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.

Either philosophy reinforces communal beliefs, in which case it is pointless; or else it is at odds with those beliefs, in which case it is dangerous.

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.

Whatever you experience in your life is really but the outpicturing of your own thoughts and beliefs. Now, you can change these thoughts and beliefs, and then the outer picture must change too. The outer picture cannot change until you change your thought.

What [he] is apparently objecting to is that not everyone takes his beliefs seriously. Indeed, some don't seem to respect his beliefs at all, and actually poke fun at them. Well, I have news for [him]: that's the nature of a free society. Opinions don't necessarily merit respect; they must earn respect in the marketplace of ideas.

Dad has always been - and still is - a great influence on me. He has always stood up for spirit, staying true to his beliefs... and I like to do the same with regard to my own true beliefs, regardless of potential criticism or mockery.

The true measurement of a person's worth isn't what they say they believe in, but what they do in defense of those beliefs. If you're not acting on your beliefs, then they probably aren't real.

I have a list of universal beliefs, and they are amazing beliefs, like, "No one cares" or "You don't care about me"; "I should be successful" or "I'm not successful"; "I don't have enough money"; "I'm too tall or thin or fat"; "I shouldn't have done it" - oh, my goodness, they go on and on and on.

Know that all the limiting beliefs from your family, your friends, your fears and the world will begin to come up once you start to take action. Move through them. This part of the process is where we begin to grow as individuals into who we were meant to be by challenging all of these limiting beliefs and fears.

In my platoon, we came from different parts of the country, with different backgrounds, different religious beliefs, different political beliefs—and yet we all put those differences aside. Fundamentally, I believe that’s what the American people expect of Congress as well. We all ought to be able to come together in Washington and do what’s best for our America.

Reason adapts impulses and beliefs into the real world; rationalization, on the other hand, adapts the concept of reality to the impulses and beliefs of the individual. Reasoning discovers the true cause of our acts, rationalization finds good reasons for justifying our acts.

There is no question that, if you look at name recognition and celebrity, my opponent is far-and-away ahead. I think that if you put my beliefs in one column and her positions in another column, I am almost convinced that a majority of the people in the Democratic Party would support my beliefs.

Even trees are creative, rocks are creative. You are man, the very culmination of this existence. You are at the top, you are conscious. Never think with wrong beliefs, and never be attached to wrong beliefs, that you are uncreative.

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.

Those beliefs about the essential goodness or beauty of the world are fundamentally paper-thin bullshit. There's not an essential belief that isn't a contingent belief. It could all be destroyed in a second, at any second. And I have an issue with that.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

In sorting out my feelings and beliefs, there is, however, one piece of moral ground of which I am absolutely certain: if I were to be murdered I would not want my murderer executed. I would not want my death avenged. Especially by government--which can't be trusted to control its own bureaucrats or collect taxes equitably or fill a pothole, much less decide which of its citizens to kill.

Your thoughts are like the seeds you plant in your garden. Your beliefs are like the soil in which you plant these seeds.

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.

Writing is how I communicate my deepest beliefs, and what I hope are helpful observations about our dual citizenship, as children of God, as regular old mixed-up, worried, flawed, precious human beings.

They stared at each other, wanting each other, drawn to each other, but their silent shout of love went unheard in the roar of misunderstanding, and the clatter of culturally ingrained beliefs.

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.

Our ability to turn off empathy for specific kinds of humans and then use faulty logic to justify our beliefs is messily sociopathic.

Rather than going after our walls and barriers with a sledgehammer, we pay attention to them. With gentleness and honesty, we move closer to those walls. We touch them and smell them and get to know them well. We begin a process of acknowledging our aversions and our cravings. We become familiar with the strategies and beliefs we use to build the walls: What are the stories I tell myself? What repels me and what attracts me? We start to get curious about what’s going on.

The difficulty with humanity's previous attempts at reinventing itself is that we've always started with behaviors rather than with beliefs.

The right to criticize: the right to hold unpopular beliefs; the right to protest; the right of independent thought. The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood... Otherwise none of us could call our souls our own.

When I worked at the White House in the mid-1990s, I would not have dreamed of sharing my beliefs on faith with my colleagues.

