Quotes on Belief

They felt that science would be corrosive to religious belief and they were worried about it. Damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive to religious belief and it's a good thing.

Christianity has been successfully attacked and marginalized… because those who professed belief were unable to defend the faith from attack, even though its attackers’ arguments were deeply flawed.

I decided early in graduate school that I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse. Since almost everyone I knew was seeing a psychiatrist, and since I had an absolute belief that I should be able to handle my own problems, I naturally bought a horse.

I have always played into the belief that you are only ever borrowing the jersey; you never own the jersey because someone has gone before you and there is going to be someone after you, so it's a case of giving the jersey maximum respect.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also.

What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.

When we believe that we should be satisfied rather than God glorified in our worship, then we put God below ourselves as though He had been made for us rather than that we had been made for Him.

My belief of book writing is much the same as my belief as to shoemaking. The man who will work the hardest at it, and will work with the most honest purpose, will work the best.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

I don't believe there is such a thing as 'moderate Islam.' I think it's better to talk about degrees of belief and degrees of practice.

Don't be misled into believing that somehow the world owes you a living. The boy who believes that his parents, or the government, or any one else owes him his livelihood and that he can collect it without labor will wake up one day and find himself working for another boy who did not have that belief and, therefore, earned the right to have others work for him.

Infuse your life with action. Don't wait for it to happen. Make it happen. Make your own future. Make your own hope. Make your own love. And whatever your beliefs, honor your creator, not by passively waiting for grace to come down from upon high, but by doing what you can to make grace happen... yourself, right now, right down here on Earth.

What we see in the outer is but a reflection of the inner, because we surround ourselves with a picture of our own beliefs. In other words, we manifest in general what we seriously think and believe. So if we want to find out what our habitual thinking is like, we have but to look around us and ask ourselves what we really see.

The world is such-and-such or so-and-so only because we tell ourselves that that is the way it is.

What should we think of someone who never admits error, never entertains doubt but adheres unflinchingly to the same ideas all his life, regardless of new evidence? Doubt and skepticism are signs of rationality. When we are too certain of our opinions, we run the risk of ignoring any evidence that conflicts with our views. It is doubt that shows we are still thinking, still willing to reexamine hardened beliefs when confronted with new facts and new evidence.

Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

Believing is a fine thing, but placing those beliefs into execution is a test of strength. Many are those who talk like the roar of the sea, gut their lives are shallow and stagnant, like the rotting marshes. Many are those who lift their heads above the mountain tops, but their spirits remain dormant in the obscurity of the caverns.

I don't believe in dying. It's been done. I'm working on a new exit. Besides, I can't die now - I'm booked.

Toast was a pointless invention from the Dark Ages. Toast was an implement of torture that caused all those subjected to it to regurgitate in verbal form the sins and crimes of their past lives. Toast was a ritual item devoured by fetishists in the belief that it would enhance their kinetic and sexual powers. Toast cannot be explained by any rational means. Toast is me. I am toast.

The gift my mother gave me was the gift of possibility. From an early age, she instilled in me a belief that I could do anything I wanted to do. It wasn't a matter of, 'Can I?' or 'Should I?' It was just, 'You can, you must, you will!' She wanted me to believe that anything was possible.