Quotes About Belief

We ask the child to drag around the unwieldy weight of magic. To clap wildly. To believe in what we believe in no longer. We ask the child to keep the awe we forgot how to hold. The fairy isn't the fairy. It's the child who is the fairy.

I come from a long line of superstitious people. We spit three times, we keep salt in our pockets, we wear tiny hands against our chests, we throw no baby showers, we chew on thread, we break the glass, we knock on wood, we rarely smile for fear of bringing attention to a happiness we rarely feel, for fear of someone out of nowhere taking our happiness away.

I put it to you, Doctor, that our gods are what good and bad once were before they became categories un human reasoning.

From the gods' perspective all ways are the same and all roads will be travelled in the end. It's only a matter of time.

Oh sometimes it does, Carter

It's funny how you imagine loving someone is enough to make them believe you love them. Thomas to Elizabeth, The Other Side of You

Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.

Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief. Doubt.

The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it's a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible. [ Defend the right to be offended ( openDemocracy , 7 February 2005)]

Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power.

When...did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? When did reason get redescribed as unreason? When were the fairy stories of the superstitious placed above criticism, beyond satire? A religion was not a race. It was an idea, and ideas stood (or fell) because they were strong enough (or too weak) to withstand criticism, not because they were shielded from it. Strong ideas welcomed dissent.

The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it's a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.

In spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day.

My parents gave me the gift of irreligion, of growing up without bothering to ask people what gods they held dear, assuming that in fact, like my parents, they weren't interested in gods, and that this uninterest was 'normal.' You may argue that the gift was a poisoned chalice, but even if so, that's a cup from which I'd happily drink again.

A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.

everything is relative, one man's absolute belief is another man's fairy tale;

What's the use of stories that aren't even true?

If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.

When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for.

Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.

All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own,' said Birbal, 'and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.

You will see, as time goes by, said Ibn Rushd, that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God. The godly are God's worst advocates.

Sometimes by a woodland stream he watched the water rush over the pebbled bed, its tiny modulations of bounce and flow. A woman's body was like that. If you watched it carefully enough you could see how it moved to the rhythm of the world, the deep rhythm, the music below the music, the truth below the truth. He believed in this hidden truth the way other men believed in God or love, believed that truth was in fact always hidden, that the apparent, the overt, was invariably a kind of lie.

When we stop believing in the gods we can start believing in their stories.