Quotes About Belief

But confirmation bias will always beat out common sense.

And she takes him like someone who's sure that life has need of her.

She once told me that no matter how much bad stuff she had to deal with during the day, if she said those words before bed, she'd be ready for anything the next morning.

The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.

THEIR FIRSTBORN DIES in infancy, killed by a thing that doesn't yet have a name. There are no microbes, yet. God is the lone taker of children, snatching even placeholder souls from one world to the other, according to obscure timetables.

Nothing has more power than simple conviction.

She hears him, and understands. This is science, and worth a million times more than anything any person might ever swear to you.

it's easy for even Nick to believe that green has a plan that will make the age of mammals seem like a minor detour.

auto-suggestion.

Utah. She has followed back roads from Las Vegas, capital of clueless sinners, toward Salt Lake, capital of cunning saints.

He'll die of idealism, of being right when the world is wrong.

All of art is childish, all storytelling, all human hope and fear.

world is an experiment in inventing validity, and conviction is its only proof.

Every belief will be outgrown, in time.

To hope, which finds roots in the most infertile of soils.

We're living in the age of mass hypnotism. As long as we keep clapping our hands and believing, the captains of industry will take care of us.

They were two human primates carrying another primate. One was the master of the earth, or at least believed himself to be, and the other was a nimble dweller in trees, a cousin of the master of the earth.

Any account of science which does not explicitly describe it as something we believe in is essentially incomplete and a false pretense. It amounts to a claim that science is essentially different from and superior to all human beliefs that are not scientific statements--and this is untrue.

The quiet child became a rebellious adolescent. He was working his own way through Kant and Darwin and mathematics while the Gymnasium pounded him with rote. He veered off into religion—Judaism—and came back bitterly disillusioned: "Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much of the stories in the Bible could not be true. . . 

religion either produces the very best people or the very worst.

There are two ways of being a prophet. One is to tell the enslaved that they can be free. It is the difficult path of Moses. The second is to tell those who think they are free that they are in fact enslaved. This is the even more difficult path of Jesus.

God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting the boxes.

A mystic doesn't say "I believe." They say "I know." A true mystic will ironically speak with that self-confidence but at the same time with a kind of humility. So when you see that combination of calm self-confidence, certitude, and humility all at the same time you have the basis for mysticism in general.

Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy.