Quotes About Beliefs

When it comes to controlling human beings there is no better instrument than lies. Because, you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts ... Who knows what use they’ll make of you? Maybe you’ll help them to persuade people to buy things they don’t need, or hate things they know nothing about, or hold beliefs that make them easy to handle, or doubt the truths that might save them.

If faith is what you have to go on, if faith is the link between your beliefs and the world at large, your beliefs are very likely to be wrong. Beliefs can be right or wrong. If you believe you can fly, that belief is only true if indeed you can fly. Somebody who thinks he can fly, and is wrong about it, will eventually discover there's a problem with his view of the world.

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.

When people try to use religion to address the natural world, science pushes back on it, and religion has to accommodate the results. Beliefs can be permanent, but beliefs can also be flexible. Personally, if I find out my belief is wrong, I change my mind. I think that's a good way to live.

Facts do not find their way into the world in which our beliefs reside; they did not produce our beliefs, they do not destroy them; they may inflict on them the most constant refutations without weakening them, and an avalanche of afflictions or ailments succeeding one another without interruption in a family will not make it doubt the goodness of its God or the talent of its doctor.

This is something I consider Enlightenment to be - and that is to give intellectual or spiritual understanding and to be free of ignorance, false beliefs or prejudice. Able to honor each person as they walk their own path and not infringe our own personal beliefs onto them but to accept what ever form that carries truth for them

I'm not an atheist. I do have faith in God. I do not judge people for their faith. I judge people who use religion to hurt people. I don't believe in a religion that shuns people for their beliefs, or that you should hurt people for their beliefs.

I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs.

Tolerance isn't about not having beliefs. It's about how your beliefs lead you to treat people who disagree with you.

When our beliefs are based on our own direct experience of reality and not on notions offered by others, no one can remove these beliefs from us.

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

The Earth is not 6,000 or 10,000 years old. It's not. And if that conflicts with your beliefs, I strongly feel you should question your beliefs.

We have two alternatives: either we question our beliefs - or we don't. Either we accept our fixed versions of reality- or we begin to challenge them. In Buddha's opinion, to train in staying open and curious - to train in dissolving our assumptions and beliefs - is the best use of our human lives.

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.

When examining evidence relevant to a given belief, people are inclined to see what they expect to see, and conclude what they expect to conclude. Information that is consistent with our pre-existing beliefs is often accepted at face value, whereas evidence that contradicts them is critically scrutinized and discounted. Our beliefs may thus be less responsive than they should to the implications of new information

Convictions are not merely beliefs we hold; they are those beliefs that hold us in their grip.

Alternative explanations are always welcome in science, if they are better and explain more. Alternative explanations that explain nothing are not welcome... Note how science changed those beliefs when new data became available. Religions stick to the same ancient beliefs regardless of the data.

[He] seems to want it both ways: the freedom to hold and express beliefs, and immunity from criticism for those beliefs. This is the kind of attitude that leads inexorably to totalitarianism. It is to be decried, particularly in a university environment where the search for truth necessitates that no belief be treated as sacred or above scrutiny.

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.

As soon as you awaken to the power you have, you begin to flex the muscles of your courage. Then you can dream bravely: letting go of your limiting beliefs and pushing past your fears. You can start to come up with a truly original dream that germinates in your soul and bears fruit in your life.

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.

Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you - all of the expectations, all of the beliefs - and becoming who you are.

FAQ regarding my book were not about my use of commas or how the images went berserk, but about the political situation in Bosnia, about guilt and shame, about victims and perpetrators, about reasons, arguments and beliefs that led to the conflict in the first place, etc. All of this needed and still needs answering and ongoing discussions, but I mostly felt overwhelmed and unqualified to articulate anything worth more than personal experiences of the siege, of fear and refuge - all the things which I wrote about anyway.

There is an objective reality out there, but we view it through the spectacles of our beliefs, attitudes, and values.

Our beliefs are the invisible ingredients in all our activities.

While everyone I work with may not share my beliefs, I have been surrounded by nothing but support.

Just the way sound creates visible waves as it travels through a droplet of water, our "belief waves" ripple through the quantum fabric of the universe to become our bodies and the healing, abundance, and peace-or disease, lack, and suffering-that we experience in life. And just the way we can tune a sound to change its patterns, we can tune our beliefs to preserve or destroy all that we cherish, including life itself.

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 challenge for the church is how do we have unity about basic beliefs and yet respect individual differences.

Jack looked out the window as they passed the Mormon temple, just outside the beltway near Connecticut Avenue. A decidedly odd-looking building, it had grandeur with its marble columns and gilt spires. The beliefs represented by that impressive structure seemed curious to Ryan, a lifelong Catholic, but the people who held them were honest and hardworking, and fiercely loyal to their country, because they believed in what America stood for.

Sometimes you are forced to defend your beliefs. Sometimes you are forced to look at relationships that aren't positive anymore. There are times when I have had to make peace with the fact that I am at war. And sometimes you have to fight those who do not want love to conquer all.

The ultimate arbiter of truth is experiment, not the comfort one derives from one's a priori beliefs, nor the beauty or elegance one ascribes to one's theoretical models.

The America I was born and raised in intersected with people of all ethnicities and beliefs and that, coupled with my parents' instilling of good values, made me the individual I am now.

Healing... is an active and internal process that includes investigating one's attitudes, memories and beliefs with the desire to release all negative patterns that prevent one's full emotional and spiritual recovery. This internal review inevitably leads one to review one's external circumstances in an effort to recreate one's life in a way that serves activation of will - the will to see and accept truths about one's life and how one has used one's energies; and the will to begin to use energy for the creation of love, self-esteem, and health.

A true spiritual teacher does not have anything to teach in the conventional sense of the word, does not have anything to give or add to you, such as new information, beliefs, or rules of conduct. The only function of such a teacher is to help you remove that which separates you from the truth of who you already are and what you already know in the depth of your being

Integrity is a life where your beliefs and intentions are aligned with your words and actions.

Sometimes people have sympathized with me because long years of my life were spent in jail and in exile. Well, those years ... were a mixed experience. I hated them because they separated me from the dearest thing in the world-the struggle of my people for rebirth. At the same time, they were a blessing because I had what is so rare in this world-the opportunity of thinking about basic issues, the opportunity of examining afresh the beliefs I held.

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.

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.

When we form heart-centered beliefs within our bodies, in the language of physics we're creating the electrical and magnetic expression of them as waves of energy, which aren't confined to our hearts or limited by the physical barrier of our skin and bones. So clearly we're speaking to the world around us in each moment of every day through a language that has no words: the belief-waves of our hearts.

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.

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.

Moore's Law is really a thing about human activity, it's about vision, it's about what you're allowed to believe. Because people are really limited by their beliefs, they limit themselves by what they allow themselves to believe about what is possible.

Your beliefs shape your attitudes!

Science can have a purifying effect on religion, freeing it from beliefs of a pre-scientific age and helping us to a truer conception of God. At the same time, I am far from believing that science will ever give us the answers to all our questions.

I think it's better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier. Life should malleable and progressive; working from idea to idea permits that. Beliefs anchor you to certain points and limit growth; new ideas can't generate. Life becomes stagnant.

Positive secularism is not tolerance of all religions, but it is the total denial of religious beliefs: it is the emergence of homogeneous human outlook which is based upon verifiable facts of life.

Our beliefs are rooted deep in our earth, no matter what you have done to it and how much of it you have paved over. And if you leave all that concrete unwatched for a year or two, our plants, the native Indian plants, will pierce that concrete and push up through it.