Quotes About Belief

If one believes in God, but has learned not to pray, one offers only, in silence, one's apologies, and then asks the spirit to do what it can.

Austin said, 'He is very plausible. I believed him when he gave me his oath.' 'Never do that,' said Richard flatly.

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. And that, Philippa did not need to be told, was the truth, which Lymond had guessed long before her.

People who prefer to believe the worst of others will breed war and religious persecutions while the world lasts.

Well, it's no good jumping at conclusions. Jump? You don't even crawl distantly within sight of a conclusion. I believe if you caught the cat with her head in the cream-jug you'd say it was conceivable that the jug was empty when she got there.

the fellow's got a bee in his bonnet. Thinks God's a secretion of the liver--all right once in a way, but there's no need to keep on about it. There's nothing you can't prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited.

I can't think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one's grammar. It's a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I'm afraid.

What'll Geoffrey do when you pull off your First, my child? demanded Miss Haydock. Well, Eve -- it will be awkward if I do that. Poor lamb! I shall have to make him believe I only did it by looking fragile and pathetic at the viva.

There's nothing you can't prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited.

A man was taken to the Zoo and shown the giraffe. After gazing at it a little in silence: 'I don't believe it,' he said.

The brutal fact is that in this Christian country not one person in a hundred has the faintest notion what the Church teaches about God or man or society or the person of Jesus Christ.

there's nothin' like Christian feelin's for upsettin' a man's domestic comfort.

The popular mind has grown so confused that it is no longer able to receive any statement of fact except as an expression of personal feeling.

It is the dogma that is the drama -- not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death -- but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that a man might be glad to believe.

But you see, I can believe a thing without understanding it. It's all a matter of training.

A person who can believe all the articles of the Christian faith is not going to boggle over a trifle of adverse evidence.

Any fool can tell a lie, and any fool can believe it; but the right method is to tell the truth in such a way that the intelligent reader is seduced into telling the lie for himself.

Ah, well, as the old pagan said of the Gospels, after all, it was a long time ago, and we'll hope it wasn't true.

But if you believe that Jesus was wholly God, then to condemn His conduct is presumptuous. If you believe that He was not wholly God, but only partly or in some respects divine, you are a heretic. If you think He was not God at all, you are an infidel.

It is impossible for human nature to believe that money is not there.

In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair. It is the accomplice of the other sins and their worst punishment. It is the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.

But, looking round at the world as it is, it seems to me (I speak as a fool) that youth is all out for dogma, and that if boys and girls grow up imagining that Christianity has no dogma to give them, they'll give themselves over to political dogma or economic dogma in its crudest and most intransigent form.

as Aristotle might say, it is an improbable-possible.

Here again, the souls 'have what they chose'; they enjoy that kind of after-life which they themselves imagined for the virtuous dead; their failure lay in not imagining better. They are lost because they 'had not faith' — primarily the Christian faith, but also, more generally, faith in the nature of things.