Quotes about belief

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“Some people are trapped by the belief that love comes in finite quantities, and that our kind of love exhausts the supply upon which they need to draw. I do not accept competitive models of love, only additive ones.”

“We believe in the wrong things, that's what frustrates me the most. Not the lack of belief, but the belief in the wrong things. You want meaning? Well, the meanings are out there. We're just so damn good at reading them wrong.”

“One should never fall in the belief that you can find someone to pick you up.”

“The nice thing about having a friend who is crazier than you are is that she bolsters your belief in your own sanity.”

“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.”

“It is comfortable to live in the belief that you are great, though your greatness is latent.”

“Your religious beliefs are your business. They are not and should not be the basis for law. If you use them as justification to discriminate against others, don’t be upset when others decide you’re an asshole."

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“Our beliefs about what we are and what we can be precisely determine what we can be”

“Faith is not about finding meaning in the world, there may be no such thing -- faith is the belief in our capacity to create meaningful lives.”

“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.”

“It has always been my belief that people are remembered for the sum of their accomplishments but defined by their singular failure.”

“Like me, he has a searing belief that books are sacred. They might not be to other people, but when you have a passion, you hold on to it. You defend it. You dont pretend it isn't important at the risk of offending others." -Carrie.”

“I personally subscribe to the belief that normal is just a setting on the dryer.”

“Achamian tossed his hands skyward in dismay. “Foolish boy! How many faiths are there? How many competing beliefs? And you would murder another on the slender hope that yours is somehow the only one?”

“Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt.”

“For dear me, why abandon a belief
Merely because it ceases to be true”

“it's the belief, not the words, that mean everything. it's the floating.”

“Nothing binds you except your thoughts; nothing limits you except your fear; and nothing controls you except your beliefs.”

“The Alchemists’ beliefs are my beliefs,” I say quickly.

She arched an eyebrow. “Are they? I would hope your beliefs would be your beliefs.”

I’d never thought about it that way before, but I suddenly hoped desperately that her words were true.”

“People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs.”

“Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”

“Have you any other objection than your belief of my indifference?"

- Elizabeth Bennet”

“All of us have our own inner fears, beliefs, opinions. These inner assumptions rule and govern our lives. A suggestion has no power in and of itself. its power arises from the fact that you accept it mentally.”

“What is belief - what is faith - if you don't continue it after failure?”

“I surrendered my beliefs
and found myself at the tree of life
injecting my story into the veins of leaves
only to find that stories like forests
are subject to seasons”

“At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything.”

“What do you mean, Araluen? Death?"
Halt made a careless gesture. "The usual, I suppose: the sudden cessation of life. The end of it all. Departure for a happier place. Or oblivion, depending upon your personal beliefs.”

“belief is the death of intelligence.”

“And maybe she had certain beliefs that if you love somebody, [you're] gonna like them too. And that isn't necessarily true.”

“I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.”

“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”

“Ever, if I’ve learned nothing else in my six hundred years of living, it’s that people hate change almost as much as they hate for their beliefs to be challenged.”

“There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand. I am practically industrious — painstaking, a workman to execute with perseverance and labour — but besides this there is a love for the marvellous, a belief in the marvellous, intertwined in all my projects, which hurries me out of the common pathways of men, even to the wild sea and unvisited regions I am about to explore.”

“Perfectionism is a self destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame.”

“I was too busy fighting the river to worry about adjusting my beliefs in accordance to reality.”

“Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.”

“Nobody dares to solve the problems-because the solution might contradict your philosophy, and for most people clinging to beliefs is more important than succeeding in the world.”

“Despite popular belief, hitting someone with a closed fist actually hurts the hitter almost as much as the hittee.”

“The only thing that guarantees an open-ended collaboration among human beings, the only thing that guarantees that this project is truly open-ended, is a willingness to have our beliefs and behaviors modified by the power of conversation.”

“There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author. The term is 'idiot'.”

