Quotes About Belief

By the age of fifteen, I had convinced myself that nobody could give a reasonable explanation of what he meant by the word 'God' and that it was therefore as meaningless to assert a belief as to assert a disbelief in God. Though this, in a general way, has remained my position ever since, I have always avoided unnecessarily to offend other people holding religious belief by displaying my lack of such belief, or even stating my lack of belief, if I was not challenged.

The Bible represents a fundamental guidepost for millions of people on the planet, in much the same way the Koran, Torah, and Pali Canon offer guidance to people of other religions. If you and I could dig up documentation that contradicted the holy stories of Islamic belief, Judaic belief, Buddhist belief, pagan belief, should we do that? Should we wave a flag and tell the Buddhists that the Buddha did not come from a lotus blossom? Or that Jesus was not born of a literal virgin birth? Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical.

Yoga is existential, experiential, experimental. No belief is required, no faith is needed - only courage to experience. And that's what's lacking. You can believe easily because in belief you are not going to be transformed. Belief is something added to you, something superficial. Your being is not changed; you are not passing through some mutation.

I never really knew what it meant, to win, until one day I was flying on the Phoenix Suns airplane, the team plane, on the way to Chicago. I was talking to Danny Ainge on this flight, and he was talking about the concept of knowing how to win. And so he proceeded to give me from his perspective as an athlete, and now he's a coach, what the whole concept of knowing how to win is, and he said part of it is rooted in experience, the experience of winning, but it's attitudinal, it's the belief that you should, it's the belief that you can, it's the belief.

I don't think that writing, real writing, has much to do with affirming belief--if anything it causes rifts and gaps in belief which make belief more complex and more textured, more real. Good writing unsettles, destroys both the author and the reader. From my perspective, there always has to be a tension between the writer and the monolithic elements of the culture, such as religion.

When I have heard him talking to Papa during the sittings for the picture, I have sat wondering whether it could be that he has no belief in anybody else, because he has no belief in himself.

Belief is reassuring. People who live in the world of belief feel safe. On the contrary, faith is forever placing us on the razor's edge.

The worry that unreflective belief acquisition may be unreliable, after all, applies equally to reflective belief acquisition: it too may be unreliable. To my mind, the plausibility of internalist views about justification is dramatically decreased when one becomes vividly aware of what introspection and reflection actually achieve.

The greatest force in the human body is the natural drive of the body to heal itself - but that force in not independent of the belief system. Everything begins with belief. What we believe is the most powerful option of all.

Sometimes you've got to #‎ believe in someone else's belief in you until your #‎ belief kicks in.

Global consciousness is not an objective belief that can be taught to anybody and everybody, but a subjective transformation in the interior structures that can hold belief in the first place, which itself is the product of a long line of inner consciousness development.

With the near-death or clinical near-death phenomenon some people who are brought back from 'death' have reported being alive the entire time they were 'dead.' This phenomenon occurs among people with a wide diversity of religious belief and no religious belief at all - from atheists to Zen Buddhists.

Nothing makes a man so virtuous as belief of the truth. A lying doctrine will soon beget a lying practice. A man cannot have an erroneous belief without by-and-by having an erroneous life. I believe the one thing naturally begets the other.

As patterns of obedience develop, the specific blessings associated with obedience are realized and belief emerges. Desire, hope, and belief are forms of faith, but faith as a principle of power comes from a consistent pattern of obedient behavior and attitudes. Personal righteousness is a choice. Faith is a gift from God, and one possessed of it can receive enormous spiritual power.

We dress them [children] in the presumptions of the world. They are the bright small face of hope. They are the last belief we have, the belief in making them believe.

This is appalling. The idea that a person could be punished because of their religious belief and the idea they might be executed is just beyond belief.

What no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.

In practice, the goal of skepticism is not the discovery of truth, but the exposure of other people's errors. It plays a useful role in science, religion, scholarship, and common sense. But we need to remember that it is a weapon serving belief or self-interest; we need to be skeptical of skeptics. The more militant the skeptic, the stronger the belief.

Iran rejects weapons of mass destruction based on its belief system, its religious belief system, as well as its ethical standpoint.

