Quotes About Belief

Religion becomes a matter of belief, and belief acts as a limitation on the mind; and the mind then is never free. But it is only in freedom that you can find out what is true, what is God, not through any belief; because your belief projects what you think God ought to be, what you think ought to be true. If you believe God is love, God is good, God is this or that, your very belief prevents you from understanding what is God, what is true.

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 man who has a certain religious belief and fears to discuss it, lest it may be proved wrong, is not loyal to his belief, he has but a coward's faithfulness to his prejudices. If he were a lover of truth, he would be willing at any moment to surrender his belief for a higher, better, and truer faith.

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.

If you really believe something, you will act in accordance with that belief - always. If you believe in gravity, you will never attempt to defy it. If you claim to hold a belief but act incongruently, then you don't actually believe it. You're only kidding yourself. Casual faith isn't.

Certainly the affirmative pursuit of one's convictions about the ultimate mystery of the universe and man's relation to it is placed beyond the reach of law. Government may not interfere with organized or individual expressions of belief or disbelief. Propagation of belief - or even of disbelief - in the supernatural is protected, whether in church or chapel, mosque or synagogue, tabernacle or meeting-house.

A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition.

We are resolved to protect individual freedom of belief. This freedom must include the child as well as the parent. The freedom for which we stand is not freedom of belief as we please,... not freedom to evade responsibility, ...but freedom to be honest in speech and action, freedom to respect one's own integrity of thought and feeling, freedom to question, to investigate, to try, to understand life and the universe in which life abounds, freedom to search anywhere and everywhere to find the meaning of Being, freedom to experiment with new ways of living that seem better than the old.

Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality... and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.

We are so well trained that we are our own domesticator. We are an autodomesticated animal. We can now domesticate ourselves according to the same belief system we were given, and using the same system of punishment and reward. We punish ourselves when we don't follow the rules according to our belief system; we reward ourselves when we are the "good boy" or "good girl".

No matter how much we may study, it is not possible to come to know God unless we live according to His commandments, for God is not know by science, but by the Holy Spirit. Many philosophers and learned men came to the belief that God exists, but they did not know God. It is one thing to belief that God exists and another to know Him. If someone has come to know God by the Holy Spirit, his soul will burn with love for God day and night, and his soul cannot be bound to any earthly thing.

What is wrong is not the great discoveries of science—information is always better than ignorance, no matter what information or what ignorance. What is wrong is the belief behind the information, the belief that information will change the world. It won’t.

When you have a strongly held belief, don't you think it's important to express that belief accurately?

Man has not really vanquished Shamanism and its spooks till he possesses the strength to lay aside not only the belief in ghosts or in spirits, but also the belief in the spirit.

A belief in feminism is a belief in personal freedom - the freedom to live a life free of fear of violence, to select a fulfilling career and be compensated fairly, to choose when to start a family, to marry whom you love. I want everyone, regardless of gender, to live a life free of restriction or fear, able to pursue their own personal brand of happiness and fulfillment.

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.

Creative people have to believe in the value of their work. If you don’t have any belief then you can’t give anything—designing is an act of giving, and a belief in the value of the work fuels the desire to express something. It’s important to know what your values are and to take care of them.

The test of a belief is not exclusively in the belief itself, but also in the intentions and actions of those who embrace it.

Faith is not belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active.

Belief is everything when you're performing something. If you don't have the belief behind it, then that actually puts a shunt on the character. It's like, "Does the character believe this for a minute?"

The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.

I had been conscious a feeling of depression and so I voiced to [Secretary Of War Stimson] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at this very moment, seeking a way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face.'

You should always make it like it's your last film. That's my personal belief. Every filmmaker is going to have another belief... That's the only way I know to try to make a film that might be good. You got to take it real seriously like it's your last thing.

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.'

If one believes in a god, one is a Theist. If one does not believe in a god, then one is an A-theist — he is without that belief. The distinction between atheism and theism is entirely, exclusively, that of whether one has or has not a belief in God.

The belief that God will do everything for man is as untenable as the belief that man can do everything for himself. It, too, is based on a lack of faith. We must learn that to expect God to do everything while we do nothing is not faith but superstition.

A disbelief in God does not result in a belief in nothing; disbelief in God usuallyresults in a belief in anything.

The ghostly presence of virtual particles defies rational common sense and is nonintuitive for those unacquainted with physics. Religious belief in God, and Christian belief that God became Man around two thousand years ago, may seem strange to common-sense thinking. But when the most elementary physical things behave in this way, we should be prepared to accept that the deepest aspects of our existence go beyond our common-sense intuitions.

What is the opposite of abundance? It's not scarcity. It's greed. Greed is the belief that there is not enough for everyone, so you'd better grab yours now. What is the opposite of love? It's not hate. It's fear. Fear is the belief that someone or something can hurt you.

Belief isn't simply a thing for fair times and bright days...What is belief - what is faith - if you don't continue in it after failure?...Anyone can believe in someone, or something that always succeeds...But failure...ah, now, that is hard to believe in, certainly and truly. Difficult enough to have value. Sometimes we just have to wait long enough...then we find out why exactly it was that we kept believing...There's always another secret.

Those of us who have transcended mythical belief systems know without any doubt that there is no God up in the sky. But when we awaken to what I call the evolutionary impulse - the mysterious passion to evolve, to become, to develop on every level-we rediscover who God is.

In religious belief as elsewhere, we must take our chances, recognizing that we could be wrong, dreadfully wrong. There are no guarantees; the religious life is a venture; foolish and debilitating error is a permanent possibility. (If we can be wrong, however, we can also be right.)

Belief isn't supposed to make sense, at least not all the time. In that, it finds its power. It gets to creep up on you and carry you forward. Until you can carry yourself again.

Religion may be defined thus: a belief in, and homage rendered to, existences unseen and causes unknown.

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

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.

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.

Hope is not something you can just place in your back pocket or put your fingers around – it’s the belief in a world that has yet to exist.

Having lived through the transition from totalitarianism, I am acutely mindful of the need to never take for granted the basic freedoms of thought, expression and belief that democracy brings.

I've always had some sort of affinity for the ends of things. It depends on the song, I try to explore it in different ways. Sometimes when I think about death I'm thinking of it as a physical character that can teach you things and sometimes I'm thinking of it in a finite sense and other times I'm just asking questions that I can't answer. I don't really like to state my personal belief, because I change my mind too often, but I imagine something peaceful. Whether it's a rest or another world or some kind of eternity, it doesn't seem like a scary thing.

Superstition is but the fear of belief.

State solutions are imposed from above; they are often without corrective devices, and cannot easily be reversed on the proof of failure. Their inflexibility goes hand in hand with their planned and goal-directed nature, and when they fail the efforts of the state are directed not to changing them but to changing people’s belief that they have failed.

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

Your persistence is your belief in yourself.

The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.

The major problem of our time is the decay in the belief in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of the secret police... How right [the working classes] are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time!

As Wade Clark Roof noted in his study, the 'weightlessness' of contemporary belief in God is a reality...for religious liberals and many evangelicals.