Quotes About Belief

T)he cadet was too young to believe in death after life.

You? I know you! You trust beyond reason. She met his eyes steadily. Yes. It's how I get results beyond hope. As you may recall.

You cannot outguess the gods. Hold to virtue—if you can identify it—and trust that the duty set before you is the duty desired of you. And that the talents given to you are the talents you should place in the gods' service. Believe that the gods ask for nothing back that they have not first lent to you. Not even your life.

That's the spirit! Forward momentum. Mayhew snorted. Your forward momentum is going to lead all your followers over a cliff someday. He paused, beginning to grin. On the way down, you'll convince 'em all they can fly. He stuck his fists in his armpits, and waggled his elbows. Lead on, my lord. I'm flapping as hard as I can.

It's true that if your religion failed to deliver a miracle, that a human sacrifice would certainly follow. Ah...quite. You are a man of acute insight. That's not insight. That's a personal guarantee.

Hold to virtue—if you can identify it—and trust that the duty set before you is the duty desired of you. And that the talents given to you are the talents you should place in the gods' service. Believe that the gods ask for nothing back that they have not first lent to you. Not even your life.

And whose fault was it that the boy swallowed down lies, when no one would feed him the truth?

Only the saints would joke so about the gods, because it was either joke or scream, and they alone knew it was all the same to the gods.

I have had another thought on such fates that denies neither gods nor man. Perhaps, instead of controlling every step, the gods have started a hundred or a thousand Cazarils and Umegats down this road, and only those arrive who choose to.

Just once, Pen thought glumly, he'd like to get an answer to prayers, instead of being delivered as one.

Talking to the gods had been a much more comfortable proposition when there had seemed no danger of Their talking back.

How could you argue sense into someone who believed something not because it was true, but because he was an idiot?

The gods have no hands in this world but ours.  If we fail Them, where then can They turn?

His further study of humanity had revealed just how much people could convince themselves that their own needs were those of the gods, and not the other way around.

Anyone who desires to see the gods face-to-face is a great fool

It was a curious insight into Vorkosigan that he should so automatically accept her bare word as binding; he evidently thought along the same lines himself. The

Trust in the gods, They will supply? Hardly. He wondered suddenly if it was as hard for the gods to have faith in Ingrey as it was for him to have faith in Them, and a weird wild urge to show Them how it should be done swept him for a moment.

A doctrinal point Pen had constantly to explain to people trying to pray for good weather or no earthquakes, who never listened, he'd finally decided, because they didn't want it to be so.  The gods did not control the weather.  Or the world.  Or souls. But death, oh, they own that.

The world is ashes and the gods are a horror. Tell me, Learned, what other place is there for me to go?

The gods do not grant miracles for our purposes, but for theirs, Umegat had said. Yes? It seemed to Cazaril that this bargain ought to run two ways. If people stopped lending the gods their wills by which to do miracles, eh, what would the gods do about it then?

there is no thought control—or I'd certainly have put it to use before this. Trying to shape, or respond to, what every idiot on the street believes—on the basis of little logic and less information—would only serve to drive you mad.

He claims that the gods, and we, are both right here all the time, a shadow's thickness apart. We've no distance to cross at all to get to each other.

Prayer, he suspected... was putting one foot in front of the other. Moving all the same.

We can stop at the Vilnoc temple and pray for him, if you like." Lencia looked down at her sandals, up at Penric.  "Does it help?" "For a certainty… only at the very end of all journeys