Quotes About Belief

I was four, and I sincerely believe that this is my first memory of life itself – as opposed to what I was told happened, as opposed to the pictures other people have painted for me.

What we believe as children forms us; what haunts us in our childhood and adolescence can make us do wayward things

WELL, NOW YOU KNOW HOW I FEEL ABOUT GOD," said Owen Meany. "I CAN'T SEE HIM—BUT I ABSOLUTELY KNOW HE IS THERE!

But miracles don't c-c-c-cause belief—real miracles don't m-m-m-make faith out of thin air; you have to already have faith in order to believe in real miracles.

every study of the gods, of everyone's gods, is a revelation of vengeance toward the innocent

It's not God who's fucked up, it's the screamers who say they believe in Him and who claim to pursue their ends in His holy name!

What no person has a right to is to delude others into the belief that faith is something of no great significance, or that it is an easy matter, whereas it is the greatest and most difficult of all things.

Pour Juan Diego, des morts ou des fantômes auraient dû avoir une toute autre attitude, surtout dans une église. Que venaient-ils chercher ? Ne connaissaient-ils pas les réponses désormais ?

IF SOME PREACHER'S AN ASSHOLE, THAT'S NOT PROOF THAT GOD DOESN'T EXIST! (page 286)

Then he looked only at me. "YOU'RE GETTING SMALLER, BUT I CAN STILL SEE YOU!" said Owen Meany. Then

BELIEF IS NOT AN INTELLECTUAL MATTER," he complained. "IF HE'S GOT SO MUCH DOUBT, HE'S IN THE WRONG BUSINESS.

The thing about sin, Jack, is that some people think it's very important and other people don't even believe it exists.

You're always telling me I don't have any faith," I wrote to Owen. "Well—don't you see?—that's a part of what makes me so indecisive. I wait to see what will happen next—because I don't believe that anything I might decide to do would matter.

Durante un período terrible de la vida, el adolescente se defrauda a sí mismo y cree que puede engañar al mundo entero. Está convencido de que es invulnerable.

We did not realize that there were forces beyond our play. Now I know they were the forces that contributed to our illusion of Owen's weightlessness; they were the forces we didn't have the faith to feel, they were the forces we failed to believe in—and they were also lifting up Owen Meany, taking him out of our hands. O God—please give him back! I shall keep asking You.

Of course, apologies are rarely acceptable to true believers—or to anyone who believes in pure good, or in pure evil.

Cho? ju? tyle razy prze?y?em m?k? i ?mier? Chrystusa, nieodmiennie niepokoj? si? o Jego zmartwychwstanie - jestem przera?ony, ?e w tym roku si? to nie uda.

That image of how the children can lift Owen over their heads in Sunday school—how he is light enough so they can easily pass him back and forth when the teacher is out of the room—is not only as near to the beginning of the novel as I could find a place for it; that image is echoed at the end of the novel, where Owen's seeming weightlessness is interpreted to mean that he was always in God's hands. But the penultimate paragraph of the

But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead …'" Pastor Merrill assured us. "'For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead,'" my father said.

I know three things. I know that my voice doesn't change, and I know when I'm going to die. I wish I knew why my voice never changes, I wish I knew how I was going to die; but God has allowed me to know more than most people know—so I'm not complaining. The third thing I know is that I am God's instrument; I have faith that God will let me know what I'm supposed to do, and when I'm supposed to do it. Happy New Year!

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.

And the trick of having faith, he said, was that it was necessary to believe in God without any great or even remotely reassuring evidence that we don't inhabit a godless universe.

That was when Angel Wells became a fiction writer, whether he knew it or not. That's when he learned how to make the make-believe matter to him more than real life mattered to him; that's when he learned how to paint a picture that was not real and never would be real, but in order to be believed at all—even on a sunny Indian summer day—it had to be better made and seem more real than real; it had to sound at least possible.

Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there was no room for doubt, there would be no room for me. —FREDERICK BUECHNER