Quotes About Belief

It's approximately the same if you're a Jew," the rabbi said, "although we tend to emphasize that you're a Jew whether you like it or not. It's more a matter of God tracking you down than of you finding God.

Over the years, Leila had come to believe that politicians were literally made of special stuff, chemically different stuff. The senator was flabby and bad-haired and acne-scarred and yet completely magnetic.

In Technology We Trust. Need to put that on the new hundred-dollar bill.

I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure, and even if I did, what business would I, who feel like the sick one, have in offering it? It's hard to consider literature a medicine; sooner or later the therapeutically minded reader will end up fingering reading itself as the sickness.

Ora si rendeva conto […] che aveva sempre odiato essere la figlia di un pastore. I padri delle sue amiche progettavano edifici, curavano malattie, perseguivano criminali. Suo padre era come un fabbricante di croci, però peggio. La sua fede ardente, la sua santità, erano un odore che aveva sempre minacciato di aderire a lei, come la puzza delle Chesterfield, però peggio, perché non si poteva lavare via.

Science and delusion had no ground in common.

To have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets.

Enid had chosen to believe the promise of his looks. Life then became a matter of waiting for his personality to change.

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.

W]hen a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds.

Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.

Each of us thinks we see the world directly, as it really is. We further believe that the facts as we see them are there for all to see, therefore others should agree with us. If they don't agree, it follows either that they have not yet been exposed to the relevant facts or else that they are blinded by their interests and ideologies.

When I had asked Mrs. Flowers how she held up in the face of all the death and violence within her neighborhood, she had given me a simple answer: "This family talks to God.

Astrology fell into the class of a fake lie ...and not worth the efforts of the debunking engine Cicero had been born with in place of a brain. Cicero's capacities were reserved for lies that mattered. Ideology, though that word was yet unknown to him: the veil of sustaining fiction that drove the world, what people needed to believe. This, Cicero wished to unmask and unmake, decry and destroy. (p. 65)

Mai infrangere le illusioni degli altri se non si è certi di poter offrir loro un'alternativa migliore di quella a cui li si vuole strappare.

You could harbor a man in your bed or your body, play on his nervous system like Paderewski at the keyboard, and not shift his brain one inch out of the concrete of dogma. (p. 5)

The truth is the truth. What changes is what we know about it and what we're willing to believe.

Is he nuts? I think the expression used to be 'touched by God'. So that would be a yes.

It's just that I'm fifteen, and I have this crazy idea I might actually have a life in front of me. I don't see how it's going to do me much good to believe that the world is over and this is just an epilogue.

Those who believe that liberal democracy and the free market can be defended by the force of law and regulation alone, without an internalised sense of duty and morality, are tragically mistaken.

Just because you're an atheist, that doesn't mean you wouldn't love for things to have reasons for why they are.

I tried the key in all the doors, even though he said he didn't recognize it. It's not that I didn't trust him, becuase I did. It's that at the end of my search I wanted to be able to say: I don't know how I could have tried harder.

She] always knew he was a fiction but believed in him anyway.

I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time... ...why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time, my greatest regret is how much I believed in the future.