Quotes About Belief

Besides, it seems to mee that spreading the doctrine of doing good can harm no one.' Nakor shook his head. 'Would that it were true. Men have been put to death for preaching good.

Besides, it seems to me that spreading the doctrine of doing good can harm no one.' Nakor shook his head. 'Would that it were true. Men have been put to death for preaching good.

Sve je magija. Samo ograni?enja onoga ko se njome služi uslovljavaju koji ?e se put slediti.

To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.

The secret of the demagogue is to appear as dumb as his audience so that these people can believe themselves as smart as he is.

Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. What was tortuously secured by complex argument becomes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance. We don't see it, because we see with it.

Exiting the ideological cave, where all our questions are answered and everyone we know agrees with us, is the hardest and most significant step we can take. But if we don't take that step, then we will leave this life no closer to the truth than when we entered it. And that is exactly what it is to live a life not worth living, even if it proves to be the most pleasant sort of existence.

In fact, the answers that religion, as we have come to know it, provides to the question of human worth have played so dominant a role in the preceding centuries that believers often cannot conceive how non-believers can muster sufficient commitment to their own lives to get out of bed each morning, let alone the ethical wherewithal to regard others as deserving of moral regard. Once one "comes out" as an atheist, these are the inquisitions to which one is often subjected.

the success of relativistic quantum field theory offers no reason to believe that there is any such thing as a relativistic quantum field.

All of life is like this. You may attempt over and over again to accomplish a goal, but if you do so from an intellectual standpoint only, you'll rarely be successful.

As the saying goes, "If you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got." If we're finding it hard to fulfill our needs, there's something within us (most likely a thought process or belief governed by fear) that needs to change so that we can create a different reality.

1. She couldn't count on anyone, not even God, to help her. 2. Something was wrong with her; otherwise, the abuse wouldn't have happened. 3. She had no control over her life (which led to the development of a victim mentality). 4. She was inadequate and didn't deserve good things.

Hope just means another world might be possible, not promise, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.

One of the reasons people lock onto motherhood as a key to feminine identity is the belief that children are the way to fulfill your capacity to love. But there are so many things to love besides one's own offspring, so many things that need love, so much other work love has to do in the world.

Your opponents would love you to believe that it's hopeless, that you have no power, that there's no reason to act, that you can't win. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away.

One more thing about Cassandra: in the most famous version of the myth, the disbelief with which her prophecies were met was the result of a curse placed on her by Apollo when she refused to have sex with the god. The idea that loss of credibility is tied to asserting rights over your own body was there all along. But with the real-life Cassandras among us, we can lift the curse by making up our own minds about who to believe and why.

I believe in hope as an act of defiance, or rather as the foundation for an ongoing series of acts of defiance, those acts necessary to bring about some of what we hope for while we live by principle in the meantime. There is no alternative, except surrender. And surrender not only abandons the future, it abandons the soul.

The term 'politics of prefiguration' has long been used to describe the idea that if you embody what you aspire to, you have already succeeded. That is to say, if your activism is already democratic, peaceful, creative, then in one small corner of the world these things have triumphed. Activism, in this model, is not only a toolbox to change things but a home in which to take up residence and live according to your beliefs, even if it's a temporary and local place...

A comprehensive utopia may be out of reach, but the effort to realise it shapes the world for the better all the same. The belief may not be true, but it is useful. Belief makes the world.

It's important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine.

Stories migrate secretly. The assumption that whatever we now believe is just common sense, or what we always knew, is a way to save face. It's also a way to forget the power of a story and of a storyteller, the power in the margins, and the potential for change.

Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists adopt the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.

The status quo would like you to believe it is immutable, inevitable, and invulnerable, and lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces this view.

Cynicism is, first of all, a style of presenting oneself, and more than anything, cynics take pride in not being fooled and not being foolish. But in the forms in which I encounter it, cynicism is frequently both of those things.