Quotes About Belief

one day she started making this gesture. It wasn't an ASL sign at all, and I realized with a shock—I'm sorry, but you won't believe this—that she was crossing herself. I can hardly believe it now when I look back, that this . . . this man was attempting to make Jennie into a Christian. Why the Archibalds put up with it is entirely beyond my comprehension.

Denying the existence of things beyond our knowledge is as dangerous as promoting them.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints identified the Maya as one of the lost tribes of Israel, the Lamanites, as chronicled in The Book of Mormon, published in 1830.

Are you surprised? He doesn't believe in any power greater than himself. And we all know he's God-like anyway—in his own mind, at least.

to authorize that personally.

It is a wager with an infinite upside and no downside. And, I might add, it is a wager every human being must make. It is not optional. Pascal's Wager—the logic is impeccable.

He said he had been converted to atheism at the age of six, when his Sunday school teacher had described with relish the eternal fires of Hell.

Your grandmother sent me to church every day, and it did me no harm. It was in church that I was converted to atheism. Also, it's a wise hedge. I myself might take it up on my deathbed, just in case.

Jennie understands love. Yes, murmured Mrs. Archibald, she knows what love is. I said: then she can understand religion, because religion starts with love. Religion is love. Without first loving God and feeling God's love for us, there can be no religion.

If you think that people should be nice to one another, then by all means be nice. But when you project that belief onto the people and the world around you as if it were an objective reality, or worse still, as if it were their job to be nice to you, you put yourself at odds with what is, and suffering will surely follow.

When we believe what we think, when we take our thinking to be reality, we will suffer.

All delusions begin in the mind. All delusions are based on various ways we're talking to ourselves and then believing what we are saying.

Absolute Truth is not a belief, not a religion, not a philosophy, not a momentary experience, and not a transient spiritual experience either. It is neither static nor in motion, neither good nor bad. It is other than all of that, more other than you can ever imagine. Truth cannot be touched by thought or imagined by the mind. It can only be found in the heart of universal being. To know thy self is the key. To bring forth your being is The Way.

When these Velcro thoughts and emotions arise, the key is to face and investigate whatever belief structures underlie them. In that moment, inquiry is your spiritual practice. To avoid this practice is to avoid your own awakening. Anything you avoid in life will come back, over and over again, until you're willing to face it—to look deeply into its true nature.

Suffering occurs when you believe in a thought that is at odds with what is, what was, or what may be.

To you your dream is real because all of your thoughts confirm that it is real. But what is is more real than a thousand thoughts about how things should be. Life will conform neither to the story you tell yourself about it nor your interpretation of it. Believe a single thought that runs contrary to the way things are or have been and you suffer because of it. No exceptions!

All of these are labels. All of them are fine. There is nothing wrong with any one of them, until you actually believe they're true. As soon as you believe that a label you've put on yourself is true, you've limited something that is literally limitless, you've limited who you are into nothing more than a thought.

What is the cause of suffering in the human being? Why is it that human beings have such a difficult time putting their suffering down? What's the reason that we often carry it around, when it becomes such a burden to us? One of the primary reasons we suffer is because we believe what we think, that the thoughts in our heads come uninvited into our consciousness, swirl around, and we attach to them. We identify with them and grab hold of them.

Unfortunately, when we turn to religion, often the churches box us in even more. They tell us that we are inherently flawed, that we need to be forgiven for this sin, this stain that we carry. The first and most important function of religion is to connect you with the mystery of life and the mystery of your own being. When religion fails to do this, it has betrayed its primary mission, and all we are left with is dogma and belief.

But Jesus never defines what someone must have faith in; he doesn't say "your faith in me has healed you." Rather, it's faith itself, the trust in things unseen that heals.

I can't do that." Those belief structures are by their very nature based in unreality.

Thinking is something and then feeling it are two different reference points for most human beings: If I think it and I feel it, then it is real. But it does not take much reflection to acknowledge we have all thought and felt things to be true that later found out were not.

It is not the oath that makes us believe the man, but the man the oath.

God is not averse to deceit in a holy cause.