Quotes About Beliefs

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.

The brain is a stubborn organ. Once its primary set of beliefs has been established, the brain finds it difficult to integrate opposing ideas and beliefs. This has profound consequences for individuals and society and helps to explain why some people cannot abandon destructive beliefs, be they religious, political or psychological.

Holding on to beliefs limits our experience of life. That doesn't mean that beliefs or ideas or thinking is a problem; the stubborn attitude of having to have things be a particular way, grasping on to our beliefs and thoughts, all these cause the problems. To put it simply, using your belief system this way creates a situation in which you choose to be blind instead of being able to see, to be deaf instead of being able to hear, to be dead rather than alive, asleep rather than awake.

The therapist does not treat patients by simply giving them another set of beliefs. He or she tries to help them see which kinds of ideas and beliefs have led to their suffering. Many patients want to get rid of their painful feelings, but they do not want to get rid of their beliefs, the viewpoints that are the very roots of their feelings.

Teach children tolerance. No one need surrender his or her own beliefs while extending tolerance to those with other beliefs.

Enhanced interrogation is not to be considered lightly, but the use of enhanced interrogation techniques does not require moral people to abandon their beliefs. Rather, it is precisely during these difficult times that one's beliefs about life, justice and mercy become indispensible.

What a doctor or healer tells you is a reflection of the beliefs and expectations you hold. Change your beliefs and you change the prognosis. Who is the doctor? The mind of the patient.

When we speak of ordinary unqualified knowledge, my thought is that we are implicitly relativizing to the standards imposed by our evolution-derived humanity. These are standards that determine when we consider it appropriate to store beliefs just as a human being, rather than in one's capacity as an expert of one or another sort. Such stored beliefs are to be available for later use in one's own thought or in testimony to others.

This sort of behavior is left to the psychotic, dogmatic, fundamentalist believers you see on your TV everyday letting off bombs and killing people in the name of God. Beliefs are dangerous. Beliefs allow the mind to stop functioning. A non-functioning mind is clinically dead. Believe in nothing.

In a brutal country like ours, where human life is 'cheap', it's stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs? High ideas? Only people in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.

Until you understand your Core Story, whatever it is, and how it made you who you are today, your foundation will reflect only your unconscious beliefs about yourself, real or imagined, positive or negative. When you delve into your subconscious beliefs about your lot in life, whether you believe you deserve to be happy or sad, successful or unsuccessful, only then do you have the chance to change the story that is replaying over and over in your head and determining how you go through life.

Suppose we concede that if I had been born of Muslim parents in Morocco rather than Christian parents in Michigan, my beliefs would be quite different. [But] the same goes for the pluralist...If the pluralist had been born in [Morocco] he probably wouldn't be a pluralist. Does it follow that...his pluralist beliefs are produced in him by an unreliable belief-producing process?

Most true believers, when faced with evidence that contradicts their beliefs, will hold on to those beliefs even more strongly.

All religions, plainly and simply, cannot be true. Some beliefs are false, and we know them to be false. So it does no good to put a halo on the notion of tolerance as if everything could be equally true. To deem all beliefs equally true is sheer nonsense for the simple reason that to deny that statement would also, then, be true. But if the denial of the statement is also true, then all religions are not true.

I believe that the vast majority of people that are unfaithful are monogamous in their beliefs. The ones who are not monogamous in their beliefs either live in poly relationships or consensual non-monogamous relationships, or they have divorced. If it's very bad, then people don't stay married these days in the West. They can be married and have their family, but they want something else - they want something that they don't have in their lives, or simply to be someone that isn't who they are in the context of their marriage.

The 'secret of life' is BELIEF. Rather than genes, it is our beliefs that control our lives. PSYCH-K is a set of simple, self-empowering techniques to change your beliefs and perceptions that impact your life at a cellular level.

They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness.

It's really interesting for me as a filmmaker to go back and look at the films I've made and see where I was at that point in my life and also where my ideals were and the beliefs that I had and look at the ways I've grown and evolved and apply that to the next thing.

Contrary to economists' beliefs, the informal sectors of the world's economies, in total, are predominant, and the institutionalized, monetized sectors grow out of them and rest upon them, rather than the reverse.

It is difficult, none the less, for the ordinary man to cast off orthodox beliefs, for he is seldom allowed to hear the other side... Whereas the Christian view is pressed on him day in and day out.

