Quotes About Belief

For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ('this-has-been'), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.

Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, doubts, despairs, despite impulses to be done with it, I unceasingly affirm love, within myself, as a value.

There is an age at which we teach what we know. Then comes another age at which we teach what we do not know; this is called research. Now perhaps comes the age of another experience: that of unlearning, of yielding to the unforeseeable change which forgetting imposes on the sedimentation of the knowledges, cultures, and beliefs we have traversed.

Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, doubts, despairs, despite impulses to be done with it, I unceasingly affirm love, within myself, as a value. Though I listen to all the arguments which the most divergent systems employ to demystify, to limit, to erase, in short, to depreciate love, I persist, I know, I know, but all the same...

All this means in fact that one believes oneself to have such sureness of intelligence that acknowledging an inability to understand calls in question the clarity of the author and not that of one's own mind.

There are thus very engaging myths which are however not innocent.

I always behave--I insist upon behaving, whatever I am told and whatever my own discouragements may be, as if love someday might be fulfilled, as if the Sovereign Good were possible

Magic consultations, secret rites, and votive actions are not absent from the amorous subject's life, whatever culture he belongs to.

either the intention of the myth is too obscure to be efficacious, or it is too clear to be believed. In either case, where is the ambiguity? This is but a false dilemma. Myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion. […] driven to having either to unveil or to liquidate the concept, it will naturalize it. We reach here the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature.

Il m'importe peu de savoir si Dieu existe ou non ; mais ce que je sais et que je saurai jusqu'au bout, c'est qu'il n'aurait pas dû créer en même temps l'amour et la mort. Le Neutre, c'est ce Non irréductible : un Non comme suspendu devant les endurcissements de la foi et de la certitude et incorruptible par l'une et par l'autre.

The saint is first and foremost a being without formal context; the idea of fashion is antipathetic to the idea of sainthood.

It is philosophically impossible to be an atheist, since to be an atheist you must have infinite knowledge in order to know absolutely that there is no God. But to have infinite knowledge, you would have to be God yourself. It's hard to be God yourself and an atheist at the same time!

THE TABLECLOTH OF TURIN

When you step out onto the ineffable fabric of your own invention, it is key, essential to act just like that character in the cartoons who steps off the cliff onto the absolute air. Do not look down. You wrote it; you can stand on it to reach for the next thing.

Early disappointments with people left Washington with a residual cynicism that was to jibe well with Hamilton's views.

D. Rockefeller drew strength by simplifying reality and strongly believed that excessive reflection upon unpleasant but unalterable events only weakened one's resolve in the face of enemies.

Washington's hair was reddish brown, and contrary to a common belief, he never wore a wig. The illusion that he did so derived from the powder that he sprinkled on his hair with a puffball in later life.

In other words, Julia still believed in the beneficial effects of tobacco long after her husband had likely died from it. Even grimacing with pain, Grant tracked presidential politics intently.

He knew that his actions would at first be resisted and misunderstood by the myopic crowd, but he believed that the force and truth of his ideas would triumph in the end.

He believed in Standard Oil and gladly purchased all available stock from other directors.

Once he had made up his mind, however, he was no longer troubled by doubts and pursued his vision with undeviating faith.

Although Rockefeller never said so outright, one senses that he thought Flagler had become a slave to fashion and ostentation, a traitor to the austere puritanical creed that had united them.

To believe America able to withstand England is a dreadful infatuation.

Rockefeller succeeded because he believed in the long-term prospects of the business and never treated it as a mirage that would soon fade.