Quotes About Beliefs

The birth of excellence begins with our awareness that our beliefs are a choice. We usually don't think of it that way, but belief can be a conscious choice. You can choose beliefs that limit you, or you can choose beliefs that support you. The trick is to choose the beliefs that are conducive to success and the results you want and to discard the ones that hold you back.

There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry towards religious beliefs of others begins. Religious beliefs are sacred to people and at all times should be respected and honored. As a civil rights activist of the past 40 years, I cannot support a show that disrespects those beliefs and practices.

If you can do one thing you thought was utterly impossible, it causes you to rethink your beliefs. Life is both subtler and more complex than some of us like to believe. So if you haven't done so already, review your beliefs and decide which ones you might change now and what you would change those beliefs to.

Creative power has to filter through our beliefs, attitudes, emotions, and habits. The more negative and constricted our beliefs and patterns are, the more they block the creative energy. Most people hope that by ignoring negativity, it will go away, but the reverse is actually true. Through recognizing, acknowledging, and experiencing it, the blocked energy can be released. You are then free to replace it with positive beliefs and attitudes.

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

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.

I great difficulty having any respect for a religion that has so little confidence in the truth of its beliefs that it feels reduced to using threats in order to propagate those beliefs.

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.

But individuals and firms spend an enormous amount of resources acquiring information, which affects their beliefs; and actions of others too affect their beliefs.

People who believe in something for which there is not a shred of evidence act on that belief and, above all, impose their beliefs on others, they make me cross, and they make me especially cross when they impose their beliefs on defenceless children.

The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.

Questioning our own motives, and our own process, is critical to a skeptical and scientific outlook. We must realize that the default mode of human psychology is to grab onto comforting beliefs for purely emotional reasons, and then justify those beliefs to ourselves with post-hoc rationalizations.

Our negative thoughts are valuable messages to us about our deeper fears and negative attitudes. These usually are so basic to our thinking and feeling that we don't realize they are beliefs at all. We assume that they are simply "the way life is." We may be consciously affirming and visualizing prosperity, but if our unconscious belief is that we don't deserve it, then we won't create it. Once we become aware of our core negative beliefs, they begin to heal.

Truth, when we are fortunate enough to find it, is like bad-tasting medicine. It rarely comes as a pleasant surprise, because if it surprises us, it means we've been denying it for some time and have a lot of beliefs based on falsehood. It's hard to give up those beliefs.

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them.

So long as knowledge goes beyond mere true belief, foreknowledge is implausible, since having and relying on relevant true beliefs is sufficient for inquiry. A stepping-stone version of prior true belief seems reasonable, though perhaps we should accept only an even weaker view: a stepping-stone version of roughly-accurate beliefs.

The opposition of instinct and reason is mainly illusory. Instinct, intuition, or insight is what first leads to the beliefs which subsequent reason confirms or confutes; but the confirmation, where it is possible, consists, in the last analysis, of agreement with other beliefs no less instinctive. Reason is a harmonizing, controlling force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical realms, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.

Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.

I'm interested in how a person forms her beliefs, how that happens. Beliefs of all kinds make up the animating force in each of us. Without them we would be paralyzed, lifeless - the glove without the hand.

All the ideals and beliefs you ever had have crashed about your gun-deafened ears - you don't believe in God or them or the infallibility of England or anything but bloody war and wounds and foul smells and smutty stories and smoke and bombs and lice and filth and noise, noise, noise - you live in a world of cold sick fear, a dirty world of darkness and despair - you want to crawl ignominiously home away from these painful writhing things that once were men, these shattered, tortured faces that dumbly demand what it's all about in Christ's name.

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 totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.

The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.

The problem is, most people don't like to hear suggestions that directly confront or run counter to their most sacred beliefs.

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

In fact, the U.S. military has bent over backwards to respect the religious beliefs of some very dangerous fanatics who want to kill us.

The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs.

Some beliefs may be subject to such instant, brutal and unambiguous rejection. For example: no left-coiling periwinkle has ever been found among millions of snails examined. If I happen to find one during my walk on Nobska beach tomorrow morning, a century of well nurtured negative evidence will collapse in an instant.

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.'

The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

Forceful actions arising from erroneous beliefs often create social effects that confirm the misbeliefs

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.

I have spiritual beliefs that I could literally go out and make an entire comedy routine about, and tour as some sort of spiritual guru, but it kind of goes against that [as] I actually believe the things, so I'm always kind of caught in the middle.

We repeat and again reaffirm that neither a State nor the Federal Government can constitutionally force a person "to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion." Neither can constitutionally pass laws or impose requirements which aid all religions as against nonbelievers, and neither can aid those religions based on a belief in the existence of God as against those religions founded on different beliefs.

That's what makes America great; the fabric and the core of our beliefs and our being is we wrap ourselves around diversity. We say that the American flag represents our right to be free in every aspect of what that is, and every veteran who fought, fought for that freedom. So what we have to do is realize it's not a choice between the country and racial justice; it's about what we believe in at the core of our being, and that's that we are free.

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

I am a Christian. I haven't really talked about that before. It is something very private. But I do pray and my beliefs are very important to me.

Our beliefs, our values shape the way we look out at the world and the way we treat it. If we believe that we were here, placed here by God, that this - all of this creation is for us, it's for us to go and occupy, dominate and exploit, then we will proceed to do that.

Real men don't conform to the beliefs of others, even when society has concluded on what is good and true, but maintain the integrity of their own mind.

Religion isn't best understood primarily as a collection of beliefs held by backward people with fear and trembling for most of human history (religion as brainwash). It is rather, among other things, a scriptorium of beleaguered witness, a record of collated information, both fragmentary and sometimes systematic, with which we may feel compelled to reckon as it somehow, across history, reckons with us, an inheritance, if you like, of difficult wisdom.

Conservatism clings to what has been established, fearing that, once we begin to question the beliefs that we have inherited, all the values of life will be destroyed.

I believe in the separation of church and state. We all have our own religious beliefs. There are people out there who are atheists, who don't believe at all. . . . They are citizens of Minnesota, and I have to respect that.

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.

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.

I was shamed.My son, Bill, who was 14 come to me and said: "Mother, you've been professing that you're an atheist for a long time now. Well, I don't believe in God either, but every day in school I'm forced to say prayers, and I feel like a hypocrite. Why should I be compelled to betray my beliefs?" I couldn't answer him.

wrongness always seems to come at us from left field - that is, from outside ourselves. But the reality could hardly be more different. Error is the ultimate inside job. Yes, the world can be profoundly confusing; and yes, other people can mislead or deceive you. In the end, though, nobody but you can choose to believe your own beliefs.

Even though their arguments did not invoke religion, I think we all know what's behind these arguments. They're trying to protect religious beliefs from contradiction by science. They used to do it by prohibiting teachers from teaching evolution at all; then they wanted to teach intelligent design as an alternative theory; now they want the supposed "weaknesses" in evolution pointed out. But it's all the same program - it's all an attempt to let religious ideas determine what is taught in science courses.