Quotes on Belief

A traveller at Sparta, standing long upon one leg, said to a Lacedaemonian, "I do not believe you can do as much." "True," said he, "but every goose can."

There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible and those who believe that 'belief' must be discarded and replaced by 'the scientific method.

She loved the teachings of the Five Visions. Humility. Sacrifice. Seeing another's problems before your own. Yet she was beginning to think that she-- along with others-- had taken this belief too far, letting her desire to seem humble become a form of pride itself. She now saw that when her faith had become about clothing instead of people, it had taken a wrong turn.

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

Have a belief in yourself that is bigger than anyone's disbelief.

It seemed, indeed, that the study of light-scattering might carry one into the deepest problems of physics and chemistry, and it was this belief which led to the subject becoming the main theme of our activities at Calcutta from that time onwards.

It is my belief, that we should not be too sure of having found Christ in ourselves until we have found him also in that part of humanity that is most remote from our own.

I will not close my eyes, neither those in my head nor those in my soul, as the ship carries me away, along with my future, my dreams, and my beliefs. Buru Island is no happy land somewhere; it's but a way station on my journey in life—though to believe even that much will require no small measure of hope.

That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.

I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!

Evolution has encountered no intellectual trouble; no new arguments have been offered. Creationism is a home-grown phenomenon of American sociocultural history-a splinter movement ... who believe that every word in the Bible must be literally true, whatever such a claim might mean.

All central beliefs on human matters spring from a personal predicament.

I had gradually come, by this time [1839-01], to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc. and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.

We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.

For the record, feminism by definition is: 'The belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities. It is the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.'

The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.

Men gladly believe what they wish. -Libenter homines id quod volunt credunt

Having lived through the transition from totalitarianism, I am acutely mindful of the need to never take for granted the basic freedoms of thought, expression and belief that democracy brings.

A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.

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 the butterfly.

Unless man is committed to the belief that all mankind are his brothers, then he labors in vain and hypocritically in the vineyards of equality.