Quotes About Belief

Those in love see renunciation in the same light: they imagine it while living in a state that is its opposite; and, never having so much as begun to try it, they cannot believe in its power of healing.

jealousy belonging to that family of unhealthy doubts far more easily removed by the vigor of an affirmation than by its plausibility.

A peculiarity of love, moreover, is that it makes us at once more mistrustful and more credulous, makes us quicker to suspect the one we love than we would have another woman, and to be readier to lend credence to her denials.

No doubt I had long been prepared, by virtue of the sway exercised over my imagination and my ability to be moved by the example of Swann, to believe that what I feared was true, instead of what I would have wished for. Thus the comfort brought by Albertine's affirmations was all but compromised for a moment because I recalled the story of Odette.

We believe that we can change the things around us in accordance with our desires—we believe it because otherwise we can see no favourable outcome. We do not think of the outcome which generally comes to pass and is also favourable: we do not succeed in changing things in accordance with our desires, but gradually our desires change.

?injenice nemaju pristušpa u svijet u kojemu žive naša uvjerenja, one ta uvjerenja nisu stvorile, pa ih ne mogu ni razoriti. ?injenice mogu uvjerenjima nametnuti najpouzdanija opovrgnu?a, a da ne proizvedu ni najmanji u?inak, a kamoli da ih oslabe.

But one reads the papers as one wants to with a bandage over one's eyes without trying to understand the facts, listening to the soothing words of the editor as to the words of one's mistress. We are beaten and happy because we believe ourselves unbeaten and victorious

A large part of what we believe to be true (and this applies even to our final conclusions) with a persistence equalled only by our sincerity, springs from an original misconception of our premisses.

Pois como a medicina é um compêndio dos erros sucessivos e contraditórios dos médicos, recorrendo aos melhores destes, corre-se o risco de solicitar uma verdade que será reconhecida falsa alguns anos mais tarde. De modo que acreditar na medicina seria a suprema loucura se não acreditar nela não fosse loucura maior, pois desse amontoado de erros se desvencilharam com o tempo algumas verdades.

Lo primero y lo más íntimo que yo sentía,..., que gobernaba todo lo demás, era mi creencia en la riqueza filosófica y la belleza del libro que estaba leyendo y mi deseo de apropiármelas, de cualquier libro que se tratara

He who is in the wrong believes himself in the right, as was the case with Germany, and he who is in the right supports it with arguments which only appear irrefutable to him because they respond to his anger.

She refrained from uttering it? So at least I long believed, for at that time I still supposed that it was by means of words that one communicated the truth to others.

At a time when I believed what people told me, I should have been tempted to believe Germany, then Bulgaria, then Greece when they proclaimed their pacific intentions. But since my life with Albertine and with Françoise had accustomed me to suspect those motives they did not express, I did not allow any word, however right in appearance of William II, Ferdinand of Bulgaria or Constantine of Greece to deceive my instinct which divined what each one of them was plotting.

A verdade que depositamos nas palavras não abre caminho diretamente, não tem irresistível evidência. Cumpre que decorra o tempo necessário para que se possa formar no interlocutor uma verdade da mesma espécie. E então o adversário político, que, apesar de raciocínios e provas, considerava traidor ao sectário da doutrina oposta, chega a compartilhar das detestadas convicções quando já não interessam àquele que antes tentava inutilmente difundi-las.

But, as a matter of fact, we each derived a certain satisfaction from the mannerism, being still at the age in which one believes that one gives a thing real existence by giving it a name.

My happiness and my life needed Albertine to be virtuous, thus they had posited once for all that she was. Armed with this salutary faith, I could safely allow my mind to play sadly with the suppositions which it formulated without believing in them. I thought, "Perhaps she does love women," as one thinks, "I might die during the night"; we say the words to ourselves, but we do not believe them, we make plans for the morrow.

Self-interest implicit in not being wrong in our pre-judgment limits the time we shall remember it and encourages us to believe we never indulged in it.

Les faits ne pénètrent pas dans le monde où vivent nos croyances, ils n'ont pas fait naître celles-ci, ils ne les détruisent pas.

Humane motives are too sacred for the person they are used to appeal to not to bow before them, whether he believes them to be sincere or not; I did not wish for a moment to appear to be weighing up the relative importance of my invitation and the possible fatigue of Mme de Guermantes, and I promised to say nothing to her about the object of my visit, acting as though I had been completely taken in by this rigmarole M. de Guermantes had staged for my benefit.

But when a belief vanishes, there survives it—more and more vigorously so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new things—a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it did once animate, as if it was in them and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause—the death of the gods.

praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator. And I was well aware, too, that it was not merely a work of art

I loved my father, but I was not like him. I never needed to believe the best of people. I took them as they were: two-faced, desperate, kind - perhaps all at once. But to Pa, they were all children of god, poor troubled sheep, who only needed love and an even break. He needed the world to back up what his religion told him about people. And when it came down to a choice between reason and faith, he let go of reason.

I had always believed that right was like north to my father: a thing as real as sunlight, a place on the map, the arrow on a compass.

I had always believed that right was like north to my father: a thing as real as sunlight, a place on the map, the arrow on a compass. It was the unalterable facts of duty, love, and conscience. But our world had gone so far north that the compass could make no sense of it, could only spin hopelessly in it binnacle. North had melted right off the map.