Quotes About Faith

The leaf that spreads in the light is the only holiness there is. I haven't found holiness in the faiths of mortals, or in their music, not in their dreams: it's out in the open field, with the green rows looking at the sky. I don't know what it is, this holiness: but it's there, and it looks at the sky. Probably though this is some conditioning the Company installed to ensure I'd be a good botanist. Well, I grew up into a good one. Damned good.

Lady, the Faith is here," he stated. "But we must build churches in our hearts, for surely those built in the world have all betrayed us.

True believers aren't real receptive to the idea that what they're telling you is just mythology.

Or, perhaps you thought I might ape your blessed Kannan, stealing ghee and curds from the homes of the Gopis, getting beaten up with churners and—" Azhwarkkadiyaan

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and that there is 'nothing' out there; in making these assertions, their aim was not to deny the reality of God but to safeguard God's transcendence.

I had failed to make a gift of myself to God.

Auschwitz was a dark epiphany, providing us with a terrible vision of what life is like when all sense of the sacred is lost and the human being--whoever he or she may be--is no longer revered as an inviolable mystery.

People worship different things; there must be 'no coercion in matters of faith!

By increasing the amount of Torah (obligatory religious laws) in the world, they were extending His presence in the world and making it more effective.

Eventually, with regret, I left the religious life, and, once freed of the burden of failure and inadequacy, I felt my belief in God slip quietly away. He had never really impinged upon my life, though I had done my best to enable him to do so. Now that I no longer felt so guilty and anxious about him, he became too remote to be a reality.

each generation has to create the image of God that works for it.

One of the characteristics of early modern thought was a tendency to assume binary contrasts. In an attempt to define phenomena more exactly, categories of experience that had once co-inhered were now set off against each other: faith and reason, intellect and emotion, and church and state.

people derived their faith in Jesus from the experience of living together in a close-knit, minority community that challenged the unequal distribution of wealth and power

One day in Auschwitz, a group of Jews put God on trial. They charged him with betrayal and cruelty. Like Job, they found no consolation in the usual answers to the problems of evil and suffering in the midst of this current obscenity. They could find no excuse for God, no extenuating circumstances, so they found him guilty and, presumably, worthy of death. The Rabbi pronounced the verdict. Then he looked up and said that the trial was over, it was time for the evening prayer.

The only way to show a true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God's existence." ? A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus

The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war.

Humanism is itself a religion without God—not all religions, of course, are theistic.

fundamentalism is antihistorical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experienced their God in exactly the same way as people do today.

FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH centuries were decisive for all the people of God. It was a particularly crucial period for the Christian West, which had not only succeeded in catching up with the other cultures of the Oikumene but was about to overtake them.

One of the reasons why religion seems irrelevant today is that many of us no longer have the sense that we are surrounded by the unseen.

We open ourselves to the divine activity which will transform us by a threefold discipline, which Augustine calls the trinity of faith: retineo (holding the truths of the Incarnation in our minds), contemplatio (contemplating them) and dilectio (delighting in them). Gradually, by cultivating a continual sense of God's presence within our minds in this way, the Trinity will be disclosed

There is a distinction between belief in a set of propositions and a faith which enables us to put our trust in them.

People would continue to adopt a particular conception of the divine because it worked for them, not because it was scientifically or philosophically sound.