Quotes About Belief

If a man, said Epictetus, opposes evident truths, it is not easy to find arguments by which we shall make him change his opinion. But this does not arise either from the man's strength or the teacher's weakness; for when the man, though he has been confuted, is hardened like a stone, how shall we then be able to deal with him by argument?

It is not the events but our viewpoint toward events that is the determining factor. We ought to be more concerned about removing wrong thoughts from the mind than removing tumors and abscesses from the body.

So when someone assents to a false proposition, be sure that they did not want to give their assent, since, as Plato says, 'Every soul is deprived of the truth against its will.'47 [5] They simply mistook for true something false.

has any of you such power as Socrates had, in all his intercourse with men, of winning them over to his own convictions?

Anytus and Meletus can kill me, but they cannot harm me,'50 he says, and: 'If it pleases the gods, so be it.

if you know you are in the right, why fear those who misjudge you?

The most serious misfortune for a busy man who is overwhelmed by his possessions is, that he believes men to be his friends when he himself is not a friend to them, and that he deems his favours to be effective in winning friends, although, in the case of certain men, the more they owe, the more they hate.

Epictetus] believes that God gave man the means to fulfill all his obligations; that these means are within his power, that happiness is attained through what we are capable of, this being the reason God gave them to us. Our mind cannot be forced to believe what is false, nor our will compelled to love something that makes it unhappy. These two powers are therefore free, and it is through them that we can become perfect.

If you worked hard, believed in what you did, and stayed the course, then success and recognition would follow.

and following your ideals is the only thing worth dying for.

Limbaji grinned widely and reached for a stone. "But this is what different religions mean," he said, placing the stone on the ground. "God is for all men, he is always the same. There is only one. And all men finally go to the same God." He drew lines toward the stone in the dust. "But there are different roads." From

If heaven may be found here and now, then heaven cannot be merely found in the absence of struggle as most of us assume, but in the very heart of our struggles. If Jesus' message is true, then our deepest challenges may offer our most profound opportunities. Heaven is found in the Dark Wood!

It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.

To be fully alive is to feel that everything is possible.

The enemy—the indispensible devil of every mass movement—is omnipresent. He plots both outside and inside the ranks of the faithful. It is his voice that speaks through the mouth of the dissenter, and the deviationists are his stooges. If anything goes wrong within the movement, it is his doing. It is the sacred duty of the true believer to be suspicious. He must be constantly on the lookout for saboteurs, spies and traitors.

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.

Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Marx a Marxist.

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a God or not. The atheist is a religious person. He believes in atheism as though it were a new religion.

If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable.

The radical and the reactionary loathe the present. They see it as an aberration and a deformity. Both are ready to proceed ruthlessly and recklessly with the present, and both are hospitable to the idea of self-sacrifice.

The impression somehow prevails that the true believer, particularly the religious individual, is a humble person. The truth is the surrendering and humbling of the self breed pride and arrogance. The true believer is apt to see himself as one of the chosen, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a prince disguised in meekness, who is destined to inherit the earth and the kingdom of heaven too. He who is not of his faith is evil; he who will not listen will perish.

Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.

The conservatism of a religion - it's orthodoxy - is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap.