Quotes About Belief

Never reproach him with his own weakness, for then he will become wholly weak. Never let him feel that but for you he would be useless, for then he will indeed become useless. You must search for the few strong threads in him and weave your fabric with those, and where the threads are weak, never trust to them. Supply your own in secret.

It was strange how these poems came to him nowadays, the distillation of his private emotions, of his disillusionment, of his solitude, of his yearning for a future in which, nevertheless, he could not believe.

It is not that we cannot believe," he replied. "It is that we do not want anything enough. Faith rises from necessity. We have no necessity.

The lie deceives no one so much as the one who tells it.

And will you understand me when I say I would fight to keep you free from such beliefs because for you they would be false, and at the same time I would fight to keep my mother in those same beliefs because for her they are true and necessary? She would be lost without them, for by them she has lived and by them she must die. But you and l—we must have our own beliefs to live and die in

and they looked with coming hatred and with fear upon this young man, saying in their hearts they knew he lied, because they could not believe there was in the whole world a man who would choose an earthen house when he might have a great one.

I have come to believe that the natural human heart is good, and I have observed that this goodness is found in all varieties of people, and that it can and does prevail in spite of other corruptions. This human goodness alone provides hope enough for the world.

Life without idealism is empty indeed. We just hope or starve to death.

Yes, their ancients had taught them that no good man would be a soldier and that the warlike man was the least of men and not to be respected, and so they had all believed.

I'd believed I could keep out the tales and the toys but had failed on both counts.

The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last—that they don't disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security.

The truth you believe in and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.

Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly. The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last—that they don't disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security.

As long as we believe that there is something that will permanently satisfy our hunger for security, suffering is inevitable.

I N TAOISM there's a famous saying that goes, "The Tao that can be spoken is not the ultimate Tao." Another way you could say that, although I've never seen it translated this way, is, "As soon as you begin to believe in something, then you can no longer see anything else." The truth you believe in and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.

The root of these fundamentalist tendencies, these dogmatic tendencies, is a fixed identity—a fixed view we have of ourselves as good or bad, worthy or unworthy, this or that. With a fixed identity, we have to busy ourselves with trying to rearrange reality, because reality doesn't always conform to our view.

Don't make gods into demons.

We sometimes think that dharma is something outside of ourselves—something to believe in, something to measure up to. However, dharma isn't a belief; it isn't dogma. It is total appreciation of impermanence and change.

Trungpa Rinpoche once said that the dharma has to be experienced because when the real quality of our lives, including the obstacles and problems and experiences that cause us to start questioning, becomes intense, any mere philosophical belief isn't going to hold a candle to the reality of what we are experiencing.

False optimism sooner or later means disillusionment , anger and hopelessness.

As for the "anger" of the volcano, we leave it up to the local populations who create their demons, their gods and their divine punishment.

How is it possible to hold such anger against something you don't believe in?

Her anger said, as anger is apt to say, that God was with her— that all heaven, though it were crowded with spirits watching them, must be on her side.

Who can refute a sneer?