Creed

A creed is a statement which indicates, expresses, formulates or formalizes a set of beliefs, especially those deemed religious or political.

• Vain are the thousand creeds
  That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;
  Worthless as withered weeds,
  Or idle froth amid the boundless main,

  To waken doubt in one
  Holding so fast by Thine infinity;
  So surely anchored on
  The stedfast rock of immortality.

  • Emily Brontë, in No Coward Soul Is Mine (1848).

• The character in religion determines the creed. Character has been defined "the educated will." But the will — the conscious, personal will — is not the only factor in this product: there is something in it of the radical self. And something of the radical self there is in every creed which is genuine, and not mere subscription to the placita of a Church. The true creed of a man is his character confessed.
  • Frederic Henry Hedge, Reason in religion (Introduction)

• Followers of creeds
  Place their confidence in views.
  I don't approve of their teachings;
  They are not skilled in the Dhamma.
  • Sisupacala articulating the teaching of Gautama Buddha in Samyutta Nikaya 1.545 p. 228

• I care nothing for creeds. I am not concerned with any one's religious belief. But I would have men think for themselves. If we do not, we can only abandon one superstition to take up another, and it may be a worse one. It is as bad for a man to think that he can know nothing as to think he knows all.
  • Henry George, in A Perplexed Philosopher : Being An Examination of Mr. Herbert Spencer's Various Utterances on the Land Question, with some Incidental Reference to his Synthetic Philosophy (1892), Conclusion: The Moral of this Examination.

• The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.
  • John Stuart Mill, in Utilitarianism (1863), Ch. 2.

• I have a very simple creed: that life and joy and beauty are better than dusty death.
  • Bertrand Russell, in a speech on his ninetieth birthday (18 May 1962), quoted in The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 3 (Little, Brown, 1967), p. 169.

• So many gods, so many creeds,
  So many paths that wind and wind,
  While just the art of being kind
  Is all the sad world needs.
  • Ella Wheeler Wilcox, in The World's Need (1896).

• Dorian Gray ... never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night.
  • Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ch. 11, p. 106

• I am not going to question your opinions. I am not going to meddle with your belief. I am not going to dictate to you mine. All that I say is, examine; enquire. Look into the nature of things. Search out the ground of your opinions, the for and the against. Know why you believe, understand what you believe, and possess a reason for the faith that is in you…
  But your spiritual teachers caution you against enquiry — tell you not to read certain books; not to listen to certain people; to beware of profane learning; to submit your reason, and to receive their doctrines for truths. Such advice renders them suspicious counsellors. By their own creed you hold your reason from their God. Go! ask them why he gave it.
  • Frances Wright, in A Course of Popular Lectures (1829), Lecture III : Of the more Important Divisions and Essential Parts of Knowledge

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Creed

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