Quotes About Belief

Why should I be expected to shut up about everything I believe in?

Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different. Men eat themselves up believing they have to be the thing they have been made. Children go crazy. Really, even children go crazy, believing the shape of the life they must live is as small and mean and broken as they are told.

There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.

You need to know that you are a real person, that this thing happening to you is not something you are making happen—because when I was a child I thought I was doing it. I thought that if only I were a little better, a little smarter, a little meaner, a little faster, or maybe even a better Christian, none of those terrible things would be happening.

Let me tell you a story. I tell stories to prove I was meant to survive, knowing it is not true.

that the biggest part of the struggle as a child is about trying to believe you are not the monster you are being told you are. You need to know that you are a real person, that this thing happening to you is not something you are making happen—because when I was a child I thought I was doing it. I thought that if only I were a little better, a little smarter, a little meaner, a little faster, or maybe even a better Christian, none of those terrible things would be happening.

that the biggest part of the struggle as a child is about trying to believe you are not the monster you are being told you are.

The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal. It is a belief that dominates this culture. It is what makes the poor whites of the South so determinedly racist and the middle class so contemptuous of the poor.

Whatever magic Jesus' grace promised, I didn't feel it.

You'll get him," Sylvia said, pushing conviction into her wish. "We'll get him." Brub believed it. "But how many women will be murdered first?" He tipped up the glass.

He will not, I think, find it logical to live with what he has done today. I have told him that you are his responsibility. While he believes that, he will continue to protect you. I tell you this, so that you will understand what is happening. He will measure his life by your helplessness.

I should hesitate to attribute anything to him at the moment, even principles,' said Lord Culter, smiling. 'But you are free to try.

Then you've had a good day of it, I suppose. Then you suppose wrong, said Lymond shortly. I've had a damned carking afternoon. A Moslem would blame my Ifrit, a Buddhist explain the papingo was really my own great-grandmother, and a Christian, no doubt, call it the vengeance of the Lord. As a plain, inoffensive heathen, I call it bloody annoying.

Richard doesn't like me either," said the fair one sorrowfully. "But that's unmannerly rank for you. Do you like Richard?" "I'm married to him!" "That's why I asked. You don't believe in polyandry by any chance?

Whoever is unsupported by the Mystery of Love shall not achieve the grace of salvation. Whoever shall cast love aside shall lose everything.

You know we believe Philippa.' 'Perhaps I envy her,' Lymond said. 'No one believes me.

It would have made a fitting tomb, she supposed, for Thady Boy Ballagh. That it was fitting for Francis Crawford she would not believe.

A lie is a broad and spacious and glittering thing, sweeping belief before it from its very grandeur. But the truth fits, like an old man cutting cloth in an attic.

The carrying voice of Alec Guthrie said unexpectedly, 'But as Sir Graham has already pointed out, every practising Christian must serve two masters.' 'My God … I know it,' said Lymond. 'My nerves are on edge like a Dublin butcher over the conversation as it is. The situation is that Sir Graham's other Master and I are in perfect accord; whereas, being human, I am not convinced that Sir Graham and I should necessarily be.

My part in the prophecy is fulfilled. Yours has still to come. Whatever made you think you were free?

I am good?' said the strained treble. 'Thou art good,' said Francis Crawford in a dry voice.

The nursing brethren spoke in whispers to Jerott. Such stillness was what the overstrained body required. Pray God it would last. Downstairs, Jerott unleashed his anxious irritation on Marthe. 'They know it can't last. Why don't they admit it?' 'They are kind. They are innocent. They believe God is merciful,' said Marthe.

The trouble with Austin was that he believed so deeply in the chivalrous virtues that he found it impossible to refer to them.

Like the narration of those who preach to those who do not wish to hear, my story has failed to excite anyone. They don't believe me.