Quotes About Belief

when it comes to the caprices and manipulations of the gods or God, whichever philosophy you may embrace, we are all of us merely pawns in their games, rather than players.

I remember so many things [. . .] The problem is, only half of them are true . . . and the half which is true keeps changing places with the half which is false.

Yet he derives emotional strength merely from the knowledge of her existence.

These, of course, are far more enlightened times, when it is only acceptable to believe that not being a Christian is likely to mean one is a criminal only if one is a Muslim (or at least so we've been assured by people who claim to know such things)

It's time we capture our imaginations for Christ

The Left Behind series by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye presents a detailed and adrenaline-laced roadmap for the authors' beliefs about Biblical end-times prophecy.

The danger of total propaganda is not that propaganda will be believed. The danger is that nothing will be believed and that every communication becomes suspect. In the end, no communication is being recieved anymore. Everything anyone says is considered a demand and is resisted, resented, and in effect not heard at all. The end results of total propaganda are not fanatics, but cynics - but this, of course, may be even greater and more dangerous corruption. (p. 20)

One reason why it is difficult for management to accept unexpected success is that all of us tend to believe that anything that has lasted a fair amount of time must be 'normal' and go on 'forever'. Anything that contradicts what we have come to consider a law of nature is then rejected as unsound, unhealthy, and obviously abnormal.

millions of people "deeply believed things that were verifiably untrue.

finally there is just one truth: the official version.

If my father could not abide Christianity, he had no objections to individual Christians.

For van Fraassen, when a theory passes a lot of tests and becomes well established, the right attitude to have toward the theory is to accept it, in a special sense. To accept a theory is to (z) believe (provisionally) that the theory is empirically adequate, and to (z) use the concepts the theory provides when thinking about further problems and when trying to extend and refine the theory.

And then I realize that maybe not so much has changed as we all thought, that maybe the whole idea of progress is a paradox, a rocking horse that goes forward and back, forward and back, but stays in the same place, giving only the comforting illusion of motion.

At first I didn't believe in women and unicorns but that was before I knew about the power of chick stuff and before I knew Vageena Hertz.

People do not reconsider," Langer observes, "what they mindlessly accepted as true."14

even though much of what America believed about itself was also fraudulent, at least the press and publishers could express unorthodox views.

In the countryside, traditional parents avoid flattery, and the mother's responses were automatic—it was like knocking her knee with a rubber hammer. She didn't want to spoil the child, but there was also the Chinese superstition that pride attracts misfortune.

There is hope in such a superstition; there is the illusion of control.

Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself," according to Anaïs Nin (herself the author of several abortions). But what if it's not a lie? And what if the someone is you?

The evangelist put his hand on the man's shoulder and asked him if he wanted to become a Christian. The man growled back at the evangelist, I'm a deacon in this church! And the evangelist said, Don't let that stand in your way!

It is just as crazy not to be crazy about Christ as it is to be crazy about anything else.

God gives us not only the truth but also the ability to believe it; not only the new thing to see but also the new eye to see it with.

It is closer to the truth to say that God is crazy than that God is reasonable. I suspect God merely smiles when someone calls him crazy, but shakes His head and frowns when someone calls Him reasonable.

We try too much and trust too little. Count the times God's Book tells us to try. Now count the times it tells us to trust.