Quotes About Belief

If I had only life's book to read ... I should not believe in a God of love. I should turn Persian, and believe in two gods, one of love and good-will, one of hate and malice.

I believe that God is the Great Companion, that we are not left orphans, that we may have comradeship with him.

A bad God is worse than no God at all.

There are many men, and a large number, who, though they do not wish to be rid of God, do not very much care to have him.

It is true that even to the heathen death did not end all. They believed in something after death, but they knew not what--a vague, shadowy, unsatisfactory immortality.

So long as the creed is a window, and we see God through it, it is good ... but when men are content simply to believe in the creed, or in the church, or in the Bible, they are worshipping idols.

It is not possible even to state the doctrine of an atheistic creation without using the language of theism in the statement.

If you and I have not seen God, we cannot bear witness to God.

It is a poor sort of fatalism which makes men fold their hands and wait for fortune.

I do not believe that the laws of nature have ever been violated, for this would be to believe that God who dwells in nature and animates it has violated the laws of his own being.

He who looks for the worst in men will not be without belief in a personal devil; he who looks for the best in men will not be without faith in a personal God.

My faith in miracles rests also on my faith in Christ -- he himself a greater miracle by far than any attributed to him.

When a man begins to justify the ways of God to man, he has entered on a very dangerous process.

This subordination of time and place to comfort and convenience is a part of her quite unconscious and therefore unformulated theory that life is the end and that all household arrangements are means to that end. She therefore believes that things are for folks, not folks for things, and always and instinctively acts on that belief.

Never say you are too old. You do not say it now, perhaps; but by and by, when the hair grows gray and the eyes grow dim and the young despair comes to curse the old age, you will say, "It is too late for me." Never too late! Never too old! How old are you--thirty, fifty, eighty? What is that in immortality? We are but children.

For the man who does not want God of course will not find him; and the man who is busy searching for something else will not find God; and certainly the man who has coined the atrophy of faculty into a philosophy that the Eternal and the Invisible cannot be seen or known, cannot see or know.

Courage is the Christian's coronation. There is no crown without it.

One of the things that bothers me most is the growing belief in the country that security is more important than freedom. It ain't.

Optimism will grow like a flower if the soil be properly prepared.

The tendency to superstitions should be counteracted from the earliest age; or rather steps should be taken to protect the mind of the child from superstitions imposed upon it by ignorant nurses or silly mothers.

Human society is part of the general order, and the more our knowledge increases the less we are inclined to believe that the birth or death of princes, the rise or fall of millionaires, are matters that cause the sun to stand still or even produce the appearance of comets in the sky.

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.

This ability to exist in pieces is what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma.

But when the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?