Quotes About Belief

If destiny is implacable, that is because you have not known how to please it.

Paradoxical confidence is the confidence we place in someone on the basis of their failure or their absence of qualities. The prototype of of this confidence is the failure of prophecy [...] following which the group, instead of denying its leader and dispersing, closes ranks around him and creates religious, sectarian, and ecclesiastical institutions to preserve the faith. Institutions all the more solid for deriving their energy from the failure of the prophecy.

It is like truth according to Nietzsche: we no longer believe that the truth is true when all its veils have been removed. Similarly, we do not believe that war is war when all uncertainty is supposedly removed and it appears as a naked operation. The nudity of war is no less virtual than that of the erotic body in the apparatus of striptease.

One who lets others believe is always superior to one who believes, or makes others believe.

I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you don't like?

No se debe confundir la verdad con la opinión de la mayoría.

It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious... Poetry is a religion without hope.

The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.

Invoqué ou non invoqué, Le divin sera présent.

I have always preferred mythology to history. Because history is made up of truths which eventually turn into lies. Mythology is made up of lies that eventually become truths.

She did not thank him. She was accustomed to miracles and accepted them as part of daily life. She expected them to happen, and they always did.

Everyone believes very easily whatever he fears or desires.

I figured that when there's no way of knowing what the future holds it's just as easy to believe it'll be good as to believe it'll be bad.

Here's what I say - when you don't know or can't know the answer to a question, why not believe the answer you like best? It's as valid as any of the others - and it might be right.

He began to understand that just because some people thought certain behavior was wrong, that didn't make it so. A person could resist popular belief and stand up for personal principles, and though there might be consequences, not everything would necessarily be lost. In fact, something important might be gained, if only within oneself.

His people believed that the Mother had first created a spirit world, and the spirits of all things in it were perfect. The spirits then produced living copies of themselves, to populate the ordinary world. The spirit was the model, the pattern from which all things were derived, but no copy could be as perfect as the original; not even the spirits themselves could make perfect copies, that was why each was different.

He began to understand that just because some people thought certain behavior was wrong, that didn't make it so. A person could resist popular belief and stand up for personal principles, and though there might be consequences, not everything would be necessarily lost. In fact, something important might be gained, if only within oneself.

The test is not just something hard to do, the test is knowing you can do it.

The trouble with adults is that they never believe kids can do something even when they have good ideas.

I have just related the story of a missed vocation: I needed God, He was given to me, I received Him without realizing that I was seeking Him. Failing to take root in my heart, He vegetated in me for a while, then He died. Whenever anyone speaks to me about Him today, I say, with the easy amusement of an old beau who meets a former belle: Fifty years ago, had it not been for that misunderstanding, that mistake, the accident that separated us, there might have been something between us.

But to what extent did I believe in my delirium? That's the basic question, and yet I can't tell. I realized later that we can know everything about our attachments except their force, that is, their sincerity.

J'ai cru que votre amour allait finir son cours. Je connais mon erreur, et vous aimez toujours.

I thought if I told no one it might not be true.

I have tried, I said, but he does not believe me. It is too late for that now (it is always too late for truth, I thought).