Quotes About Belief

God is the opposite of Rodin.

Un bel giorno mi toccherà un colpo, uno di quelli che annientano una persona, e allora tutto finirà: finirà questo intrico, questo struggimento, quest'ignoranza, tutto, tutto, gratitudine e ingratitudine, menzogna e miraggi, questo creder di sapere e invece non saper mai niente. Però desidero vivere, non importa come.

There are no gods, only one, and he's too sublime to help.

4And patience produces character, and character produces hope. 5And this hope will never disappoint us, because God has poured out his love to fill our hearts. He gave us his love

The root of the issue is pride. We think of ourselves as thoughtful and in control. We think of ourselves as wiser than the God who planned all things from beginning to end. We think we can see the future, disbelieving God and believing ourselves.

natural selection didn't design your mind to see the world clearly; it designed your mind to have perceptions and beliefs that would help take care of your genes.

Being a person's true friend means endorsing the untruths he holds dearest.

People see what they want to see and what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth.

Hope is more the consequence of action than its cause. As the experience of the spectator favors fatalism, so the experience of the agent produces hope.

They [Americans] believe that the terrors of vast problems yield to the effects of many small solutions. Use little things to break big things, says Saint Paul, describing an essential feature of the psychology of hope.

Be sure you choose what you believe and know why you believe it, because if you don't choose your beliefs, you may be certain that some belief, and probably not a very credible one, will choose you.

Why do people all over the world, and at all times, want marvels that defy all verifiable facts? And are the marvels brought into being by their desire or is their desire an assurance rising from some deep knowledge, not to be directly experienced and questioned, that the marvelous is indeed an aspect of the real?

No action is ever lost - nothing we do is without result. It's obvious, of course, but how many people ever really believe it, or act as if it were so?

For I was, as you have already guessed, a collaborator with Destiny, not one who put a pistol to its head and demanded particular treasures. The only thing for me to do was to keep on keeping on, to have faith in my whim, and remember that for me, as for the saints, illumination when it came would probably come from some unexpected source.

the irrational will have its say, perhaps because 'irrational' is the wrong word for it.

Any theologian understands martyrdom, but only the martyr experiences the fire.

Fanaticism is ... compensation for doubt

There comes a time when one must be strong with rationalists, for they can reduce anything whatever to dust, if they happen not to like the look of it, or if it threatens their deep-buried negativism. I mean of course rationalists like you, who take some little provincial world of their own as the whole of the universe and the seat of all knowledge.

Life, as he conceived of it, was a long decline from a glorious past, and if a reader approaches a newspaper in that spirit, he can find much to confirm him in his belief, particularly if he has never examined any short period of the past in day-to-day detail.

People who have failed at Christianity aren't likely to make great Buddhists.

Despite these afternoon misgivings and self-reproaches I clung to my notion, ill-defined though it was, that a serious study of human knowledge, or theory, or belief, if undertaken with a critical but not a cruel mind, would in the end yield some secret, some valuable permanent insight, into the nature of life and the true end of man.

Anna, who has always been devout, knows well that Despair is a mortal sin, and now she knows that it is a luxury, as well.

banking is like religion: you have to accept certain rather dicey things simply on faith, and then everything else follows in marvellous logic.

We come to God in little steps, not a leap, and that love of police-court truth you think so much of comes very late on the way, if it comes at all. What is truth? as Pilate asked; I've never pretended that I could have told him. I'm just glad when a boozer sobers up, or a man stops beating his woman, or a crooked lad tries to go straight. If it makes him boast a bit, that's not the worst harm it can do. You unbelieving people apply cruel, hard standards to us who believe.