Quotes About Belief

If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane.

There is no harmony between religion and science. When science was a child, religion sought to strangle it in the cradle. Now that science has attained its youth, and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling, palsied wreck says to the athlete: "Let us be friends." It reminds me of the bargain the cock wished to make with the horse: "Let us agree not to step on each other's feet.

They who stand with breaking hearts around this little grave, need have no fear. The larger and the nobler faith in all that is, and is to be, tells us that death, even at its worst, is only perfect rest ... The dead do not suffer.

My object is to drive fear out of the world. Fear is the jailer of the mind. Christianity, superstition—that is to say, the supernatural—makes every brain a prison and every soul a convict

In every man's God there is, to say the least, a part of that man. The lower the man, the lower his conception of God. The higher the man, the grander his Deity must be.

You always give credit where credit is due - to high school coaches, college coaches - but my dad, the foundation that he built with me, is where all of this came from. The speed, the determination, the mindset, just the natural belief that you can do anything you put your mind to, it all comes from my dad.

We wonder at good things, are appalled by evil. What's wondering got in common with being appalled? That strange combination, that surprise duet of disbelief and acknowledgement. You can't believe that any human being would open up with an assault gun in a trolley, but look over there--right there!--there's somebody doing it.

The strong are free to trust, the weak constrained to.

Heresy," Hilaire Belloc reminds us, "is the dislocation of some complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein. We

The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion, it will cease to be free for religion.

The Roman Catholic Church isn't going to change its theologies.

It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.

The only place where your dream becomes impossible is in your own thinking.

The psychological fact of suggestion is that if statements are made again and again in a confident manner, without argument or proof, then their hearers will tend to believe them quite independently of their soundness and of the presence or absence of evidence for their truth.

Convincing yourself doesn't win an argument

Oh, honey, God don't care which church you go, long as you show up!

And people would believe it, thought Hartmann, because people believed what they wanted to believe – that was Goebbels's great insight. They no longer had any need to bother themselves with inconvenient truths. He had given them an excuse not to think.

It's not the story though, not the friend leaning toward you, saying "And then I realized—," which is the part of stories one never quite believes. I had the idea that the world's so full of pain it must sometimes make a kind of singing. And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps— First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.

A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual", find out how he feels about astrology.

People say that God works in mysterious ways when they really mean that life, or something in their own lives, doesn't make any sense, but I think that's wrong. I think it means that we can't make any sense out of life until we give up our deepest hopes, until we stop trying to arrange everything to suit us. But once we do, or are forced to . . . That's what's mysterious.

The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is that success equals skill.

Never ignore a gut feeling, but never believe that it's enough.

Afghanistan. Afghanistan is named after the biblical King Saul's grandson. Afghana, according to legend, which has traditionally described the Afghanistan people as Ben-i-Israel, "Children of Israel." Legend also has it that King Solomon' (Sulaiman) settled the country. Whether such stories, and many more, are true or not, they are widely believed, and the country does bear Afghana's name.

There are mighty few people who think what they think they think.