Quotes About Belief

We must have a spiritual rebirth. We must be born out of the belief in externalities into the belief of inner realities, out of the belief that we are separated from God, into the belief that we are part of a Unitary Wholeness.

Disease is the misery of our belief, happiness is the health of our wisdom, so that man's happiness or misery depends on himself. Now, as our misery comes from our belief, and not from the thing believed, it is necessary to be on the watch, so as not to be deceived by false guides. Sensation contains no intelligence or belief, but is a mere disturbance of the matter, called agitation, which produces mind, and is ready to receive the seed of error. Ever since man was created, there has been an element called error which has been busy inventing answers for every sensation.

This is a very central part of the psychedelic attitude toward the world, to entertain all possibilities but to never commit to belief. Belief always being seen as a kind of trap, because if you belief something you are forever precluded from believing its opposite.

Opinion involves belief (for without belief in what we opine we cannot have an opinion), and in the brutes though we often find imagination we never find belief.

Historically the belief in heaven and the belief in utopia are like compensatory buckets in a well: when one goes down the other comes up. When the classic religions decayed, communistic agitation rose in Athens (430 B.C.), and revolution began in Rome (133 B.C.); when these movements failed, resurrection faiths succeeded, culminating in Christianity; when, in our eighteenth century, Christian belief weakened, communism reappeared. In this perspective the future of religion is secure.

Paul commands: 'Therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold the Traditions which you have been taught, whether by word or by our letter.' From this it is clear that they did not hand down everything by letter, but there is much also that was not written. Like that which was written, the unwritten too is worthy of belief. So let us regard the Tradition of the Church also as worthy of belief. Is it a Tradition? Seek no further.

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.

Once infected, the individual [infected with a god virus] cannot detect major contradictions in his beliefs and behavior. Belief systems become self-evident to him, and no amount of logical discourse will move him from his belief. If a Mormon and Catholic were to debate the merits of their respective religions, neither could see his own inconsistencies and logical fallacies, but would see the other's quite clearly.

Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking.

I believe that there are many paths to the same place, and that is a belief that there is a higher power, a belief that we are connected as a people.

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.

If my interlocutor desires to convince me that Jupiter has inhabitants, and that his description of them is accurate, it is for him to bring forward evidence in support of his contention. The burden of proof evidently lies on him; it is not for me to prove that no such beings exist before my non-belief is justified, but for him to prove that they do exist before my belief can be fairly claimed. Similarly, it is for the affirmer of God's existence to bring evidence in support of his affirmation; the burden of proof lies on him.

I think there's a general sense that the belief structures that existed and carried civilization forward have weakened to the point where they can no longer support it. They are not powerful enough to do it anymore because there is not enough serious belief in them.

The commune movement is part of a reawakening of belief in the possibilities for utopia that existed in the nineteenth century and exist again today, a belief that by creating the right social institution, human satisfaction and growth can be achieved.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.

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.

Everyone thinks they've won the Magical Belief Lottery. Everyone thinks they more or less have a handle on things, that they, as opposed to the billions who disagree with them, have somehow lucked into the one true belief system.

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.

So little is actually worthy of belief or disbelief. Better to strive to coexist than seek to disapprove . . .

Al-Ghazali is the most important philosophical theologian of classical Islam, and Moderation in Belief is among his most important works. It sets out al-Ghazali's Ash?arite theology with unusual clarity and provides important background for such well-known works as his autobiographical Deliverance from Error and his attack on Avicenna in The Incoherence of the Philosophers. This first English-language translation, with notes that bring out the argumentation and background of the work, is thus very much to be welcomed.

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.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

When you develop a game plan to get what you want, you will develop a belief that you can get it.

it’s as if the universe has a sense of humor, since at a deep level it’s impossible not to lead a spiritual life… the universe is living through you at this moment. with or without belief in god, the chain of events leading from silent awareness to physical reality remains intact.

Because God is reflected in the world in which me made, in some sense, my scientific investigation has always supported my belief in God in a very real sense. It helps me to pray better.

What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.

It is perfectly possible to live a very moral life without a belief in God, and I think it's perfectly possible to live a life peppered with ill-doing and believe in God.

I don't know how you bridge that contradiction, but I felt that Barack Obama was sincere. It didn't feel like a line to me. You know, it felt like him reverting back to what was in his bones and that's, you know, optimism and a deep belief in, you know, American institutions and the American people.

It is curious to observe the triumph of slight incidents over the mind; and what incredible weight they have in forming and governing our opinions, both of men and things, that trifles light as air shall waft a belief into the soul, and plant it so immovable within it, that Euclid's demonstrations, could they be brought to batter it in breach, should not all have power to overthrow it!

The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering.

According to our belief, Japan was founded by the Sun Goddess Amaterasu Omikami, who is revered by the entire nation for her all-pervading virtue, and from whom our Imperial House is descended.

If agricultural land be left uncultivated, in a few years the jungle returns, and signs are not lacking that a similar danger is always lying in wait for the fields of thought, which, by the labour of three hundred years, have been cleared and brought into cultivation by men of science. The destruction of a very small percentage of the population would suffice to annihilate scientific knowledge, and lead us back to almost universal belief in magic, witchcraft and astrology.

Whenever a man acts purposively, he acts under a belief in some experimental phenomenon. Consequently, the sum of the experimental phenomena that a proposition implies makes up its entire bearing upon human conduct.

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

It is my belief one should not belittle the artist; while, however glorious his fame may seem, his time on Mount Olympus as an honourable guest of Zeus is short. It's a pity, but all too eager will the common folk drag him from this etherial heights to the low and trodden earth.

Belief is no substitute for arithmetic.

My reason taught me that I could not have made one of my own qualities - they were forced upon me by Nature; that my language, religion, and habits were forced upon me by Society; and that I was entirely the child of Nature and Society; that Nature gave the qualities and Society directed them. Thus was I forced, through seeing the error of their foundation, to abandon all belief in every religion which had been taught by man.

Contrary to common belief, Christian fiction did not begin with Catherine Marshall, Janette Oke, or Frank Peretti.

One thing alone I charge you. As you live, believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the great end comes slowly, because time is long.

I'm of the belief that you can have only one commander-in-chief at a time, only one president at a time. President Bush is our president. Whatever he decides vis-a-vis war or peace in Iraq is what we will do as a country. And I for one will swing in behind him as a citizen ... and support whatever his decision is.

It is my hope and my belief that you will be able to report that I died with dignity, without animal fear and without bravado. I owe that much to myself.

Leadership is much more an art, a belief, a condition of the heart, than a set of things to do.

I faced quite a few challenging times, and in front of those, I was more positive than some people not facing those conditions. I'm actually of the belief now that it is that struggle that offers you that open-hearted hope.

You're not free until you've been made captive by supreme belief.

The Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out, there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930's, it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it - the ascent of man against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty.

I like the confusion you get between science and religion … that’s where belief lies and art as well.

Years of observation and thought have given increasing strength to the belief that we Jews stand apart from you gentiles, that a primal duality breaks the humanity I know into two distinct parts; that this duality is a fundamental, and that all differences among you gentiles are trivialities compared with that which divided all of you from us.

When Michelle and I decided that I would run for President, it was because of a shared belief in the power of community and connection, a commitment to the idea that we are our brothers' keepers.