Quotes About Belief

Don't you think we tend to invest some categories of people with unearned goodness? I suppose we've all got a need to trust people who seem to have power over life and death.

If you need a reason to keep going right now, you should hold onto the fact that you're going to be the star witness at this fucker's trial, and if you need a reason to live beyond that, you ought to remember that you were the one Edie called when she believed she was facing death, because she still trusted you with the thing that mattered to her more than anything else.

The older Strike got, the more he'd come to believe that in a prosperous country, in peacetime – notwithstanding those heavy blows of fate to which nobody was immune, and those strokes of unearned luck of which Inigo, the inheritor of wealth, had clearly benefited – character was the most powerful determinant of life's course.

No matter how many famous people were convicted of rape or murder, still the belief persisted, almost pagan in its intensity: not him. It couldn't be him. He's famous.

It was far from the first time he'd encountered the tendency to believe the dead would have wanted whatever was most convenient to the living.

lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.' Tansy

because it was so much more comforting to believe that language alone could remake the world.

Jesus,' said Robin, hurrying over to them, and finding nothing else to say she repeated, 'Jesus!' 'He was definitely on our side an hour ago,' said Strike.

Anomie has to be someone there, with the quote on the window and the stolen drawing and everything. But you never wanted to believe me, that that place was bad news, because of her.

Naval aviation, they believed, was not inherently dangerous. Sure, there were risks, but if you were good—really good, like they were—nothing bad would happen.

In a world that thought itself so wise yet behaved so stupidly, it was possible sometimes to believe that only the mad saw matters as they truly were, that only people like my brother were prepared to admit what they saw from the corner of their eye.

History is the geology of human experience, a study, as it were, of tragedy and comedy laid down in the strata of past lives. In death there are no winners or losers, merely people who once lived but can never live again. What they thought, what they believed, what they hoped, is largely lost. That which remains is history.

The trouble with altering the facts to fit the picture is that it's a cumulative exercise. It starts as a game — a bit of a lark really. Then it gets serious, then complicated, then . . . then pleasure becomes pain because you find yourself and everyone else believing the charade — living the lie as if it were the truth.

Man's ability to indulge in self-deception knows no bounds.

She believed in the miraculous. Or she had, until she reached an age when, all of a sudden, she realized that the life she was living was, in fact, her life. The clay of her being, so long infinitely malleable, had been formed, hardened into what now seemed a palpable, unchanging object, a shell she inhabited.

Nothing is real for me until I've read about it.

I've simply always lacked even the slightest religious impulse- when people talk about their faith, I can't connect with what they're talking about. This isn't a decision I came to, or a deep belief or principle; I'm just religion-deaf, the way tone-deaf people hear sounds and not music. I suppose my religion is reading.

There can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.

The only thing that makes life endurable in this world is human love, and yet, according to Christianity, that is the very thing that we are not to have in the other world. We are to be so taken up with Jesus and angels, that we shall care nothing about our brothers and sisters that have been damned. We shall be so carried away with the music of the harp that we shall not even hear the wail of father and mother. Such a religion is a disgrace to human nature.

Our hope of immortality does not come from any religions, but nearly all religions come from that hope

What has religion to do with facts? Nothing

Religion is one of the phases of thought through which the world is passing

Religion has not civilized man, man has civilized religion.

It has always seemed absurd to suppose that a god would choose for his companions, during all eternity, the dear souls whose highest and only ambition is to obey.