Life & Wisdom Quote by Ralph Hodgson

Faith runs ahead of proof in Hodgson's line, and that reversal is the point. "Some things have to be believed to be seen" flips the sturdy Enlightenment promise that evidence produces conviction. Here, conviction is the instrument that makes certain evidence legible at all. Hodgson, a poet who wrote in an era jittery with modernity's shocks (industrial speed, new sciences, disenchanted cities), is staking out poetry's jurisdiction: not the measurable world, but the felt one. He suggests that perception isn't a neutral camera; it's a selective, hungry organ trained by what we already grant as possible.

The intent is quietly polemical. It's a defense of imagination and spiritual receptivity against the modern temptation to dismiss anything that can't be audited. The subtext: skepticism can be a kind of self-fulfilling blindness. If you refuse the premise that wonder, grace, or meaning might exist, you won't notice the fragile evidence of them when they arrive - the faint pattern, the almost-coincidence, the human gesture that doesn't "prove" anything yet changes the temperature of a life.

What makes the line work is its compact paradox and its passive construction. "Have to" implies necessity, not preference: some truths require a wager. And "be seen" stays deliberately vague, letting the reader supply the object - love, art, God, justice, even one's own potential. It's not an argument so much as a dare: test how much of reality your worldview is allowing you to perceive.