Quotes About Belief

It's a pragmatic response: a comprehensive Utopia may be out of reach, but the effort to realize it shapes the world for the better all the same. The belief may not be true, but it is useful. Belief makes the world.

Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.

Or maybe there's one thing to say, about the capitalism of the heart, the belief that the essence of life too can be seized and hoarded, that you can corner the market on confidence, stage a hostile takeover of happiness.

Like William Morris, he believed that paradise was behind us, in the old ways of life, and in the organic world, rather than ahead of us in an urbanized and industrialized future.

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.

Hopefulness is risky, since it is after all a form of trust, trust in the unknown and the possible, even in discontinuity. To be hopeful is to take on a different persona, one that risks disappointment, betrayal...

So many of us believe in perfection, which ruins everthing else, because the perfect is not only the enemy of the good, itÄs also the enemy of the realistic, the possible, and the fun.

though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn't enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons

Jeszcze jedno w kwestii Kasandry: niewiara, z jakÄ… spotykaÅ'y siÄ™ jej proroctwa, byÅ'a skutkiem klÄ…twy, którÄ… rzuciÅ' na niÄ… Apollo za to, ?e nie chciaÅ'a uprawia? z nim seksu. W tej historii od poczÄ…tku chodzi o to, ?e tracisz wiarygodno??, kiedy domagasz siÄ™ prawa do wÅ'asnego ciaÅ'a.

We are by nature optimists, if optimism means that we believe we see the world as it is.

often the worst behavior in the wake of a calamity is on the part of those who believe that others will behave savagely and that they themselves are taking defensive measures against barbarism.

Or maybe there's one thing to say, about the capitalism of the heart, the belief that the essences of life too can be seized or hoarded, that you can corner the market on confidence, stage a hostile takeover of happiness.

En mi opinión, su habilidad más importante era sencillamente el optimismo que les hacía pensar que iban a sobrevivir y encontrar el camino».

We are still in an era of battles over who will be granted the right to speak and the right to be believed

Saying that everything is fine or that it will never get any better are ways of going nowhere or of making it impossible to go anywhere. Either approach implies that there is no road out or that, if there is, you don't need to or can't go down it.

Gonzalez adds, "Researchers point out that people tend to take any information as confirmation of their mental models. We are by nature optimists, if optimism means that we believe we see the world as it is. And under the influence of a plan, it's easy to see what we want to see.

The story of Cassandra, the woman who told the truth but was not believed, is not nearly as embedded in our culture as that of the Boy Who Cried Wolf—that is, the boy who was believed the first few times he told the same lie. Perhaps it should be.

It's important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I'm interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act.

Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naïvete," the Bulgarian writer Maria Popova recently remarked.

People disappear into their stories all the time. We live in stories and images, as immersed in them as though they were Wu Daozi's inkpots; we breathe in presuppositions and exhale further stories. We in the West have been muddled by Plato's assertion that art is imitation and illusion; we believe that it is a realm apart, one whose impact on our world is limited, one in which we do not live.

I don't believe in palmistry or any other form of divination, but I believe in stories that come by any means, and in capacities strangers have to be messengers and mirrors in which you see new possibilities.

It was the kind... of Southern women... who believe... that it is impossible to arrive in a new place without a pair of shoes to match every possible change of clothes.

He is in his late sixties, but has the charm of extreme youth, for he comes to a pleasure and hails it happily for what it is without any bitterness accumulated from past disappointments, and he believes that any moment the whole process of life may make a slight switch-over and that everything will be agreeable for ever. His manners would satisfy the standards of any capital in the world, but at the same time he is exquisitely, pungently local.

You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.--Quoted in Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood