Quotes About Belief

wanted to know how any ethical system—much less a religion so indomitable that it had survived every evil mankind could throw at it—could flow from a command from God for a man to slaughter his son.

realized that in the end – when all else is dust – loyalty to those we love is all we can carry with us to the grave. Faith – true faith – was trusting in that love.

Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality…and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.

I don't believe in God with a capital G and, despite their obvious solidity, I don't believe in the gods with their small g's. Not as real forces in the universe. But I believe in the bitch-goddess Irony. She crosses all time. She rules men and gods and God alike.

Abraham was testing God. By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right—in Abraham's eyes and the hearts of his offspring—to become the God of Abraham.

Every time I believe I know one of these men or officers, I find that I am wrong. A million years of Man's Medicinal progress will never reveal the secret condition and sealed compartments of the Human soul.

From what Paul tells me," said the Monsignor, "the Consul was true to his convictions, faithful to the memory of his grandmother Siri.

The best lack all conviction," he thought, "while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Dur

I meant only to point out that in hopelessness there is always hope.

began to wonder when this expedition had crossed the boundary from the merely fantastic into the region of the absurdly unbelievable.

All of our lives are governed by a certain degree of faith in bullshit.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

My God, whispered Meina Gladstone, looking down at the body of Admiral Singh. I'm doing all this on the strength of a dream. Sometimes, said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, dreams are all that separates us from the machines.

They're just words. And words alone don't really mean anything. It's what you feel and what you believe when you say them that matter.

There are days when I think I don't believe anymore. When I think I've grown too old for miracles. And that's right when another seems to happen.

I'm looking to make a miracle

I'm curious how someone...finds God, or solace, or peace or whatever it is he finds out here alone...while he's reciting words. Is it just a matter of believing what you say?

Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?

There's a great expression in Twelve Step programs: Act as if. Act as if you're a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don't wait for anybody to tell you it's okay. Take that shimmer and show us our humanity. That's your job.

morning was true will by evening have become a lie.

I clung to the only story I could tolerate.

Let me fall if I must fall. The one I will become will catch me." —THE BAAL SHEM TOV

I'm giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.

He look'd a little disorder'd, when he said this, but I did not apprehend any thing from it at that time, believing as it us'd to be said, that they who do those things never talk of them; or that they who talk of such things never do them.