Quotes About Faith

And then I think of the Velvet Underground's doleful song Jesus, from their third and least renowned or appreciated album. It is my favorite. Jesus / Help me find my proper place / Help me in my weakness / 'Cause I'm falling out of grace. The only words in the song, repeated repeatedly, composed by Lou Reed, a Jew. You see, in the hour of darkness, it is easier to turn to the Son of God than to God Himself, for some reason. I'm not sure why.

Pass the pills and fancy plants/ Give us this day our daily trance.

I don't much like my life, but for some dumb reason, I want to be alive, because sooner or later, I figure it will work out.

I am a monotheist. I am in it for life. I am in everything for life. If you don't stop me, I will not stop myself. I have the kind of faith that you can only have if you have talked your way out of trouble all along.

we jews do not have a concept of unconditional love. the god of the old testament is judgmental, jealous, and vengeful. he gets mad and he gets even. the notion of turning the other cheek, the idea that faith is more important than deeds, these are distinctly christian concepts.

some say that the difference between catholic guilt and jewish guilt is that the former emanates from the knowledge that we are all born already fallen, that there is nothing we can ever do to overcome the original sin; the latter springs from a sense that every one of us was created in god's image and has the potential for perfection. so catholic guilt is about impossibility, while jewish guilt is about an abundance of possibility.

Knit on with confidence and hope through all crises.

That's when I understood deeply that with all my studies of other religions, basically I really am devoted to Jesus. I am not a church-going Christian, not a conventional one by most standards, but in my heart, Jesus is my guru.

Sometimes we look at outcomes in this life, seeking the reassurance of a happy ending, and it's just not there. What then? As Betty put it, His ways are inscrutable. So we have to rest, not in the peace of a pretty story, but in the reality of faith in a Person we cannot see.

Faith's most severe tests come not when we see nothing, but when we see a stunning array of evidence that seems to prove our faith vain.

Faith's most severe tests come not when we see nothing, but when we see a stunning array of evidence that seems to prove our faith vain. If God were God, if He were omnipotent, if He had cared, would this have happened? Is this that I face now the ratification of my calling, the reward of obedience?

It was a long time before I came to the realization that it is in our acceptance of what is given that God gives Himself. Even the Son of God had to learn obedience by the things that He suffered . . . And His reward was desolation, crucifixion.

God does work through hurt. God works in the midst of all things.

Oh, how I pray for conforming to the acceptable will of God. I do not want to miss one lesson. Yet I find that events do not change souls. It is our response to them which finally affects us. - Elisabeth Elliot

My deepest impulses are optimistic, an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.

I have always known that the best of the Saracens could out-Christian many of us Christians.

Say your prayers, think quietly what you should do, do it, and sleep. There is no man living, neither king nor emperor, can do more or better, or trust in a better harvest.

Where there is no certainty the mind must turn to the light and not the shadow.

Never let it shake your faith that there is a balance hereafter. What you see is only a broken piece from a perfect whole.

There is no profit in ifs. We go on from where we stand, we answer for our own evil, and leave to God our good.

He prayed as he breathed, forming no words and making no specific requests, only holding his heart, like broken birds in cupped hands

I think there are some who live on a knife-edge in the soul, and at times are driven to hurl themselves into the air, at the mercy of heaven or he'll which way to fall.

I have been about the world long enough to know that God's plans for us, however infallibly good, may not take the form that we expect and demand.

Even grief has its arrogance." "Then you have learned, my son, that vengeance belongs only to God?" "More than that, Father," said Luc. "I have learned that in God's hands vengeance is safe. However long delayed, however strangely manifested, the reckoning is sure.