Quotes About Beliefs

Love is our response to our highest values—and can be nothing else.

The integrated sum of a man's basic values is his sense of life.

If one asks him the reasons of his convictions, one will discover that his convictions are a thin, fragile film floating over a vacuum, like an oil slick in empty space—and one will be shocked by the number of questions it had never occurred to him to ask.

Si identificáis vuestras creencias, hallaráis en ellas una triple condenación: hacia vosotros, hacia la vida y hacia la virtud, en la grotesca conclusión a que habéis llegado al creer que la moralidad es un mal necesario.

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

It was not so much, then, that people like the rapper Danis Cuspert and Dunya were brainwashed into an ideology of radicalism; they simply lacked the intellectual and psychological coping skills to channel their newly found beliefs into more productive and legal means: activism, charity work, human rights law, citizen journalism.

Religious freedom doesn't mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.

Conservative or liberal, we are all constitutionalists.

If everyone is family, then no one is family.

But she and my grandfather had no firm ideological or partisan leanings to speak of, beyond what they considered to be common sense.

CONTRARY TO THE BELIEFS of many in the Arab world (and more than a few American reporters), the United States is not a grand puppet master whimsically pulling the strings of the countries with which it does business. Even governments that rely on our military and economic assistance think first and foremost of their own survival, and the Mubarak regime was no exception. After

I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place. We are a motley crew, distinguished not only by our inability to explain ourselves to those who are more certain of their beliefs than we are but in many cases by our distance from the centers of our faith communities as well.

He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.

accepting limiting beliefs is like wearing a straightjacket all of your life.

It's been my experience that people who can express their political views only in clichés and passionate generalizations are fanatics.

What we think of as the twenty-seven books of "the" New Testament emerged out of these conflicts, and it was the side that won the debates over what to believe that decided which books were to be included in the canon of scripture.

One of the clearest ways to evaluate the common beliefs of a society is to consider the satires that arise within it. Satire makes fun of standard assumptions, perspectives, views, and beliefs.

collective memory, is essentially a reconstruction of the past that adapts the image of historical facts to the beliefs and spiritual needs of the present.

That is, by showing what happens after death, the texts emphasize what matters in life, providing insight into the purpose, meaning, and goals of human existence so as to encourage certain ways of being and living in the world: attitudes, dispositions, priorities, commitments, life choices, beliefs, practices, public activities, relationships—in fact, almost everything involved with being a sentient and conscious human being.

ancient religions were almost never interested in "true beliefs.

Religion was all about the proper practices:

Ancient people, whether pagans, Jews, or Christians, did not neatly differentiate between the religious and the political. They would have had a hard time understanding the difference.

My point here is that no Jew before Christianity was on the scene ever interpreted such passages as referring to the messiah.

the Gospel writers compiled not necessarily what Jesus exactly said or did, but what the believing community collectively understood to be the tenor of his actions and sayings.