Quotes About Belief

For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.

But this general business of trusting people, I don't know. I doubt if I can change. I believe in trusting people, do you see? At least till they prove they can't be trusted. What kind of life is it when you can't?

In all honesty, what I believe is neither inspirational nor evangelical. Passionate faith I am suspicious of because it hangs witches and burns heretics, and generally I am more in sympathy with the witches and heretics than with the sectarians who hang and burn them. I fear immoderate zeal, Christian, Muslim, Communist, or whatever, because it restricts the range of human understanding and the wise reconciliation of human differences, and creates an orthodoxy with a sword in its hand.

God is in me or else is not at all (does not exist).

There is nothing in life except what one thinks of it.

After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is the essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

After the final no there come a yes, and on that yes a future world depends.

After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.

The law of chaos is the law of ideas, Of improvisations and seasons of belief. Ideas are men. The mass of meaning and The mass of men are one. Chaos is not The mass of meaning. It is three or four Ideas, or, say, five men or, possibly, six. In the end, these philosophic assassins pull Revolvers and shoot each other. One remains. The mass of meaning becomes composed again.

The death of one god is the death of all.

One poem proves another and the whole, For the clairvoyant men that need no proof: The lover, the believer and the poet

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly." ? Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

Believe that you can do it, under any circumstances. Because if you believe you can, then you really will. That belief just keeps you searching for the answers, then pretty soon you get it.

If you want your prayers answered, get up off your knees and do something about them.

Religion's just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all.

According to the Buddha's teaching the beginning of the life-stream of living beings is unthinkable. THe believer in the creation of life by God may be astonished at this reply. But if you were to ask him 'What is the beginning of God?' he would answer without hesitation 'God has no beginning', and he is not astonished at his own reply.

To force oneself to believe and to accept a thing without understanding is political, and not spiritual or intellectual.

Almost all religions are built on faith—rather 'blind' faith it would seem. But in Buddhism emphasis is laid on 'seeing', knowing, understanding, and not on faith, or belief.

The root of all evil is ignorance (avijj?) and false views (micch?di??hi). It is an undeniable fact that as long as there is doubt, perplexity, wavering, no progress is possible.

The common belief that to follow the Buddha's teaching one has to retire from life is a misconception. It is really an unconscious defence against practising it.

It is always seeing through knowledge or wisdom (ñ??a-dassana), and not believing through faith.

All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.