Quotes About Belief

Sacchetti ends his story with a popular saying: "What woman wants the Lord wants, and what the Lord wants comes to pass."24

She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.

No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.

Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.

One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality

There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.

Nothing, however, can be more arrogant, though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods there is only one, and of religions none but the speaker's.

They say that one must beat one's wings against the storm in the belief that beyond this welter the sun shines

In the 18th century we knew how everything was done, but here I rise through the air, I listen to voices in America, I see men flying- but how is it done? I can't even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns.

No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion.

No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes... ....Tories, Liberal Party and Labour Party for what do they battle except their own prestige - No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes....Tories, Liberal Party and Labour Party for what do they battle except their own prestige

For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he relates them; specialised because since he is a single person with one sensibility the aspects of life in which he can believe with conviction are strictly limited

She had made him think he could do anything. Nobody else took him seriously. But she made him believe that he could do whatever he wanted.

She felt him trying to piece together in a laborious and elementary fashion fragments of belief, unsoldered and separate, lacking the unity of phrases fashioned by the old believers. Together they groped in this difficult region, where the unfinished, the unfulfilled, the unwritten, the unreturned, came together in their ghostly way and wore the semblance of the complete and the satisfactory. The future emerged more splendid than ever from this construction of the present.

One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.

Later she wasn't so positive perhaps; she thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.

He should be very proud of Andrew if he got a scholarship, he said. She would be just as proud of him if he didn't, she answered. They disagreed always about this, but it did not matter. She liked him to believe in scholarships, and he liked her to be proud of Andrew whatever he did.

To leave a door shut that might be open is in my eyes some form of blasphemy.

As a matter of fact, this effort at discipline had been helped by the interests of a difficult profession, but the old conclusion to which Ralph had come when he left college still held sway in his mind, and tinged his views with the melancholy belief that life for most people compels the exercise of the lower gifts and wastes the precious ones, until it forces us to agree that there is little virtue, as well as little profit, in what once seemed to us the noblest part of our inheritance.

What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. Yes, one feels, I should never have thought that this could be so; I have never known people behaving like that. But you have convinced me that so it is, so it happens

At this moment, I feel as if the human race had no character at all – sought for nothing, believed in nothing, & fought only from a dreary sense of duty.

when a subject is highly controversial — and any question about sex is that — one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.

one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.