Quotes About Beliefs

I think there's a lot of great beliefs in the Buddhist religion, I think there's a lot of great beliefs in the Christian religion, I think there's a lot of great beliefs in no religion. It just depends on how you feel on the inside.

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.

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.

Externalists reject any such view. I think that the idea that we can tell, simply by way of reflection, whether our beliefs are justified, is deeply commonsensical. More than that, the idea that responsible epistemic agents ought to reflect on their beliefs, and hold them only if they somehow pass muster, is utterly natural.

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

My beliefs will run through everything I do. My beliefs, my values are my anchor and when people try to drag me, as I know they will, it is to that sense of right and wrong, that sense of who I am and what I believe, to which I will always hold.

More and more people are becoming unable to accept traditional [religious] beliefs. If they think that, apart from these beliefs, there is no reason for kindly behaviour, the results may be needlessly unfortunate. That is why it is important to show that no supernatural reasons are needed to make [people] kind and to prove that only through kindness can the human race achieve happiness.

The beliefs of your country mostly become your own beliefs! Not the reason but the empty tales shape you!

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.

She realized how many of her beliefs were either unrealistic or belonged to her deceased parents and her ex-husband. She also realized that her expectations for herself and others were sometimes too rigid. She was trying to live up to what everyone else said was best for her, which made her depressed and hard to be around at times. Once she changed her beliefs about herself and others, she began to smile more and enjoy life.

It doesn't hurt me. I'm not governed by the fear of what other people say. Events don't elicit feelings; I think beliefs elicit feelings, and I understand what my beliefs are and I know how I am.

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

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.

Do not boast because you have beliefs; don't forget that hundreds of absurd beliefs in the history are totally disappeared!

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.

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 confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.

People have the absolute right to preach and to think and to say whatever they believe, and at the same time those beliefs can't be used as the basis for denying other people their equal rights and their equal freedom.

As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums, not least my family, now facing war thousands of miles away.

Beliefs have become unimportant to me. Faith as radical trust became even more important to me.

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.

Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life.

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.

Still, it formed one of my basic beliefs about success which is this: most of the time, success can be measured in terms of how much more than others you have of something that's in short supply. This includes money, reputation, respect, etc.

I had so many beliefs against being a singer or what it takes. There was a lot of pain associated with that. The rejection of it all. I lived in a rejection state of mind. Not because of my voice; the mike never rejected me. It was harboring all those bad memories of being broke. It teaches you your worth. Nothing good comes from that.

If a thousand old beliefs were ruined in our march to truth we must still march on.

For that again, is what all manner of religion essentially is: childish dependency. If something is irrational, that means it won't work. It's usually unrealistic. People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness. People have motives and thoughts of which they are unaware. Rational beliefs bring us closer to getting good results in the real world. Self-esteem is the greatest sickness known to man or woman because it's conditional. The art of love is largely the art of persistence.

Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possilble. This power becomes available to you just as soon as you can change your beliefs.

Any cause that requires mockery and abuse to advance itself isn't one I need to engage with, regardless of my basic beliefs or agreement with the underlying goals.

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.

The Old Religion, as we call it, is closer in spirit to Native American traditions or to shamanism of the Arctic. It is not based on dogma or a set of beliefs, nor on scriptures or a sacred book revealed by a great man. Witchcraft takes it's teachings from nature, and reads inspiration in the movements of the sun, moon, and stars, the flight of birds, the slow growth of trees, and the cycles of the seasons.

If they [Plato and Aristotle] wrote about politics it was as if to lay down rules for a madhouse. And if they pretended to treat it as something really important it was because they knew that the madmen they were talking to believed themselves to be kings and emperors. They humored these beliefs in order to calm down their madness with as little harm as possible.

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.

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.

The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities and businesses and economic relations, shook them also out of their old-established habits of thought, and out of the lightly held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past.

It sounds strange, somewhat on the line between irony and absurdity, to think that people would rather label and judge something as significant as each other but completely bypass a peanut. ... World peace is only a dream because people won't allow themselves and others around them to simply be peanuts. We won't allow the color of a man's heart to be the color of his skin, the premise of his beliefs, and his self-worth. We won't allow him to be a peanut, therefore we won't allow ourselves to come to live in harmony. (Diary 18)

I suspect that most of the individuals who have religious faith are content with blind faith. They feel no obligation to understand what they believe. They may even wish not to have their beliefs disturbed by thought.

Because our ladies mostly attend Kalatshepams, (Religious discourses) they have fallen prey to the superstitions, blind beliefs, and immorality by the false and fictituous propaganda of the Brahmins.

When I was a kid I think the thing I remembered most about The Exorcist was Linda Blair being possessed by the devil, and how scary that was. It had a lot of parallels for me because the movie was challenging different ideas about faith and it was looking at religion in a darker way. Growing up I was afraid of being possessed by the devil, as an adult I'm afraid of being possessed by the world, by ignorance, and not holding on to my beliefs and what I feel strongly about.

I think we have an obligation to put on a fun show and put on a concert that's memorable, that's energetic and that spreads joy and open-mindedness. If being open-minded and joyful is against your political beliefs, then you know, f**k you.

I think I would abolish schools which systematically inculcate sectarian beliefs.

Equality does not mean that all plants must grow to the same height - a society of tall grass and dwarf trees, a jostle of conflicting jealousies. It means, in civic terms, an equal outlet for all talents; in political terms, that all votes will carry the same weight; and in religious terms that all beliefs will enjoy equal rights.

As long as we are human, we are destined to make mistakes. We all fall prey to flawed beliefs and views. What separates a forward-looking person from an intransigent one, a virtuous person from a malevolent one, however, is whether one can candidly admit to ones mistakes and take bold steps to redress them.

What used to help us to cope with transience was stuff like, extended families all living in one place, or very strong religious beliefs, or a tribe that would outlive you. That stuff is getting weaker.

The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.