Quotes About Belief

You're too worried about figuring out what you can believe about all of this, and then figuring out how to control it. That's how most people approach their lives. Way I feel, though, after a lot of years of living? Not much of what matters in the world is under your control. You don't dictate, you adapt. That's all. So stop trying to control this, and start trying to listen to what it's telling you.

People believed that they were haunted by bad memories, but that wasn't the truth. The most sinister hauntings were from unrealized futures.

Augustine once warned, "If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don't like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself."80

Augustine once commented, "If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don't like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself.

It is, of course, essential to remember that theology is not merely a matter of intellect, but also of experience. Theology is concerned with spiritual realities, and must include personal experience as well as ideas ... The feeling equally with reason must share in the consideration of theology, because theology is of the heart, and the deepest truths are inextricably bound up with personal needs and experiences.17

It may be Jewish in the traditional sense to deny that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, but that is only because that particular form of Jewishness deviated at some key points from the Hebrew Scriptures.

The hyper-grace teachers are simply wrong when they claim that all our future sins are forgiven the moment we are saved.

Here, then, is a simple rule of thumb for all of us to apply: If the words of Jesus challenge something I believe or challenge the way I live, the problem is not with Jesus. The problem is with me. Charles Spurgeon expressed this in broader, scriptural terms when he said, "If there is any verse that you would like left out of the Bible, that is the verse that ought to stick to you, like a blister, until you really attend to its teaching."31

Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God; and whatever we ask we receive from him, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him. And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us. Whoever keeps his commandments abides in God, and God in him. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit whom he has given us. —1 JOHN 3:21–24

I believe in God, family, truth between people, the power of love.

You can't see reality. You never could: You just distort the truth until you end up with a version you can live with.

He just knew we would find luck, but believing something don't make it true.

The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don't know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.

I completely trust Gloria Vanderbilt. I have always found her very honest.

and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of ourselves and the world are all-powerful.

He had been exposed to the new wine of unfamiliar concepts and the old wineskin of tradition and rigid religion was unable to hold it. I had been there many times myself. Soon he would have to make a choice— pour out the new wine or find new wineskins.

This undermines a central tenet of progressivism, that now we're all smart but before everyone used to be dumb (how convenient for us!).

Yet for the evangelical left, with humor as with everything else, if it's not for everyone then it's not for anyone.

I think the greatest taboos in America are faith and failure.

Love and death are very similar. They're the times in your life when you most want to believe in magic, when you yearn for some symbolic act or retrospective edit that can change the world you find yourself in.

I guess, like some guy once said, if triangles invented a god, the chances are high it would have three sides.

Deep inside each of us is a part that mistrusts order and craves the relief of seeing the world shatter into the chaos it believes lies underneath all along.

faith could only be stretched so far before people demanded an element of proof,

Our purpose is not to be the answer, but rather the question. To make each day a little brighter and leave the world a better place than we found it. That is the true path, which we all must choose to follow, regardless of whether it leads us beneath the shadow of a heel or the tire of a car. Our purpose is to walk that path with our heads held high, hope in our hearts, and belief that our roles, no matter how small, are integral to the grand design.