Quotes About Faith

What convinces is conviction. You simply have to believe in the argument you are advancing; if you don't, you're as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn't there.

In Cody's version

Much of what is most simple is most miraculous.

The shamans are forever yacking about their snake-oil "miracles." I prefer the Real McCoy - a pregnant woman.

Theology is never any help it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.

The most preposterous notion that Homo sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.

Someone observed darkly that it is always two A.M. when one is in the 'dark night of the soul.

Scripture also teaches that human beings are morally responsible creatures

God is alive, real, and wants to heal you in every aspect of your life where you are hurting.

Open your eyes that you might see that all things are possible through you (with God's help)

There is no reason for a sound faith to be irrational. A useful faith should not be blind, but should be well aware of its grounds. A sound faith should be able to use scientific investigation to strengthen itself. it should be open to the spirit not to lock itself up in the letter. A nourishing, useful, healthful faith should be no obstacle to developing a science of death.

We have the assurance of the enlightened beings that reality is goodness, that reality is freedom from suffering, that reality is bliss. So we should never fear to open ourselves to reality, to cast aside our preconceptions and biases, and to open more and more to whatever turns out to be real. You can have faith in enlightenment, faith in evolutionary potential, faith in infinity, faith in your infinite self. (p. 222)

Teachers must, I discovered, have a gift to teach and the compulsion to use it. And faith. Anything less won't carry you through.

One thing do I ask of the Lord, it is this that I seek-- that I dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life -Psalm 27:4

Though my father and mother forsook me, the Lord would gather me in. -Psalm 27:10

The darkness of the whole world cannot swallow the glowing of a candle.

I am not an expert. That is someone else's job. If I were expert, the approach would be all wrong. It would be from the inside. I am a blunderer. I usually don't know what I am going into at the start. I go into the fog and trust something will be there.

Whether your beliefs are true or totally insane, if you accept them, then that's what your life will be about.

Excuses are your lack of faith in your own power.

Consciously or unconsciously, you always get what you expect.

belief is the death of intelligence.

Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.

But as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once said, "Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history.

Abraham's willingness to plunge a dagger through the heart of his young son because God, without any explanation, ordered it. We learn in this story that the correctness of an action was not judged by such considerations as apparent senselessness, harmfulness, injustice, or usual moral standards, but by the mere command of a higher authority.