Quotes About Conviction

There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days-the conviction that ideas matter . . . . That ideas matter means that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one's mind matters . . .

Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.

Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.

Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all.

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

Everybody has their own path. I just believe that with conviction and discipline you can make anything happen.

The ultimate foundation of honor is the conviction that moral character is unalterable: a single bad action implies that future actions of the same kind will, under similar circumstances, also be bad.

The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.

His contagious conviction that our love was unique and desperate infected me with an anxious sickness; soon we would learn to treat one another with the circumspect tenderness of comrades who are amputees, for we were surrounded by the most moving images of evanesecence, fireworks, morning glories, the old, children. But the most moving of these images were the intagible relfections of ourselves we saw in one another's eyes, reflections of nothing but appearances, in a city dedicated to seeming, and, try as we might to possess the essence of each other's otherness, we would inevitably fail.

There is no form of conviction more intimate and irresistible than that which arises from the inward teaching of the Spirit.

The only true hope for civilization-the conviction of the individual that his inner life can affect outward events and that, whether or not he does so he is responsible for them.

Faith is the great motive power, and no man realizes his full possibilities unless he has the deep conviction that life is eternally important and that his work well done is a part of an unending plan.

The majority of mankind think that they think; they acquiesce, and suppose that they argue; they flatter themselves that they are holding their own, when they have actually grown up to manhood, with scarcely a conviction that they can call their own. So it was, and so it ever shall be.

[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

Penance is the willingness to undergo hardships for the achievement of a good purpose. I was willing. But when hardships came I found myself lifted above them. Instead of hardship, I found a wonderful sense of peace and joy and conviction that I was following God's will. Blessings instead of hardships are showered upon me.

One of the reasons why I, 'a medical man' decided to give up medicine was a firm conviction of the extraordinary influence on health of pleasurable excitement, especially when combined with fresh air and exercise. How frequently have I, with great difficulty, persuaded patients who were never off my doorsteps to take up golf, and how rarely, if ever, I have seen them in my consulting room again.

The only rationale that the states put forth with any conviction-that same-sex couples and their children don't need marriage because same-sex couples can't produce children, intended or unintended-is so full of holes that it cannot be taken seriously.

Whoever is led to believe that species are mutable will do good service by conscientiously expressing his conviction; for only thus can the load of prejudice by which this subject is overwhelmed be removed.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting - the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness; it gives us information but in such a way that we cannot really hear it. God's saving love in Christ, however, is marked by both radical truthfulness about who we are and yet also radical, unconditional commitment to us. The merciful commitment strengthens us to see the truth about ourselves and repent. The conviction and repentance moves us to cling to and rest in God's mercy and grace.

Vaccination is a barbarous practice and one of the most fatal of all the delusions current in our time. Conscientious objectors to vaccination should stand alone, if need be, against the whole world, in defense of their conviction.

Belief, in one of its accepted senses, may consist in a merely intellectual assent, while faith implies such confidence and conviction as will impel to action.

If Mr. Thornton was a fool in the morning, as he assured himself at least twenty times he was, he did not grow much wiser in that afternoon. All that he gained in return for his sixpenny omnibus ride, was a more vivid conviction that there never was, never could be, any one like Margaret; that she did not love him and never would; but that she — no! nor the whole world — should never hinder him from loving her.

She had all her life long been accustomed to harbor thoughts and emotions which never voiced themselves… They belonged to her her and were her own, and she entertained the conviction that she had a right to them and they they concerned no one but herself.

It is impossible not to recognise the Long March as one of the great triumphs of men against odds and men against nature. While the Red Army was unquestionably in forced retreat, its toughened veterans reached their planned objective with moral and political will as strong as ever... Their conviction had helped turn what might have been a terrible defeat into an arrival in triumph.

It is our firm conviction that mankind will live the happier when it has learned to live with music more worthily. Whoever works to promote this end, in one way or another, has not lived in vain.

You cannot open the pages of the New Testament without realizing that one of the things that makes it so 'new,' in every way, is that here men and women call God 'Father.' This conviction, that we can speak of the Master of the universe in such intimate terms, lies at the heart of the Christian faith.

My aesthetic is probably closer to a 15-year-old's than my dad's, but I get his conviction.

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

Faith is not a weak form of belief or knowledge; it is not faith in this or that; faith is the conviction about the not yet proven, the knowledge of the real possibility, the awareness of pregnancy.

I must honestly declare my conviction that, since the days of the Reformation, there never has been so much profession of religion without practice, so much talking about God without walking with Him, so much hearing God's words without doing them.

Don't give up, courage is my conviction.

I first became interested in Ho Chi Minh in 1964-1965 while I was stationed at the U.S. Embassy in South Vietnam as a foreign service officer with the Department of State. The government in Saigon was at the point of collapse and the [Lyndon] Johnson administration was preparing to send U.S. combat troops to prevent a communist victory there. I became convinced that the U.S. effort would not succeed because of the lack of conviction in the Saigon government compared to the discipline and sense of self-sacrifice among the Viet Cong.

When you receive criticism from well-meaning people, it pays to ask, ‘Are they right?’ And if they are, you need to adapt what they’re doing. If they’re not right, if you really have conviction that they’re not right, you need to have that long-term willingness to be misunderstood. It’s a key part of invention.

This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of this entire existence, but in a certain sense the whole... Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon mother earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you.

[Islam] is the dynamic conviction that a person's spiritual and worldly responsibilities are one and the same, that an individuals duty to the community is indistinguishable from his or her duty to God.

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

Spring's first conviction is a wealth beyond its whole experience.

He that is warm for truth, and fearless in its defense, performs one of the duties of a good man; he strenghtens his own conviction, and guards others from delusion; but steadiness of belief, and boldness of profession, are yet only part of the form of godliness.

If they lost the incredible conviction that they can change their wives or husbands, marriage would collapse at once.

Conviction never so excellent, is worthless until it coverts itself into conduct.

Perhaps the most promising trend in our thinking about leadership is the growing conviction that the purposes of the group are best served when the leader helps followers develop their own initiative, strengthens them in the use of their own judgment, enables them to grow, and to become better contributors.

A child with an intense capacity for feeling can suffer to a degree that is beyond any degree of adult suffering, because imagination, ignorance, and the conviction of utter helplessness are untempered either by reason or by experience.

Let us work as if success depended upon ourselves alone, but with heartfelt conviction that we are doing nothing, and God everything.

At a personal level, as a Buddhist practitioner, I deliberately visualize and think about death in my daily practice. Death is not separated from our lives. Due to my research and thoughts about death, I have some guarantee and some conviction that it will be a positive experience.

Poetry interprets in two ways: it interprets by expressing, with magical felicity, the physiognomy and movements of the outward world; and it interprets by expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man's moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretative both by having natural magic in it, and by having moral profundity.

I'd begun to realize that there was an unspoken predjudice among book-learned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses can correct it.

The real trouble is that 'kindness' is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that 'his heart's in the right place' and 'he wouldn't hurt a fly,' though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble.