Quotes About Belief

God is dead, but fifty thousand social workers have risen to take his place.

Eve: What is it about asking you Catholic questions that gets you all jumpy? Roarke: You'd be jumpy, too, if I asked you things that make you feel the hot breath of hell at your back. Eve: You're not going to hell. Roarke: Oh, and have you got some inside intel on that? Eve: You married a cop...you married me. I'm your goddamn salvation.

The majority of men could sooner be brought to believe themselves a piece of lava in the moon than to take themselves for a self.

Lord take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the unbeliever who would fain believe, on the galley slave of life who puts out to sea alone under a firmament no longer lit by the consoling beacon fires of the ancient hope

If I'd stayed there, would I always have been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvelous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.

Well, we live by hope.

If you believe in magic,' I (Kate) said. 'If it exists,' said Joanna, 'it doesn't matter a toss whether you believe in it or not.

Borro had not made his mind politically correct when closing it.

Whenever a child says "I don't believe in fairies" there's a little fairy somewhere that falls right down dead.

The reason birds can fly and we can't is simply that they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings.

Do you believe in fairies? If you believe clap your hands. Don't let Tinker die.

Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.

To the last we have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished.

Go for it, while you can. I know you have it in you. And I can't promise you'll get everything you want, but I can promise nothing will change if you don't try.

As G. K. Chesterton bemoaned, once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything.

1. In our scientifically oriented culture, traditional understandings of morality and related notions are considered passé.

2. The traditional view is neither scientifically testable nor easily compatible with evolution.

The role of intellectual development is primary in evangelical Christianity, but you might not know that from a cursory look at the church today.

we cannot "prove," that is, "make known to ourselves and to others," what God's will is without the renewing or transformation of our minds.

Christians must rely on the Holy Spirit in their intellectual pursuits, but this does not mean they should expend no mental sweat of their own in defending the faith.

If our lives and ministries are expressions of what we actually believe, and if what we believe is off center and yet so pervasive that it is seldom even brought to conscious discussion, much less debated, then this explains why our impact on the world is so paltry compared to our numbers. I cannot overemphasize the fact that this modern understanding of Christianity is neither biblical nor consistent with the bulk of church history.

while few would actually put it in these terms, faith is now understood as a blind act of will, a decision to believe something that is either independent of reason or that is a simple choice to believe while ignoring the paltry lack of evidence for what is believed. By contrast with this modern misunderstanding, biblically, faith is a power or skill to act in accordance with the nature of the kingdom of God, a trust in what we have reason to believe is true.

Understood in this way, we see that faith is built on reason.

Training in apologetics should be a regular part of discipleship. Apologetics is a New Testament ministry of helping people overcome intellectual obstacles that block them from coming to or growing in the faith by giving reasons for why one should believe Christianity is true and by responding to objections raised against it.