Quotes About Belief

But then I am an imaginative man; and the butcher, the baker, and the tax-gatherer are not the only credible realities in existence to my mind.

I said, No man is worth fretting for in that way. And she said, There are men worth dying for, Lucy, and he is one of them.

Nada hay en este mundo, Betteredge, que se aparezca como una cosa probable, si no logramos vincularla con nuestra engañosa experiencia, y sólo creemos en lo novelesco cuando se halla estampado en letras de molde.

This is the tragedy of almost every civilization—that its soul is in its faith, and seldom survives philosophy.

I had rather believe all the fables in the Legend, and the Talmud and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind... A little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion. For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity.

Nothing is impossible to gods and authors.

Death is the origin of all religions, and perhaps if there had been no death there would have been no gods.

the decline of religious belief,which has all sorts of effects on morals and even on politics because religion has been a tool of politics. But today in Europe it ceases to be a tool, it has very little influence in determining political decisions—

Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous. Plato

Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For

By 1911 I found it impossible to continue my pretenses to orthodoxy;

Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past.

Belief in God, said Diderot, is bound up with submission to autocracy; the two rise and fall together; and "men will never be free till the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Since there was no Heaven in ancient Jewish theology,231 virtue had to be rewarded here or never.

What I am not," he says, most truthfully, "that for me is God

We have always goodly stock in us of that which we condemn: as only similars can be profitably contrasted, so only similar people quarrel, and the bitterest wars are over the slightest variations of purpose or belief.

W]orship, if not the child, is at least the brother, of fear.

The idea of hell disappeared from educated thought, even from pulpit homilies. Presbyterians became ashamed of the Westminster Confession, which had pledged them to belief in a God who had created billions of men and women despite his foreknowledge that, regardless of their virtues and crimes, they were predestined to everlasting hell.

As the contrast between the militant and the industrial types is indicated by inversion of the belief that individuals exist for the benefit of the state into the belief that the state exists for the benefit of individuals; so the contrast between the industrial type and the type likely to be evolved from it is indicated by inversion of the belief that life is for work into the belief that work is for life.

In some way the god had to be appeased and satisfied; for his worshipers had made him in the image and dream of themselves, and he had no great regard for human life, or womanly tears.

As long as there is poverty, there will be gods

These steeples, everywhere pointing upward, ignoring despair and lifting hope--these lofty city spires or simple chapels in the hills--they rise at every step from the earth to the sky; in every village of every nation on the globe they challenge doubt and invite weary hearts to consolation. Is it all a vain delusion? Is there nothing beyond life but death, and nothing beyond death but decay? We cannot know, but as long as men suffer, those steeples will remain

fue el miedo lo que en primer lugar creó a los dioses»:1 el miedo a fuerzas ocultas en la tierra, los ríos, los océanos, los árboles, los vientos y el cielo. La religión se convirtió en el culto propiciatorio de esas fuerzas a través de ofrendas, sacrificios, conjuros y oraciones.

La historia ha justificado a la Iglesia en la creencia de que las masas de la humanidad desean una religión pródiga en milagros, misterio y mitos.