“There’s a belief that to take care of someone else, or to let someone else take care of you—that both are inherently unfeminist. I don’t agree. There’s no shame in devoting yourself to another person, as long as he devotes himself to you in return.”

“Belief?"
"Yes," Sazed said. "Tell me, Mistress. What is it that you believe?"
Vin frowned. "What kind of question is that?"
"The most important kind, I think.”

“Teach her to question language. Language is the repository of our prejudices, our beliefs, our assumptions.”

“Your beliefs become your thoughts
Your thoughts become your words
Your words become your actions
Your actions become your destiny.

Mahatma Ghandi,” he said. “There’s more, but I can’t remember it all.”

“Belief in one’s identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one’s immortality…and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.”

“Faith is not believing in my own unshakable belief. Faith is believing an unshakable God when everything in me trembles and quakes.”

“It is odd how, when you have a secret belief of your own which you do not wish to acknowledge, the voicing of it by someone else will rouse you to a fury of denial.”

“Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one's own beliefs. Rather
it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.”

“I do not need the written code of a spiritual belief to act like a decent human being.”

“I have no argument with those who see in organized religion a template or an imperative to live life according to a prescribed set of beliefs. Just give others the room, within the laws of civil society, to believe or not believe whatever they like.”

“If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.”

“And above all things, never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.”

“We were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well made cocktail.”

“If you want to bring a fundamental change in people's belief and behavior… you need to create a community around them, where those new beliefs can be practiced and expressed and nurtured.”

“Knowledge is something which you can use.
Belief is something which uses you.”

“Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labelled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let's now stop being so damned respectful!”

“When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don't believe as you do.”

“The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.”

“One day the absurdity of the almost universal human belief in the slavery of other animals will be palpable. We shall then have discovered our souls and become worthier of sharing this planet with them.”

“The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.”

“Never confuse faith, or belief — of any kind — with something even remotely intellectual.”

“It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”

“No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.”

“This thought strengthened in me my belief that all men, without exception, deserve to be pitied, if only because they are alive.”

“The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.”

“Apocalypse is a frame of mind." [Nicodemus] said then. "A belief. A surrender to inevitability. It is a despair for the future. It is the death of hope.”

“She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.”

“Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.”

“Question: What is the opposite of faith?

Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief.

Doubt.”

“And that leaves me with the belief that miracles, no matter how inexplicable or unbelievable, are real and can occur without regard to the natural order of things.”

“The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.”

“My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.”

“Faith in faith' he answered himself. 'It isn't necessary to have something to believe in. It's only necessary to believe that somewhere there's something worthy of belief.”

“A nation which thinks that it is belief in God and not good law which makes people honest does not seem to me very advanced.”

“Your beliefs shape your attitudes!”

“It is almost impossible to state what one in fact believes, because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to define it at the same time.”

“It's my belief we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.”

“And he saw it in her eyes. Still. The belief that there could be someone other than herself. You, he wanted to shout. You. No one but you.”

“At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given.”

“I couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life…”

“I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.”

“Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”

“It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.”

“This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.”

“I believe absolutely in my own free will and my own power to accomplish - and that is the belief that moves mountains.”

“When we think about the present, we veer wildly between the belief in chance and the evidence in favour of determinism. When we think about the past, however, it seems obvious that everything happened in the way that it was intended.”

“What had happened still seemed implausible. A person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back. It resisted belief.”

“It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.”

“They are not mad. They're trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.”

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”

“He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.”

“For, dear me, why abandon a belief,
Merely because it ceases to be true,
Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt,
It will turn true again, for so it goes.”

“To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds”

“The most notable thing about Time is that it is so purely relative. A large amount of reminiscence is, by common consent, conceded to the drowning man; and it is not past belief that one may review an entire courtship while removing one's gloves.”

“Absurdity, n. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.”

“When you have a strongly held belief, don't you think it's important to express that belief accurately?”

“The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief. And by dangerous I don't mean thought-provoking. I mean: might get people killed.”

“Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.”

“I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.”