Quotes About Belief

How inadequate we are in our attempts to bring nature under our control, Henry thought. How careless of us to believe that we can manipulate diseases to kill, rather than to cure. We're like schoolchildren playing with matches. One day we'll burn the house down.

Maybe it's an insanity test, Haggis thought—if you believe it, you're automatically kicked out. He considered that possibility. But when he read it again, he decided, "This is madness.

The bad stuff is easier to believe. You ever notice that?

A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they're nowhere.

By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed.

There is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.

The trouble is, when professional spies go out of their way to make a definitive statement about one of their own, the public tends to believe the opposite: which puts us all back where we started.

To learn a belief without belief is to sing a song without the tune.

Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.

A person who believes ... that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

While we read a novel, we are insane--bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.

Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren't real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.

I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

A man who saw a miracle would reject his eyes' witness, if those with him saw nothing.

What do you mean you don't believe in homosexuality? It's not like the Easter Bunny, your belief isn't necessary.

What do you mean, you "Don't believe in homosexuality"? It's not like the Easter Bunny, your belief isn't necessary.

I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more of it I have.

It has not been the fashion to be scientific about religion, but it is necessary that we should be scientific; it is time that we examined ourselves as to our faith and tried to know what we believe and why, and on what we base our belief.

Vegetables contain more nutriment than an equal amount of dead flesh. This will sound a surprising and incredible statement to many people, because they have been brought up to believe that they cannot exist unless they defile themselves with flesh, and this delusion is so widely spread that it is difficult to awaken the average man from it.

That our intuition could lead us astray is troubling in direct proportion to the degree of trust we place in it. The solution would seem to be: Don't be overly trusting. Mix in a healthy dose of skepticism. But suppose we don't have a say in the matter? Suppose we're hardwired to trust—to believe in—our instincts, regardless of whether they're right? Suddenly the problem of not knowing becomes a lot more complicated.

Diggs lubricated her skepticism with diplomacy.

She wanted to say in a voice thick and passionate, "you're so wrong", but what was the point of saying that when they didn't realize their rules were only that, their rules, and not some absolute, pre-existing creed that was their mission to interpret and protect?