Quotes About Conviction

It is one thing to insist on walking south when the compass is pointing north. But to "fix" the compass so that it tells you that the wrong way is the right way is far, far worse. You can correct a mistake. But once you tell yourself it wasn't a mistake there's no way back.

In fact, like most things in life that really matter—love, beauty, justice—you can't prove things in history the way you can prove Pythagoras's theorem. But there are lots of things you can be certain of nonetheless.

But the fact remains that Paul had, to this point, made a career out of telling people things he knew they would find either mad or blasphemous or both. He had grown used to it. This was what he did.

Among other beliefs, I hold more firmly than ever to the conviction that serious study of Jesus and the gospels is best done within the context of a worshipping community.

Faith can't be forced, but unfaith can be challenged. That is how it has always been, from the very beginning, when people have borne witness to Jesus's resurrection.

Those twin beliefs give rise not to a meek acquiescence to injustice in the world but to a robust determination to oppose it. English

Jesus only appeared to people who believed in him. Answer: the accounts make it clear that Thomas and Paul do not belong to this category; and actually none of Jesus's followers believed, after his death, that he really was the Messiah, let alone that he was in any sense divine.

The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand.

Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.

finally convinced her to buy the style she liked

I would be a socialist if I thought it would work.

despite what she said, she knew the

The more illogical a fool's position, the more passionate he's likely to be about hanging on to it.

You know the great thing about Truman," he told Goodwin, "is that once he makes up his mind about something—anything, including the A bomb—he never looks back and asks 'should I have done it? Oh! Should I have done it?' No, he just knows he made up his mind as best he could and that's that. There's no going back. I wish I had some of that quality.

Oh, I would just love to talk to you sometime, maybe we could have lunch,' she recalled. But Graham politely declined, explaining to the governor's wife that he did not dine alone with women - be they single or married. 'Oh, well, I'm sorry,' Hillary said. 'Maybe we could have a lot of people there.' Graham replied that he would think about it. ... And so five people sat down at a found table in Little Rock's ornate Capital Hotel that fall.

The character of people varies, and it is easy to persuade them of a thing, but difficult to keep them in that persuasion.

Oh, God show me more of Your holiness. Show me more of my sinfulness. Help me to hate sin and to love righteousness as You do. Grant me a deeper conviction of sin and a more thorough spirit of repentance. And make me holy as You are holy.

faith is based not on what we see and know, but on what we believe to be true through the reading of God's word. The

In a book called Why Americans Hate Politics, E. J. Dionne says, "Americans hate politics as it is now practiced because we have lost all sense of the public good."4 Without the conviction that there exists an objective good, public debate disintegrates into a cacophony of warring voices.

The humane position, and the biblical position, is that individuals are under no obligation to affirm as true something they have not adequately examined. Moreover, if after careful examination, a claim is falsified by the evidence, it should be rejected.

The key to the power of the biblical message is the conviction that it is actually true—objectively, universally, cosmically true. It is not merely a psychological coping mechanism. It is not a sociological product of Western culture. It is truth about the universe itself. This conviction is what sets orthodox Christianity off from Christianity Lite. And it is the source of genuine church growth.

Having a Christian worldview means being utterly convinced that biblical principles are not only true but also work better in the grit and grime of the real world.

she persuaded him to execute her instead by slowly immersing her in boiling pitch. The beauty of her character as she faced death inspired the conversion of several other people, including one of her guards, Basilides, who was likewise martyred.73

Overcoming skeptics is still a skill that innovators need.