Quotes About Conviction

Our greatest challenge today is to couple conviction with doubt. By conviction, I mean some pragmatically developed faith, trust, or centeredness; and by doubt I mean openness to the ongoing changeability, mystery, and fallibility of the conviction.

Faith affects the whole of man's nature. It commences with the conviction of the mind based on adequate evidence; it continues in the confidence of the heart or emotions based on conviction, and it is crowned in the consent of the will by means of which the conviction and confidence are expressed in conduct.

The intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or false. The importance of the strength of our conviction is only to provide a proportionately strong incentive to find out if the hypothesis will stand up to critical evaluation.

Conviction is not merely an opinion. It is something rooted so deeply in the conscience that to change a conviction would be to change the very essence of who you are.

Conviction is not repentance; conviction leads to repentance. But you can be convicted without repentance.

Doubt requires more courage than conviction does, and more energy; because conviction is a resting place and doubt is infinite – it is a passionate exercise. You may come out of my play uncertain. You may want to be sure. Look down on that feeling. We’ve got to learn to live with a full measure of uncertainty. There is no last word. That’s the silence under the chatter of our time.

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.

In our timidity and our shoddy opportunism we are always stirred when a man appears on the horizon willing to stake his all on a conviction.

Hope? Hope is not the absence of tragedy, my friend. It is the conviction that tragedy can be endured. Hope is the spark in you that is not subdued in the face of the vast and callous indifference of the universe. Hope is that which is not shattered by hardship. Hope is the urge to fight what is wrong even when you know it will destroy you. Hope is the decision to love and need someone knowing that they will one day die. For me to promise that there are no obstacles would be the cruelest lie I could possibly tell. That lie is not hope. Hope is the will which needs no lies.

The gospel of Jesus Christ must be the bad news of the conviction of sin before it can be the Good News of redemption. The truth is revealed in God's Holy Word; life can be lived only in absolute and disciplined submission to its authority.

And I have found that when we Catholics, in the spirit of love and charity, declare our faith boldly and with conviction, we are more likely to find kindred spirits. This is how we must comport ourselves if we are to fulfill our Lord's command in the Gospel of John (17:21), Ut unum sint, that all may be one.

I only record songs that I really like and believe in and can sing with conviction.

I come of Quaker stock. My ancestors were persecuted for their beliefs. Here they sought and found religious freedom. By blood and conviction I stand for religious tolerance both in act and in spirit.

Because we hold it for 'a fundamental and undeniable truth', that religion or 'the duty which we owe to our Creator' and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.

I believe in the American tradition of separation of church and state which is expressed in the First Amendment to the Constitution. By my office - and by personal conviction - I am sworn to uphold that tradition.

To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write [...] so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write [...] so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on. If there is good to be said, the writer should say it. If there is bad to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living. The true artist [...] gets his sense of worth and honor from his conviction that art is powerful--

The greatest source of discouragement is the conviction that one is unable to do something

It is my conviction that the public always shows itself more honest in its spontaneity than do those who officially set themselves up as judges of works of art.

Hannah writes of love with compassion and conviction.

Mere numbers cannot bring out ... the intimate essence of the experiment. This conviction comes naturally when one watches a subject at work. ... What things can happen! What reflections, what remarks, what feelings, or, on the other hand, what blind automatism, what absence of ideas! ... The experimenter judges what may be going on in [the subject's] mind, and certainly feels difficulty in expressing all the oscillations of a thought in a simple, brutal number, which can have only a deceptive precision. How, in fact, could it sum up what would need several pages of description!

[T]he central problem of government is a religious one; and anyone who assumes that he can form his political beliefs without consulting his ethics, which have their basis in religious conviction, is deceiving himself either about the true nature of government or his moral responsibility for his actions

It is lawful and hath been held so through all ages for any one who have the power to call to account a tyrant or wicked king, and after due conviction to depose and put him to death.

To discover depravity in those whom we have loved, is one of the most exquisite tortures to a virtuous mind, and the conviction is often rejected before it is finally admitted.

Man's chief delusion is his conviction that there are causes other than his own state of consciousness.

One should not be deceived: great spirits are skeptics ... Strength, FREEDOM which is born of the strength and overstrength of the spirit, proves itself by skepticism. Men of conviction are not worthy of the least consideration in fundamental questions of value and disvalue. Convictions are prisons.

It is my faith and conviction that the Constitution came not alone of the brain and purpose of man, but of the inspiration of God.

Words saturated with sincerity, conviction, faith, and intuition are like highly explosive vibration bombs, which, when set off, shatter the rocks of difficulties and create the change desired.

Experience burned into me the conviction that access to education ought to be based on how much you are willing to learn and how hard you are willing to work, not on how many dollars your family has in their bank account.

Every strong conviction ends by taking possession of us; it overcomes and absorbs us, and tears us ruthlessly from everything else. Has the Cross so seized upon your life?

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

Insurance - an ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.

Remain still, with the conviction that the Self shines as everything yet nothing, within, without, and everywhere.

The only time Republicans will shake fists and point fingers is over a war delayed, one that isn't led by the US, or a war waged without the necessary conviction (read collateral damage).

I am one of the proudest men ever born, but let me tell you frankly, it is not for myself, but on account of my ancestry. The more I have studied the past, the more I have looked back, more and more has this pride come to me, and it has given me the strength and courage of conviction, raised me up from the dust of the earth, and set me working out that great plan laid out by those great ancestors of ours.

The public conviction that a railroad linking the West and the East was an absolute necessity became so pronounced after the gold discoveries of '49 that Congress passed an act in 1853 providing for a survey of several lines from the Mississippi to the Pacific.

It is my conviction that the root of evil is the want of a living God.

WHEN reading my present treatise, bear in mind that by "faith" we do not understand merely that which is uttered with the lips, but also that which is apprehended by the soul, the conviction that the object [of belief] is exactly as it is apprehended. If, as regards real or supposed truths, you content yourself with giving utterance to them in words, without apprehending them or believing in them, especially if you do not seek real truth, you have a very easy task as, in fact, you will find many ignorant people professing articles of faith without connecting any idea with them.

A revival does two things. First, it returns the Church from her backsliding and second, it causes the conversion of men and women; and it always includes the conviction of sin on the part of the Church. What a spell the devil seems to cast over the Church today!

In a way, being an opera singer is like being a very romantic sixteen-year-old who falls in love with great passion and conviction every month.

Marinate in your own being, grow in your wisdom, mature in understanding, be firm in your conviction, be strong in your Self.

Besides what has been said, people are fickle by nature; and it is a simple to convince them of something but difficult to hold them in that conviction; and, therefore, affairs should be managed in such a way that when they no longer believe, they can be made to believe by force.

When God brings deep conviction and I agree with Him about my condition, God restores my confidence in Him.

Whereas much of what we know from ancient history is derived from one or two sources, we have no fewer than nine ancient sources, inside and outside the New Testament, corroborating the disciples' conviction that they encountered the resurrected Jesus. That's an avalanche of data.

Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.

What was a lie in the father becomes a conviction in the son.

The Golden Rule reminds us of our responsibility to protect and defend human life at every stage of its development. This conviction has led me, from the beginning of my ministry, to advocate at different levels for the global abolition of the death penalty.

Global commerce is driven by a single conviction: the inalienable right to earn profit, regardless of any human cost.

I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world - no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.