Quotes About Faith

If you are not happy, act the happy man. Happiness will come later. If you are in despair, act as though you believe. Faith will come afterwards.

One of the strange laws of the contemplative life," Thomas Merton, one of its sovereign explorers, pointed out, "is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you." Or, as Annie Dillard, who sat still for a long time at Tinker Creek—and in many other places—has it, "I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend.

Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.

The mother of Jesus, I sometimes remember, was visited by an angel and is seen as a saint; the mother of the Buddha died at his birth. Is it any surprise that Buddhism is about learning to live with loss, while Christianity is about salvation from above?

And just as it is common to hear how, when one is in love, anything one sees reminds one of that love—our feelings remake the world in a secular equivalent of the faith that sees the hand of God in everything—so I began to find that when one is thinking on a theme, everything seems to reflect on it. Suddenly, everything I saw or read, in this girlish city of temples, seemed to take me back to the theme of the lady and the monk.

One of the strange laws of the contemplative life," Thomas Merton, one of its sovereign explorers, pointed out, "is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you.

All his novels are unreliable gospels for those who can't be sure of a thing.

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. / The honest thief, the tender murderer, / The superstitious atheist.

both characters had given up what they held dearest, the very basis of their lives — their premises — for a woman, and then had found in her a kind of saving grace. They had opened themselves up and, in the opening, found a transformation. In the pretty pun of C. S. Lewis, they had been "surprised by joy.

Woe to him who doesn't know this Christian faith is bourgeois.

Ümidini yitirsen bile, bir nebze ümit vard?r.

Io guardo in questi ragazzi il riso dei loro morti quando venivano in chiesa, e, cantando, credevano di essere vivi per sempre. Ma gli anni spariti nel paese non sono mai trascorsi. Questa è una loro alba, e noi, noi siamo i morti.

With a group of boys like him, all in white shirts, he arrived at the church of Divine Providence, where at nine Don Pizzuto gave him communion and at eleven the Bishop confirmed him.

If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.

my religion was but a fragrance.

task not unlike coming to grips with the Holy Ghost.' There

whether we are aware of it or not, every act of trust carries with it a shiver of fear.

I was hated, you know. I made no secret of the fact that I was an atheist. People told me there are no atheists in fox holes. That's nonsense. [interview promoting Marching as to War (2002)]

From Boulez, an authorized biography by Joan Peyser) At the chapel door he [a priest associated with a school Boulez attended] asked me if what he had been told was true: that Boulez no longer believed in God. I said it was...

Do your duty, and leave the rest to heaven.

Do your duty and leave the rest to the gods.

My sweetest hope is to lose hope.

Love lives on hope, and dies when hope is dead

For me sport was a religion... with religious sentiment.