Quotes About Belief

You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?

It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.

But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

Sooner or later...one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.

many adults continue to do animistic things even in cultures that do not vigorously encourage them to do so. Naming cars and swearing at recalcitrant computers are common examples of the personalizing of the world – even if, when pressed, people insist they do not really expect a positive response from inanimate machines

The modern superstition is that we're free of superstition.

The thing is, when everyone is trying to persuade you that a thing you know to be true isn't actually true, you start to believe them: not because it is true but because it's easier. It's just the easy way out.

Just because you can't see them and you can't hear them, that doesn't mean they're not here.

I guess you're right,' he said. 'They don't usually put anything on the television unless it's true.

Petrie. I stood up for a principle I believe in. If the whole of America has to die for that principle, then I still believe it's worth it.' 'Even if the principle kills the very people it's supposed to protect?' Kenneth Garunisch turned away. 'Principles are everything, Dr. Petrie. Without principles, we cease to be living beings.

I never would have believed it, the way Hunter's rousing people up. He's talking like some kind of hostile fascist, and yet they're loving it.

Ignorance and fear create the gods, enthusiasm and deceit adorn them, and human weakness worships them.

When you have come to the edge of all that you know and are about to drop off into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things will happen,' the Warmaster had told him. 'And what are they?' he had asked. 'That there will be something solid to stand on or you'll be taught to fly,' laughed Horus as he jumped.

A wise man of Old Earth had once claimed that science would destroy mankind, not through its weapons of mass destruction, but through finally proving that there was no god.

This is a sublime work whether any higher power exists or not. It does not prove the existence of anything. No gods ever created art.' 'In an earlier age, some might have considered such a sentiment blasphemy.' 'Blasphemy,' said Revelation with a wry smile, 'is a victimless crime.

I know, but it is a pleasant fiction, my dear, and the sheer impossibility of a quest is no reason to abandon it.

That leaves the allegation that atheists are humourless. There are atheist jokes. Here is a modest example. A Jewish atheist enrols his son in what he is told is the best school in town. The school is Catholic. All starts well. Then, one day, his son comes home and says: 'Today, I learned about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.' The father is furious. 'Steve, listen carefully. This is very important. There is only one God … and we do not believe in Him!

There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on--a more reliable world in so far as it does not hide that its premise is illusion.

Life goes on. It doesn't go on. Yes, yes, I know, all we want in the end, we living, breathing creatures (am I still one of them?) is life. All we want to believe in is the persistence and vitality of life. Faced with the choice between death and the merest hint of life, what scrap, what token wouldn't we cling to in order to keep that belief? A leaf? A single moist, green leaf? That will do, that will be enough.

Hamlet's mother says to Hamlet, "Why seems it so particular with thee?" What is the difference between belief and make-belief? What makes us give to any one belief (since it is only a matter of shifting, tuning the mind) the peculiar weight of actuality? "For there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

For the early English farmer, the world around was full of spiritual beings, half divine, half devilish.

Life is full of obstacle illusions.

Adults...struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real.