Quotes About Beliefs

People with depression, however, share a whole set of stories about the world that are highly distorted, and because their stories are self-fulfilling prophecies, they maintain and reinforce the depression.

A study of the brain using new technology showed that the thinking areas practically shut down when people were made to listen to information that contradicted their political beliefs. Conversely, when they heard information that tended to confirm their beliefs, the happiness centers of the brain lit up.

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.

We've got literally hundreds of cults—everything from John Believer's World Security Party, with its devilishly clever slogan, "Everybody Is Something," to Zoomites, complete with Head Zoom

The Alchemists' beliefs are my beliefs," I say quickly. She arched an eyebrow. "Are they? I would hope your beliefs would be your beliefs." I'd never thought about it that way before, but I suddenly hoped desperately that her words were true.

Okay, but if you try to get me to pray with you, I walk.

She has very strong ideas about family - ideas that probably sound kind of sexist to you. She believes all dhampirs should train and put in time as guardians, but that the women should eventually return home to raise their children together. But not the men? No, he said wryly. She thinks men still need to stay out there and kill Strigoi.

I would hope your beliefs would be your beliefs.

I'm looking for a second reformation. The first reformation of the church 500 years ago was about beliefs. This one is going to be about behavior. The first one was about creeds. This one is going to be about deeds. It is not going to be about what does the church believe, but about what is the church doing.

Regardless of how one may feel about specific doctrines of other faith traditions, this fact alone—their service to millions of fellow human beings—makes them worthy of our deep respect. Their profound benefit to others is really the ultimate reason each of us, believers and non-believers alike, must accord deep respect to the world's great faith traditions.

But in reading all of the passages in which Jesus uses the word hell, what is so striking is that people believing the right or wrong things isn't his point. He's often not talking about beliefs as we think of them--he's talking about anger and lust and indifference. He's talking about the state of his listeners' hearts, about how they conduct themselves, how they interact with their neighbors, about the kind of effect they have on the world.

everybody is resting on a set of interpretations, and we need to be honest about it.

Sometimes we've accepted rules and codes and limits without realizing it.

Our eschatology shapes our ethics. Eschatology is about last things. Ethics are about how you live. What you believe about the future shapes, informs, and determines how you live now.

The writers of the scriptures consistently affirm that we're all part of the same family. What we have in common—regardless of our tribe, language, customs, beliefs, or religion—outweighs our differences.

Customs, morals--is there a difference?

All three of us are prisoners of our early indoctrinations, for it is hard, very nearly impossible, to shake off one's earliest training.

Surely where a man lives is the least important thing about him.

A man isn't a collection of chemical reactions, he is a collection of ideas.

The Scientologists, of course, have had to fight for their rights many times;

Precisely. Every religion is a way of arriving at a certain state of consciousness and every society is based on a particular religion. Naturally, since any state of consciousness can be induced by a specific drug or group of drugs, you are going to find each society accepting certain drugs and bitterly condemning others.

I have used the word "reality" because it was a major premise in don Juan's system of beliefs that the states of consciousness produced by the ingestion of any of those three plants were not hallucinations, but concrete, although unordinary, aspects of the reality of everyday life. Don Juan behaved toward these states of non-ordinary reality not "as if' they were real but "as" real.

Mr. White believes that these are objective predictions based on eternal "laws" of karma which he learned from various occultists and gurus. He does not believe that the apocalyptical reality-tunnel in which he lives is in any way an artistic creation expressing his own emotional anxieties and hostilities.

You will see, philosophical values will fade away in your country, too. To advance themselves, politicians will increasingly claim beliefs that they don't actually possess. Values are a reflection of the soul. And as souls fade, people no longer need values. Souls fade gradually because of the substitution of the inner imagination by technology: smartphones, intelligent toys, the array of electronics at malls, all make soulful intelligence less necessary.