that.

Whatever my current beliefs are, on any topic, they're all open to being changed by the right facts and the right evidence.

I'm fascinated by how you'll change your position so many times over a lifetime, but really what you're doing is occupying a series of positions on a landscape.

It's very hard for all of us, when we've committed ourselves to a particular interpretation, to change our minds.

I felt that my views and philosophies had been changed overnight. The philosophies that i had gladly carved in stone, recited and danced upon.