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.

In American fiction, belief is like that. Belief as upbringing, belief as social fact, belief as a species of American weirdness: our literary fiction has all of these things. All that is missing is the believer.

During the last century, and part of the one before, it was widely held that there was an unreconcilable conflict between knowledge and belief. The opinion prevailed amoung advanced minds that it was time that belief should be replaced increasingly by knowledge; belief that did not itself rest on knowledge was superstition, and as such had to be opposed. According to this conception, the sole function of education was to open the way to thinking and knowing, and the school, as the outstanding organ for the people's education, must serve that end exclusively.

A belief in God may not be fully within me anymore, but there's still a belief in belief. The high drama and power of the Church has stayed with me. As a child in church, I saw grown men at the altar crying out for God's mercy. And the idea of someone doing that has become a joke in the popular culture, but when you are there and you see it, you experience - for a moment - an incredibly raw, honest, strange insight into what it means to be a human being. Those experiences don't leave you. Whatever you think of them, they are powerful experiences.

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.

That some unevangelized men are saved, in the present life, by an extraordinary exercise of redeeming grace in Christ, has been the hope and belief of Christendom. It was the hope and belief of the elder Calvinists, as of the later.

It is probably true that almost all atheists stand for the values of reason and freethought. I will attempt to put these values in more substantial terms. There is the belief that inquiry and doubt are essential checks against deception, self deception, and error. There is the belief that logic and the scientific method is the only way the world can arrive at an agreement on the truth about anything.

I see myself as a climate change skeptic and a skeptic looks at the evidence and bases conclusions on the evidence rather than on belief. To hold the view that this is not an issue that you need to do something about, to hold the view that it's all a furphy takes belief.

Self - belief is everything. Whether you want to start a law firm or a jewelry business, women get pushback, societally. People will be like, "This is a bad idea." You have to have enough self-belief to see where you're gonna end up and not let anybody derail you.

Your ability to shape your destiny is directly proportional to your belief that it is a matter of will and determination--however much or little that belief may be.

My belief in ghosts swings with the wind. But my belief that the cemetery felt happy and not sad-I've never changed my mind about that.

A belief is not a belief until you can visualize it, unless you can create a picture of it in your minds eye, especially if you have no doubts that reality can be - or is - possible.

I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love.

The law of your mind is the law of belief. This means to believe in the way your mind works, to believe in belief itself.

The belief that we some day shall be able to prevent war is to me one with the belief in the possibility of making humanity really human.

Fanatics do not have faith - they have belief. With faith you let go. You trust. Whereas with belief you cling.

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

Either belief in God is unconditional or it is no belief at all.

Trump and I have a lot in common, and that is a belief in the American dream because we both have lived it. I think it's what animates our president-elect more than anything else, is a belief in the boundless potential of every American to live the American dream. And, I think it comes from the fact that we both grew up in it, and both saw it. And in our own ways, we both lived it.

Atheism is the absence of a belief in a god, nothing more. If the theist wishes to draw monumental implications from this lack of belief, he must argue for his claims.

The confidence you need is belief in your potential. If you see world-class potential in yourself, you'll put in the effort. If you don't see the potential, you won't put in the effort and you'll wait for the performance, and the performance always follows the belief in self.

Better a wrong will than a wavering; better a steadfast enemy than an uncertain friend; better a false belief than no belief at all.

In the end, we love people into belief. We do not argue them into belief.

We are, indeed, not among the least contented. You, however, if your belief makes you blessed then appear to be blessed! Your faces have always been more injurious to your belief than our objections have! If these glad tidings of your Bible were written on your faces, you would not need to insist so obstinately on the authority of that book ... As things are, however, all your apologies for Christianity have their roots in your lack of Christianity; with your defense plea you inscribe your own bill of indictment.

You may believe whatever you want; but the most important thing is to update you belief with the truth, with the science! Your dearest belief might be the biggest buncombe ever! Don't be sad! Continue your road with the new truth! Everything changes!

As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in Time, in no other Western country is the teaching of Evolution regarded as controversial. Throughout the world, one way or another, most Christian denominations have managed to reconcile belief in God with belief in the mechanisms of natural selection. A French or German or Scandinavian politician who called for students to entertain as a reasonable deduction from existing evidence the proposition that Earth is at most 10,000 years old would be bundled off to a mental hospital.

[n regard to Jesus believing himself inspired] This belief carried no more personal imputation than the belief of Socrates that he was under the care and admonition of a guardian demon. And how many of our wisest men still believe in the reality of these inspirations while perfectly sane on all other subjects

I have a strong belief that there is a god or a higher power. I think that if you have a strong belief in that, then you won’t feel alone in life and you will feel you can get through anything.

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.

Thoughts are an important part of your inner wisdom and they are very powerful. A thought held long enough and repeated often enough becomes a belief. A belief then becomes your biology.

Whenever the strength of a belief strongly steps into the foreground, we must infer a certain weakness of demonstrability and the improbability of that belief.

I profess no belief in God, which by definition is true, especially if we take the accepted definition of God. But to be an atheist is to also have a belief, and have a system, and I don't know that I like that either.

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.

I think that the only choice that we have in life is whether we align ourselves with God or not. I think everything else is all taken care of for us. You know? If you choose to align with your source, with your spirit, then your life will go in a certain direction. If you choose to align yourself with your ego, and your false self, and the belief that who you are is what you accomplish and what other people think of you and what you accumulate, if you just go that route - the outer route, if you will, the outer path - your life will go in a different direction.

Beware of any belief that makes you self-indulgent; it came from the pit, no matter how beautiful it sounds.

Religion is not based on belief or faith: religion is based on awe, religion is based on wonder. Religion is based on the mysterious that is your surround. To feel it, to be aware of it, to see it, open your eyes and drop the dust of the ages. Clean your mirror! and see what beauty surrounds you, what tremendous grandeur goes on knocking at your doors. Why are you sitting with closed eyes? Why are you sitting with such long faces? Why can't you dance? and why can't you laugh?

A confidence man knows he’s lying; that limits his scope. But a successful shaman ropes himself first; he believes what he says — and such belief is contagious; there is no limit to his scope.

A lawyer once told a jury that the person his client stood accused of having killed was about to walk through the courtroom door. When the jurors looked startled, the lawyer asserted that if those jurors had wondered, even for one second that the victim might appear, that belief constituted enough reasonable doubt for them to find his client innocent.

I still have great faith in democracy. I have great belief in the power of community.

We are very defensive, and therefore aggressive, when we hold on to a particular belief, a dogmas, or when we worship our particular nationality, with the rag that is called the flag.

The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it seems to me the deepest root of all evil that is in the world.

My belief has come about in large measure because of the lives and examples of people I have known - not the famous, not saints, but friends and relations who have lived, and faced death, in the light of the Resurrection story, or in the quiet acceptance that they have a future after they die.

It was through the private world of family that the public world of politics came alive for me: living in intimate proximity with people for whom larger questions of ideology and belief, as well as issues relating to politics and governance, were vivid daily realities.

Looking back, the way I see it, there was something slightly deluded about my belief - what that meant to me - but with that delusion came of lot of happiness. Life was really black and white: if you do these things now, God will you invite you to his house where you will love forever and everything will be happy forever. That's what I believed, and that makes life pretty sweet. I do miss it.

Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.

I believe in equality. But I don't like the word feminist, because it's such a rational belief to think that women are equal to men, and I'm a rational person. You shouldn't be labeled for being reasonable. You should be labeled if you're f-cking crazy.

I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of WORK, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in the organised diminution of work.