Quotes About Belief

Those in favour rarely stayed in favour; it was just a question of when they fell.

Music — good music, great music — had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses' ears accuse it of being cynical. But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something.

He gave the impression that he believed in things. We did too—it was just that we wanted to believe in our own things, rather than what had been decided for us. Hence what we thought of as our cleansing scepticism.

Martha was a clever girl, and therefore not a believer.

wear flannel next to your skin, and never believe in eternal punishment.

It seemed...that intelligence wasn't as pure and unalterable a characteristic as people believed. Being intelligent was like being good: you could be virtuous in one person's company and yet wicked in another's. You could be intelligent with one person and stupid with another. It was partly to do with confidence...In a way she had been more confident when she had been eighteen and foolish. At twenty-three, with Michael, she felt less confident and therefore less intelligent.

Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any patterns exist. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belief. So each of us must pretend to find, or re-erect, a pattern.

Still, as I tend to repeat, I have some instinct for survival, for self-preservation. And believing you have such an instinct is almost as good as actually having it, because it means you act in the same way.

I can see there might be a positive side to this wilful averting of the eye: ignoring the bad things makes it easier for you to carry on. But ignoring the bad things makes you end up believing that bad things never happen. You are always surprised by them. It surprises you that guns kill, that money corrupts, that snow falls in winter. Such naivety can be charming; alas, it can also be perilous.

But ignoring the bad things makes you end up believing that bad things never happen. You are always surprised by them. It surprises you that guns kill, that money corrupts, that snow falls in winter. Such naivety can be charming; alas, it can also be perilous.

We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient—it's not useful—to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.

If I call myself an atheist at twenty, and an agnostic at fifty and sixty, it isn't because I have acquired more knowledge in the meantime: just more awareness of ignorance.

They didn't want you to fake adherence to their banal taste and meaningless critical slogans – they wanted you actually to believe in them.

In truth, he was just another man, behaving as men did in books, and she was just another woman for believing otherwise.

In other words, in order to believe in what we think our nation stands for, we must constantly, every day, in small acts or thoughts and large, deceive ourselves

The cure for sex is marriage;the cure for love is marriage;the cure for infidelity is divorce;the cure for unhappiness is work;the cure for extreme unhappiness is drink;the cure for death is a frail belief in the afterlife.

atheism, which is mere emptiness and too depressing for words, and leads to socialism.

Nu cred c? mi-ar pl?cea un zeu dezaprobator. Oricum ai parte de destul? dezaprobare în via??. Mil?, iertare È™i-nÈ›elegere - de astea avem nevoie. ?i de ideea unui plan de ansamblu.

Vivimos con suposiciones muy fáciles, ¿no? Por ejemplo, que la memoria es igual a sucesos más tiempo. Pero es algo mucho más extraño. ¿Quién dijo que la memoria es lo que creíamos que habíamos olvidado? Y debería ser obvio que el tiempo no actúa como un fijador, sino más bien como un disolvente. Pero no conviene —no es útil— creer esto; no nos ayuda a seguir adelante; por lo tanto, lo pasamos por alto.

Perhaps a sense of death is like a sense of humour. We all think the one we've got - or haven't got - is just about right, and appropriate to the proper understanding of life. It's everyone else who's out of step.

But ignoring the bad things makes you end up believing that bad things never happen. You are always surprised by them. It surprises you that guns kill, that money corrupts, that snow falls in winter.

The orthodoxy runs, that if a marriage is founded on less than perfect truth it will always come to light. I don't believe that. Marriage moves you further away from the examination of truth, not nearer to it.

Adrian, however, pushed us to believe in the application of thought to life, in the notion

I don't believe in destiny, as I may have said. But I do believe now that when two lovers meet, there is already so much pre-history that only certain outcomes are possible. Whereas the lovers themselves imagine that the world is being reset, and that the possibilities are both new and infinite.