Most of the Michelle Bachmanns and Mitt Romneys who say such terrible things about us actually is a positive force, because it allows sensible people to realize how stupid and vile their beliefs are.

One sees a trend in our political and legal cultures toward treating religious beliefs as arbitrary and unimportant, a trend supported by a rhetoric that implies that there is something wrong with religious devotion.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

I like good ideas. I don't want just do something for it's own sake to bother people, but if I can bother them with a logical argument about something they have agreed to in society simplistically - like children are sacred, the cult of the child, this cult of professional parenthood, and of course religion, and respect for policemen and the law, and all of these untouchable areas. I like attacking those beliefs, but in with good sound thinking, and an unusual approach.

This is a very unforgiving country when you show this country its warts, when you hold the mirror up. If you happen not to share their beliefs, they'll kill you.

The person who understands the evil in his own heart is the only person who is useful, fruitful, and solid in his beliefs and obedience. Others only delude themselves and thus upset families, churches, and all other relationships. In their self-pride and judgment of others, they show great inconsistency.

Magic is a sudden opening of the mind to the wonder of existence. It is a sense that there is much more to life than we usually recognize; that we do not have to be confined by the limited views that our family, our society, or our own habitual thoughts impose on us; that life contains many dimensions, depths, textures, and meanings extending far beyond our familiar beliefs and concepts.

You are given the gifts of the gods; you create your reality according to your beliefs.

Other people's beliefs may be myths, but not mine.

Missionary zeal does not grow out of intellectual beliefs, nor out of theological arguments, but out of love. If I do not love a person I am not moved to help him by proofs that he is in need; if I do love him, I wait for no proof of a special need to urge me to help him.

Those people who want to express their religious beliefs on public property should enjoy the same rights that we provide to those protesting the war in Iraq.

Our institute's agenda is relatively simple. We study the relationship between social-economic change and culture. By culture we mean beliefs, values and lifestyles. We cover a broad range of issues, and we work very internationally.

I've always been very spiritual, since I was a very, very young child. The older I get, I'm reading more, I'm experiencing more, and so that's all reflected in all of my music. All of my fans are pretty familiar with me and my beliefs. It's all about connecting to yourself and sticking to your own spirituality.

It must be emphasized that as a father, you are always teaching. For good or ill your family learns your ways, your beliefs, your heart, your ideas, your concerns. Your children may or may not choose to follow you, but the example you give is the greatest light you hold before your children, and you are accountable for that light.

The dis-incumbenced stance is the one people should cultivate, we are told, once they recognize that there is no world beyond the human world. They will, indeed must, have their beliefs and values, but they will recognize that these 'lean upon' - and are answerable to - nothing other than human commitments and purposes. The only fidelity, Rorty remarked, can be to our own conventions.

Duality is the real root of our suffering and of all our conflicts. All our concepts and beliefs, no matter how profound they may seem, are like nets which trap us in dualism. When we discover our limits we have to try to overcome them, untying ourselves from whatever type of religious, political, or social conviction may contain us. We have to abandon such concepts as 'enlightenment', 'the nature of the mind', and so on, until we no longer neglect to integrate our knowledge with our actual existence.

An ideology can be defined as a group of beliefs that individuals borrow; most people borrow an ideology by identifying with a social group ... with a body of sacred documents and heroes.

God allows hardship in our lives so that our beliefs-those handholds of faith in a troubled world-will became more and more real to us and less and less theory.

The world of the arts is by no means always comfortable, but neither is it likely ever to be boring. It is full of surprises, humor, traps for the unwary, and challenges to smugness. It is a world of moods as well as of revelation, of beliefs and fears, of unpleasant truth as well as of delicious fantasy. Perhaps it is arrogant to say that anyone who does not venture into this world is only half-interested in life. I say it, nonetheless.

Hindu is a geographical identity, or at the most a cultural one - not a religion. There is no set of beliefs that everyone has to adhere to.

One of the myths propagated by the enemies of Israel is that there is an all-powerful Zionist conspiracy. That is a false accusation. Nevertheless, that AIPAC has been so successful in suppressing criticism has lent some credence to such false beliefs.