Quotes About Belief

Neither the mob nor Vegas could exist if most people weren't optimists

I attended St. Mary's for an excellent reason. I would go to heaven. I liked my public school friends, but they were non-Catholics and couldn't look forward to that.

Agreement is often based on disagreement. It is as absurd to think, for example, that you should always begin by reaching agreement on the facts as it is for a buyer of stock to try to convince the seller that the stock is likely to go up. If they did agree that the stock would go up, the seller would probably not sell. What makes a deal likely is that the buyer believes the price will go up and the seller believes it will go down.

The more you clarify your position and defend it against attack, the more committed you become to it. The

I do not know much about this man [Jesus], but I do know that his whole life conveys one message: 'anyone at any moment can start a new future.

The willingness to let go of what we know you might even call an expression of faith. Faith: not that things will work out as we hope, but faith, simply, in life and its extraordinary intelligence that never fails to surprise. While belief holds on tightly, faith lets go.

Faith, not belief, carries us forward; for a belief is a thought, whereas faith is a knowing, a certainty which grows in the marrow.

The consolation of an imaginary thing is still a real consolation.

State solutions are imposed from above; they are often without corrective devices, and cannot easily be reversed on the proof of failure. Their inflexibility goes hand in hand with their planned and goal-directed nature, and when they fail the efforts of the state are directed not to changing them but to changing people's belief that they have failed.

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative', is asking you not to believe him. So don't.

I believed that 'freedom' is not a clear or sufficient answer to the question of what conservatives believe in. Like Matthew Arnold, I held that 'freedom is a very good horse to ride, but to ride somewhere'.

Some of the greatest achievements of modern philosophy result from the attempt to reconcile the belief in human freedom with the eternal laws of God's nature, and among these achievements Spinoza's is not only the most imaginative and profound, but perhaps the only one that is truly plausible.

There are many American conservatives, including those influenced by the Roman Catholic tradition of natural law philosophy, who believe that, in the end, the conservative position rests on theological foundations.

Every form of social and political belief that lies before us today is related to the Romantic movement, for that is the archetype of our ongoing attempt to live by our own devices. This is more true of socialism than of conservatism, in fact – socialism being a kind of diseased nostalgia for the future, which is yet more damaging than nostalgia for the past.

Christians are under an obligation to bear witness to their faith, but this does not mean inflicting their faith on other people or forcibly requiring them to adopt it. As the founder of the Christian faith showed, you bear witness not through triumphing over your rivals but through submitting to their judgement.

Robert Conquest once announced three laws of politics, the first of which says that everyone is right-wing in the matters he knows about.

Civilization is always threatened from below, by patterns of belief and emotion that may once have been useful to our ancestors, but that are useful no longer.

The important thing, Father Pavel had said, is not our belief, but His grace. We refuse His gifts out of meanness, for we fear the cost of them. And yes, the cost is everything.

To modern man,' Hayek argues, 'the belief that all law governing human action is the product of legislation appears so obvious that the contention that law is older than law-making has almost the character of a paradox. Yet there can be no doubt that law existed for ages before it occurred to man that he could make or alter it.

The content of every thought must be given, in the last analysis, in terms of the experiences that warrant it, and no belief can be established as true except by reference to the sensory 'impressions' that provide its guarantee. (This is the general assumption of empiricism.)

From this arises the belief that the order of nature is all that there really is. But to draw that conclusion would be a mistake, for two reasons. First, the Lebenswelt is irreducible. We understand and relate to it using concepts of agency and accountability that have no place in the physical sciences; to use the idiom of Sellars, the Lebenswelt exists in "the space of reasons," not in "the space of law.

nacionalismo, como uma ideologia, é perigoso apenas à medida que as ideologias são perigosas. Ocupa o espaço deixado vago pela religião e, ao fazê-lo, estimula o verdadeiro crente a venerar a ideia nacionalista e a buscar nesta concepção aquilo que ela não pode oferecer — o propósito último da vida, o caminho da redenção e o consolo para todas as aflições.

While it may have been true at the end of the nineteenth century to describe the Anglican Church as the Tory Party at prayer, it would be more correct to say, of its leaders today, that they represent the Labour Party trying to remember how to pray, while not really understanding the point of it.

A change of taste is not a 'change of mind', in the way that a change of belief or even of moral posture is a change of mind.