Quotes About Belief

The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.

I have always been on the side of the heretics, against those who burned them, because the heretics so often turned out to be right....Dead, but right.

Do not get angry because others question what you believe, be calm and loving, for anger is the root of a faulty belief.

How can there be such anger in the minds of the gods?

I think it is having answers and not simply anger, and providing solutions that people believe will change their lives in a radical way but do it in a way that's sensible.

He was all show, and he had the conviction, as such people do, that show is the same as substance. He didn't think he was fooling other people; he had fooled himself.

he sees, one cannot know enough to trust. To trust is simply to give oneself; the giving is for the future, for which there is no evidence.

We see how everything—the whole world—is belittled by the idea that all creation is moving or ought to move toward an end that some body, some human body, has thought up.

We cannot think about the future, of course, for the future does not exist: the existence of the future is an article of faith...We do not need to plan or devise a 'word of the future'; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us.

The modern ignorance is in people's assumption that they can outsmart their own nature. It is in the arrogance that will believe nothing that cannot be proved, and respect nothing it cannot understand, and value nothing it cannot sell.

But I had read all of [the Bible] by then, and I could see that it changed. And if it changed, how could all of it be true?

I believe in American political principles, and I will not sit idly by and see those principles destroyed by sorry practice. I am ashamed that American government should have become the chief cause of disillusionment with American principles.

We cannot think about the future, of course, for the future does not exist: the existence of the future is an article of faith.

We live by the assumption that what's good for us is good for the world. And this is based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what's good for us.

For a long time then I seemed to live by the slender thread of faith, spun out from within me. From this single thread I spun strands that joined me to the good things of the world. And then I spun more threads that joined all the strands together, making a life.

Invariably the failure of organized religions, by which they cut themselves off from mystery and therefore from sanctity, lies in the attempt to impose an absolute division between faith and doubt, to make belief perform as knowledge; when they forbid their prophets to go into the wilderness, they lose the possibility of renewal.

And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led—make of that what you will.

His life has never rested on anything he has known beforehand — none of it. He chose it before he knew it, and again afterwards.

The faith that limitless technological progress will finally solve the problems of limitless contamination seems to depend upon some sort of neo-religion.

The modern ignorance is in people's assumption that they can outsmart their own nature. It is in the arrogance that will believe nothing it cannot prove, and respect nothing it cannot understand, and value nothing it cannot sell.

They learned to have a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works—although they could tell you that this world had been made by God Himself.

can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present

Why, so can I, or so can any man; / But will they come when you do call for them?

I bet if you go through the rest of your life telling yourself, I'm sparkling, you'll have a whole different energy and experience.