Life & Wisdom Quote by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Tennyson is doing something sly with the phrase "Believe me", a casual, almost conversational plea that instantly lowers the grand temperature of "creeds". It’s not a thunderclap of atheism; it’s a Victorian poet nudging religious certainty off its pedestal by contrasting it with the frail, human act of trust. The line (more fully known as "There lives more faith in honest doubt, / Believe me, than in half the creeds") turns the expected hierarchy upside down: doubt, typically treated as spiritual failure, becomes the more credible form of belief.

The intent is less to demolish religion than to criticize its performance. "Half the creeds" lands like a side-eye at institutional piety: doctrines repeated because they’re inherited, socially rewarded, or intellectually convenient. Tennyson’s wager is that a person who doubts honestly is still in contact with the moral seriousness that creeds can anesthetize. Faith, in this framing, isn’t a badge; it’s a risk.

Context matters. Tennyson is writing in a century rattled by geology, biblical criticism, and the early tremors of evolutionary thinking - an era when old certainties were being audited in public. The subtext is pastoral as much as philosophical: he’s offering permission to those who can’t force themselves into tidy conviction. The line works because it’s both rebuke and consolation, suggesting that sincerity beats orthodoxy, and that inner struggle may be closer to real belief than rehearsed answers.