Quotes About Belief

Why do we believe one stranger and not another?

What does it take to be a writer? 1) Foolhardily believing that someone might actually be interested in reading what you've written. 2) Spending an enormous amount of time writing it as well as you can. 3) Accepting that, at best, you'll probably be paid something around 25 cents an hour for your efforts.

I'm sitting on the back deck, gazing up at the moonless night sky. The Milky Way is a hazy diagonal across the star-glittery blackness. In the immensely vast universe, we are a tiniest speck. In the billions of years of history, we are the merest infinitesimal instant. Yet we persist in believing that what we do can be important.

Many people believe that karma is linear: If you do some terrible (or wonderful) thing, you will receive your just desserts. However, the way it seems to be set up is not as personal as that. You have a thought or take some action, and there is a result. The consequences will be experienced, but not necessarily by you, and nobody knows when.

ce qui convainc de la nécessité de la vie future, ce ne sont pas les raisonnements mais ceci : tu marches dans la vie la main dans la main avec un homme, et tout à coup, cet homme disparaît là-bas dans le néant, et toi tu restes devant cet abîme et tu y plonges ton regard (Guerre et Paix, livre deuxième, 2ième partie, ch. XII)

Si tout le monde ne se battait que par conviction il n'y aurait pas de guerre (Guerre et Paix, livre premier, 1ère partie, ch. VI)

Boga je teško spoznati, ali to ne zna?i da ga nema, ve? je to znak Njegovog Veli?anstva, a naše slabosti. Bog je kao ?ista voda koju bismo htjeli da popijemo; a ne možete ?istu vodu naliti u prljav sud, pa onda suditi o njenoj ?isto?i

And however much the princess was assured that in our time young people themselves must settle their fate, she was unable to believe it, as she would have been unable to believe that in anyone's time the best toys for five-year-old children would be loaded pistols.

Currency is… a shared delusion in the minds of all men, a necessary delusion if civilised society were not to fall… yet so many lives, so many cities and kingdoms and nations, ultimately depend on hoping that no man ever stops to wonder why he values discs of a shiny yellow metal so highly…"   -

People are drawn across the bridge of belief by their anticipation of a better experience and a better life. Effective leaders ignite people's imaginations by painting vivid, compelling, and personally relevant pictures—ones that move them. As John Quincy Adams made clear, "If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.

We live in an age of distraction, of overwhelming amounts of conflicting information and competing priorities. And these complications can easily derail our progress on the bridge of belief. Belief requires focus. It demands that we follow the lead of our feeling mind, of our intuition and assumptions. Distractions and difficulties turn on our thinking mind, which undermines belief by overriding our instincts.

Belief is a personal construct, an emotionally-colored fusion of imperfect mental processes like perception and memory.

We are all quite capable of believing in anything as long as it's improbable.

It was no problem for me to say I came from another world and could go back and forth in time in my emphysemic old Tardis which was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. Problem? For me who believed in Guardian Angels and was convinced that pigs were possessed by devils after their New Testament encounter with God's son? It was easy and I loved it.

My old skill at self-delusion overrode my doubts as I told myself that Dexter probably believed in me. I could believe anything then. I still can as long as it is improbable.

When the doctor was there, Alfred refused to believe that he'd had a stroke. "I can't have had a stroke," he grated, in a terrible rage, "I've got 93,000 pounds in my current account."

I was playing Rasputin and what was motivating him was crumpet really, and I was extremely keen on crumpet so I was really rather good as Rasputin. And my next catastrophic failure was Macbeth, who I played in the style of a crumpet-lover, and then when Doctor Who came along, I embraced this lunacy, this cloud-cuckoo-land where people had to be convinced by absolute nonsense. I came from a very religious background, so it was easy for me to believe in something I knew nothing about.

Those who maintain that writing cannot be taught are in effect promoting the Priesthood Theory of Writing. I short, a few are called, most are not, and nothing anyone does can alter that process.

I believe," he said, "in what I call the secret mainstream. Kafka was there too. Today, yes, we know Kafka was the voice of an overwhelming bureaucracy with a deep evil inside of it. Often we see these figures in the secret mainstream. I am one of them.

Even after I lost my religious faith, Christianity remained to me deeply and resonantly interesting, and I have long believed that anyone who does not find Christianity interesting has only his or her unfamiliarity with the topic to blame.

What Christianity promises, I do not understand. What its god could possibly want, I have never been able to imagine, not even when I was a Christian.

If you believe in peace, act peacefully; if you believe in love, acting lovingly; if you believe every which way, then act every which way, that's perfectly valid - but don't go out trying to sell your beliefs to the system. You end up contradicting what you profess to believe in, and you set a bum example. If you want to change the world, change yourself.

Do you believe in God?' Julie asked. 'No. But I'm old enough to recognize that we simply have no idea what lies beyond the boundaries of our knowledge and to take some comfort from that ignorance.

What was that World War I saying, "Trust the Lord and pass the ammo"? For me, trust the doctors and the Lord and pass the Velcade, Revlimid, dexamethasone.