Quotes About Belief

his way of walking toward closed doors without slowing down, knowing they would open for him;

Shakespeare is both my door knocker and the owner of the domains to which the knock admits me, at once my Virgil opening the gates of hell and heaven, and the devil, and God, and I say this as a person who believes in neither God nor the devil, I believe only in Virgil…

For the rest of his life that was what he said to anyone who asked—and there were people who asked, because the world is a cynical and suspicious place and, being full of liars, thinks of everything as a lie. Which is what Vidyasagar's story was.

Impossible stories, stories with No Entry signs on them, change our lives, and our minds, as often as the authorized versions, the stories we are expected to trust, upon which we are asked, or told, to build our judgements, and our lives.

The true story is there's no true story any more. There's no true any more that anyone can agree on.

I'd rather die fighting over great poets than over gods.

Yalan iÅŸi bitince çürüyüp gidecek; Oysa gerçek büyüktür ve galip gelecek, zaferine ald?ran olsa da olmasa da.

People tend to focus on the magic more than the realism. But, like all fiction, fantasy arrives at truth via the road of untruth.

Unwilling wholly to abandon the project for which his wife had died, unable to maintain any longer the absolute belief which the enterprise required, Muhammad Din entered the station wagon of scepticism.

It felt as if a thing that had been impossible had become possible, a thing that had been unthinkable had become thinkable, and Luka did not want to give that terrifying thing a name.

Mr. Gibreel Farishta on the railway to London was once again seized as who would not be by the fear that God had decided to punish him for his loss of faith by driving him insane.

By the end of the Latin lesson he was a hard-line atheist, and to prove it, he marched determinedly into the school tuckshop during break and bought himself a ham sandwich. The flesh of the swine passed his lips for the first time that day, and the failure of the Almighty to strike him dead with a thunderbolt proved to him what he had long suspected: that there was nobody up there with thunderbolts to hurl.

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same

truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case;

la memoria es verdad, porque la memoria tiene su forma de ser especial. Selecciona, elimina, altera, exagera, minimiza, glorifica, y difama también; pero, en definitiva, crea su propia realidad, su versión heterogénea pero normalmente coherente de los acontecimientos; y ningún hombre en su sano juicio confía más

En esta ciudad, Mahound, el negociante-profeta, está fundando una de las grandes religiones del mundo;

As we grow, we lose our belief in our progenitors's superhuman nature. They shrivel into more or less unimpressive men and women. Apollo turns out to be Oeagrus, god and Joseph the carpenter end up being one and the same. The gods we worship, we discover, are not different from ourselves.

Deprived of the income he had received from Homi Catrack, my uncle had taken his booming voice and his obsessions with hearts and reality up to the roof of his Marine Drive apartment block; he had stepped out into the evening sea-breeze, frightening the beggars so much (when he fell) that they gave up pretending to be blind and ran away yelling … in death as in life, Hanif Aziz espoused the cause of truth and put illusion to flight.

Religion has moved out of the private space. (...) The moment it moves into the public sphere it becomes everybody's business.

We underestimate our fellow humans because we underestimate ourselves. They - we - are capable of being much more than we seem

Human beings who turn away from God lose love, and certainty

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." The first minister and the emperor were standing at

I disapprove of certainties, said Virgil Jones. They limit one's range of vision. Doubt is one aspect of width.

by your example you have taught me kindness, and shown me that it expands to include all people, not only the true believers but the unbelievers and other-believers also, not only the virtuous but also those who know not virtue