Quotes About Belief

I had to perform an act of faith. I had to prove to myself that I was a man. Not just a producing-consuming economic animal…but a man.

she had no religion with a brand on it, then cautioned me not to tell Greg. I exacted same caution from her. I don't know Who is cranking; I'm pleased He doesn't stop.

These children were often caught; police arrested batches each day. Were they scolded? Yes, often scathingly. Were their noses rubbed in it? Rarely. News organs and officials usually kept their names secret—in many places the law so required for criminals under eighteen. Were they spanked? Indeed not! Many had never been spanked even as small children; there was a widespread belief that spanking, or any punishment involving pain, did a child permanent psychic damage.

You see, my love. As you've always said, after the rain- Sun. After the darkness- Light. And after the illness- Health. Exactly, said the Tsar. We mustn't give up faith.

We have been told over and over that you can't change human nature, but the study of emic realities shows quite the contrary, that almost anything can become human nature if society defines it as such.

Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, My current model -- or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel -- contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised. In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.

Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.

But once you have a belief system everything that comes in either gets ignored if it doesn't fit the belief system or get distorted enough so that it can fit into the belief system. You gotta be continually revising your map of the world.

Humans live through their myths and only endure their realities.

When the pope sits on the chamber pot to shit, does he believe in his own infallibility? Does not every imposter occasionally recognize his own hairy, homely humanity? Perhaps not; worn long enough, sometimes the Mask of Authority becomes the man. Even looking in a mirror, he will see the sacred Mask and not his own ordinary human face.

There are gods, but there is no God; and all gods become devils eventually.

If one can only see things according to one's own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind.

Believe it possible that you can float off the ground and fly by merely willing it. See what happens.

Men (and women) indeed become strange when seeking gods. As the present work will show, however, they become even stranger when seeking devils.

I am not a donkey to be led by the carrot of salvation and the stick of damnation without thinking of where they are driving me and what they are making me do.

How about the Federal Reserve, then, which has convinced millions that the paper it prints "is" "real" "money"? Prank or fraud? Or perhaps some species of magick that only other sorcerers can understand?

I don't believe anything I write or say. I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination. I have opinions but no Belief System (B.S.) - Robert Anton Wilson

Tentative Model #1: The perceived universe is a mixture of the "real universe" and our own "Thinker" — proving its pet beliefs.

The agnostic principle refuses total belief or total denial and regards models as tools to be used only and always where appropriate and replaced (by other models) only and always where not appropriate.

We have already explained that, of course — even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Besides, it was only coincidence. (Remember that phrase. It is the self-hypnotic chant by which the New Inquisition banishes all evidence it does not like. We will hear it often.)

As Charlie Chaplin said once in a morbid context, Numbers sanctify. The more I pile up such monstrosities, the more likely it is that some readers will start to believe them.

And when I tell the story that way I remember, alas, that space-time events do not come before us flaunting labels that say FACT or APPEARANCE — that we make that judgment, every second, and thus create our emic or existential reality — and that this is not just true of lesser mortals like you and me but of the High Priests themselves, maybe even including the High Priests of the New Inquisition —

For the paranoids, this increases their paranoia, which they seem to enjoy. For a guerrilla ontologist like me, it increases my agnosticism, which I prefer to paranoia, because I find it more amusing and less depressing.

In 1919 at Fatima, Portugal over 100,000 people saw a bright light descend from the sky, rose petals fell, everybody smelled perfume, and saw lights flashing. The rationalists say "mass hallucination." The Catholics say it's "a miracle by the Blessed Virgin." I say "it's some unknown property of the human mind.