We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship. It is obviously not the ideas themselves that are dear to us, but our self-esteem, which is threatened.

The crossroads of trade are the meeting place of ideas, the attrition ground of rival customs and beliefs; diversities beget conflict, comparison, thought; superstitions cancel one another, and reason begins.

The key thing about life is to be true to a set of beliefs. And to be genuine.

I really think it's important that my beliefs don't impinge upon what you get from the movie. It's your opinion that matters and it's far more interesting than mine.

Your religious beliefs are your business. They are not and should not be the basis for law. If you use them as justification to discriminate against others, don't be upset when others decide you're an asshole.

Even back in its colonial days, America developed a reputation as a safe harbor for people with unusual or radical religious beliefs.

No matter your spiritual beliefs, if you hold any, the answer is the same: sometimes, why is not knowable. If you open the refrigerator door and a tub of Kozy Shack tapioca pudding tumbles out and splats open onto the floor, you clean it. You don’t stand there and question why it happened, how it was possible. Why doesn’t matter now.

Religious faith is the only area of discourse where immunity through conversation is considered noble . It's the only area of our lives where someone can win points for saying, "There's nothing that you can do to change my mind and I'm taking no state of the world ultimately into account in believing what I believe. There's nothing to change about the world that would cause me to revise my beliefs.

I've spent the last few years really trying to come out of that belief system. Speaking mythologically, it's like Beauty and the Beast. The beast kidnaps the beauty until she learns to love him for who he is. In a sense, our negative beliefs kidnap our greatness, our life-force. We have to go and kiss them.

Actually, it's the other way round. In a poor country, the only consolation people can have is the one that comes from their beliefs.

I'm a Buddhist, so one of my biggest beliefs is, 'Everything changes, don't take it personally.'

If a harmonious relationship is established amongst societies and religious beliefs in today's multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural world, then it will surely set a very good example for others.

The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangibles, ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.

Exhilarating. Radical Grace moved me to tears with its portrayal of good people putting their beliefs into action in ways that transcend all ideological boundaries.

The more we can get together and talk about various perspectives, feelings, beliefs, the better.

If you’re not acting on your beliefs, then they probably aren’t real.

All my religious beliefs are based on Star Wars.

Our beliefs create the kind of world we believe in. We project our feelings, thoughts and attitudes onto the world. I can create a different world by changing my belief about the world. Our inner state creates the outer and not vice versa.

We are more connected than ever before, more able to spread our ideas and beliefs, our anger and fears. As we exercise the right to advocate our views, and as we animate our supporters, we must all assume responsibility for our words and actions before they enter a vast echo chamber and reach those both serious and delirious, connected and unhinged.

Neural science, which is the study of the brain, tells us that we have up to one billion brain cells with thousands of branches that communicate with each other much like a complex highway system. The more we attend to something, or the more we engage in certain behaviors, the more those particular cells communicate and the pathways between them deepen. This is how our values, our beliefs, and our motivations are actually formed.

For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs.

I grew up as a Mormon, and that had more of an impact on my values than my beliefs. I'm afraid I will always feel the weight of a lie. I'm very hard on myself anyway. Religious guilt carries over too. You can't really misbehave without feeling badly about it. At least, I can't.

Sociotropic voters with biased economic beliefs are more likely to produce severe political failures than are selfish voters with rational expectations.

One of the finest beliefs I developed years ago that helped me to enjoy all of my life experience was the idea that there are no bad experiences, that no matter what I go through in life - whether it's a challenging experience or a pleasurable one - every experience provides me something of value if I look for it.

People do not only live on interests; they also live on beliefs, especially in very ideological areas. Unless you understand the ideological aspect of the region, you cannot understand what is happening.

When liberal whites fail to understand how they can and/or do embody white supremacist values and beliefs even though they may not embrace racism as prejudice or domination (especially domination that involves coercive control), they cannot recognize the ways their actions support and affirm the very structure of racist domination and oppression that they wish to see eradicated.

We falsely interpret the world around us. We ignore evidence that doesn't support our prior beliefs and we convince ourselves we know things we don. We think we know things we don't know.

We can't equate democracy with Christianity because the largest democracy on earth is India, which is primarily Hindu. The third largest democracy is Indonesia, which is Islamic. Democracy and freedom are not dependent on Christian beliefs.