Quotes About Belief

The Holy Spirit gives freedom from the past, joy for the moment, and faith for the future.

Galileo was no idiot. Only an idiot could believe that science requires martyrdom - that may be necessary in religion, but in time a scientific result will establish itself.

If one were to bring ten of the wisest men in the world together and ask them what was the most stupid thing in existence, they would not be able to discover anything so stupid as astrology.

Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.

for Communists, "the future is more real than the present." The belief in this "reality" is why radicals discount the apparent freedoms and material benefits of the actual world they live in. Their eyes are fixed on a revolutionary future that is perfect and just.

There is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense, education and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves.

Any person seasoned with a just sense of the imperfections of natural reason, will fly to revealed truth with the greatest avidity.

Philosophy would render us entirely Pyrrhonian, were not nature too strong for it.

The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.

Belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain.

A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence

To be a philosophical Sceptic is the first and most essential step towards being a sound, believing Christian.

Scepticism may be theoretically irrefutable, but even the sceptic must 'act … and live, and converse, like other men', since human nature gives him no choice.

All knowledge degenerates into probability.

Here then we are first to consider a book, presented to us by a barbarous and ignorant people, written in an age when they were still more barbarous, and in all probability long after the facts which it relates, corroborated by no concurring testimony, and resembling those fabulous accounts, which every nation gives of its origin.

On belief in miracles) - "The gazing populace receive greedily, without examination, whatever soothes superstition and promotes wonder.

Hear the verbal protestations of all men: Nothing so certain as their religious tenets. Examine their lives: You will scarcely think that they repose the smallest confidence in them.

Long before we have reached the last steps of the argument leading to our theory, we are already in Fairyland

I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense, who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.

All beliefs about matters of fact or real existence are derived merely from something that is present to the memory or senses, and a customary association of that with some other thing.

The worst speculative Sceptic ever I knew, was a much better Man than the best superstitious Devotee & Bigot." "I must inform you, too, that this was the way of thinking of the Antients on this Subject. If a Man made Proffession of Philosophy, whatever his Sect was, they alaways expected to find more Regulaity in his Life and Manners, than in those of ignorant & illiterate.

Weakness, fear, melancholy, together with ignorance, are, therefore, the true sources of Superstition.

Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity (the church's ) : and whoever is moved by faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person , which subverts all the principles of his understanding and gives him a determination of believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.

What age or period of life is the most addicted to superstition? The weakest and most timid. What sex? The same answer must be given.