Befriending the life in others is sometimes a complex matter. There are times when we offer our strength and protection, but these are usually only temporary measures. The greatest blessing we offer others may be the belief we have in their struggle for freedom, the courage to support and accompany them as they determine for themselves the strength that will become their refuge and the foundation for their lives. I think it is especially important to believe in someone at a time when they cannot yet believe in themselves. Then your belief will become their lifeline.

If you think your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument rather than by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based upon faith, you will realize that argument is useless, and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting or distorting the minds of the young in what is called 'education.'

My belief in God is personal, I do not need to browbeat anyone into agreeing with me, because I believe what I believe and I try to live by it. My belief in God is about trying to be the best person I can be in this life.

We believe in the wrong things. That's what frustrates me the most. Not the lack of belief, but the belief in the wrong things. You want meaning? Well, the meanings are out there. We're just so damn good at reading them wrong.

In my view (animal) knowledge is apt belief, where not only the belief (its existence and content) but also its correctness is creditable to the subject's competence.

According to my religious belief, I'm sorry if you feel like I'm pushing this on you - my religious belief is that you behave the way God wants us to behave. And that's simply love God and love one another. If we did that, there would be no need for any of the other commandments. It would be great. But in the same vein, we would have obtained paradise by that point. And it's tougher to get to paradise by that point.

Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.

It is time we recognized that belief is not a private matter; it has never been merely private. In fact, beliefs are scarcely more private than actions are, for every belief is a fount of action in potential.

I share the belief of many of my contemporaries that the spiritual crisis pervading all spheres of Western industrial society can be remedied only by a change in our world view. We shall have to shift from the materialistic, dualistic belief that people and their environment are separate, toward a new consciousness of an all-encompassing reality, which embraces the experiencing ego, a reality in which people feel their oneness with animate nature and all of creation.

The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief.

When a belief becomes dominant in American psychological circles one can be sure of one thing: that belief refers to something that no longer exists.

Religion has the same relation to man's heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location.

If God causes man to be sick, sickness must be good, and its opposite, health, must be evil, for all that He makes is good and will stand forever. If the transgression of God's law produces sickness, it is right to be sick; and we cannot if we would, and should not if we could, annul the decrees of wisdom. It is the transgression of a belief of mortal mind, not of a law of matter nor of divine Mind, which causes the belief of sickness. The remedy is Truth, not matter,--the truth that disease is unreal.

The arts reflect profoundly the most democratic credo, the belief in an individual vision or voice . . . The arts' belief in potential gives each of us -- both audience and creator -- pride in our society's ability to nurture individuals.

There is a difference between WISHING for a thing and being READY to receive it. No one is ready for a thing, until he believes he can acquire it. The state of mind must be BELIEF, not mere hope or wish. Open-mindedness is essential for belief.

Pro-choice and pro-life activists live in different worlds, and the scope of their lives, as both adults and children, fortifies them in their belief that their own views on abortion are the more correct, the more moral, and more reasonable. When added to this is the fact that should 'the other side' win, one group of women will see the very real devaluation of their lives and life resources, it is not surprising that the abortion debate has generated so much heat and so little light.

What do you conceive God to be like? Some would say to believe at all in a personal God requires a giant leap of faith - but I am convinced that belief in God is a far more reasonable position than atheism. Nature, the personal experience of literally billions of people, and something innate in the heart of man all testify to the existence of God.

You don't choose what to believe. Belief chooses you.

Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart torpid or produces only atheists or fanatics. As an engine of power, it serves the purpose of despotism, and as a means of wealth, the avarice of priests, but so far as respects the good of man in general it leads to nothing here or hereafter.

It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.

For a while, I thought of myself as an atheist until I realized it was a belief, too. It's a shame everything has to have a label.

No human beings are more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief

Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.

True disciples are those who go beyond simply believing. They act out their belief.

More and more we are taught something throughout our growing up, our education, and continuously, no matter how much we believe in this thing, something comes up that forces us to revise our entire belief system. No matter whom you idolize, it turns out that Louis Armstrong collected vast amounts of pornography.

All theory of modernity in sociology suggests that the more modernity there is, the less religion. In my theory we can realize that this is wrong: atheism is only one belief system among many.

The shackles of belief, when reinforced by fear, are difficult to break free from and rarely done.

I admit it: I am louder than the average human being and have no fear of speaking my mind. These traits don't come from the color of my skin but from an unwavering belief in my own intelligence.

Need is not quite belief.