Quotes About Belief

God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.

The fanatical atheists...are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against the traditional 'opium of the people'—cannot bear the music of the spheres.

The horizon of many people is a circle with a radius of zero. They call this their point of view.

There are two ways to live your life: one as though nothing is a miracle and the other as though everything is a miracle.

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

For that again, is what all manner of religion essentially is: childish dependency.

Spirit and soul is horseshit of the worst sort. Obviously there are no fairies, no Santa Clauses, no spirits. What there is, is human goals and purposes as noted by sane existentialists. But a lot of transcendentalists are utter screwballs.

If you prefer to perform well and want to be accepted by others, you are concerned that you will fail and be rejected. Your healthy concern encourages you to act competently and nicely. But if you devoutly believe that you absolutely, under all conditions, must perform well and that you have to be accepted by others, you will then tend to make yourself—yes, make yourself—panicked if you don't perform as well as you supposedly must.

For many years now I have had the quaint idea that all humans-yes, the whole six billion of them on this planet-are out of their fucking minds.

People and things do not upset us. Rather, we upset ourselves by believing that they can upset us.

The concept of deservingness for one's "sins" implies that certain acts are unquestionably under all conditions "sinful." And this is impossible to prove.

Talk to me. I'll believe anything.

To be psychologically healthy, we have to believe that what we do has some effect on what happens to us. Even if the perception of control is delusional, it usually leads to more productive action than believing that what we do makes no difference.

Where man sees but withered leaves, God sees sweet flowers growing.

Sometimes it feels as though one is surely committing spiritual suicide. It feels that all that is best in one's life is being eroded and lost. But still go on. This is faith.

Edward Jenner's discovery of vaccination drew harsh criticism from the pulpit. Clergymen denounced the doctor for having put himself above God. Only the Almighty, they said, sends illness and only the Almighty cures it. Vaccination, critics charged, was "a diabolical operation," and its inventor was "flying in the face of Providence

White Christians often explained the disaster in a time-honored way: it was God's punishment of humanity for its sings. To the seven deadly sins--anger, greed, lust, envy, pride, laziness, gluttony--they added an eighth sin: 'worshiping science.

Some proverbs live because they are too true to die. Others endure because they have a smug sound and nobody has bothered to bury them.

Out stepped Lass, - tired, confused, a little frightened, but eagerly willing to make friends with a world which she still insisted on believing was friendly. It is hard to shake a collie pup's inborn faith in the friendliness of mankind, but once shaken, it is more than shaken. It is shattered beyond hope of complete mending.

Faith begins where Reason sinks exhausted.

The human spirit is not dead. It lives on in secret.... It has come to believe that compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.

One truth stands firm. All that happens in world history rests on something spiritual. If the spiritual is strong, it creates world history. If it is weak, it suffers world history.

Arguing from facts never wins a definitive victory against skillfully presented opinion.

Der unnatürliche Zustand, daß der Mensch nicht an eine von ihm selber erkannte Wahrheit glaubt, dauert an und wirkt sich aus. Die Stadt der Wahrheit kann nicht auf dem Sumpfboden des Skeptizismus erbaut werden.