Quotes on Belief

In religion and politics, people's belief's and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination

Thy way, not mine, O Lord, however dark it be; lead me by thine own hand; choose out the path for me.

The idea that everything would happen exactly as it does regardless of whether we pray or not is a specter that haunts the minds of many who sincerely profess belief in God. It makes prayer psychologically impossible, replacing it with dead ritual at best.

Our prayers are heard by God not according to what we try to be when we pray, but who we are when we are not praying

Progress begins with the belief that what is necessary is possible.

Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. ... Everything science has taught me-and continues to teach me-strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. Nothing disappears without a trace.

Most men in a concentration camp believed that the real opportunities of life had passed. Yet, in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge. One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners.

Truth will have no gods before it.- The belief in truth begins with the doubt of all truths in which one has previously believed.

Don't say, "If I could, I would." Say, "If I can, I will."

A man full of faith is simply one who has lost the capacity for clear and realistic thought.

Never answer a critic, unless he's right.

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.

No man is prejudiced in favor of a thing, knowing it to be wrong. He is attached to it on the belief of its being right; and when he sees it is not so, the prejudice will be gone.

Laughter is more sacred than prayer, dancing more spiritual than chanting mantras, loving existence more cosmic than going to a church.

Looking at a sunset, just for a second you forget your separateness: you are the sunset. That is the moment when you feel the beauty of it. But the moment you say that it is a beautiful sunset, you are no longer feeling it; you have come back to your separate, enclosed entity of the ego. Now the mind is speaking. And this is one of the mysteries, that the mind can speak, and knows nothing; and the heart knows everything, and cannot speak.

The tears that you spill, the sorrowful, are sweeter than the laughter of snobs and the guffaws of scoffers.

Belief gets in the way of learning.

The lack of belief is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome.

Man may become the master of himself, and of his environment, because he has the POWER TO INFLUENCE HIS OWN SUBCONSCIOUS MIND, and through it, gain the cooperation of Infinite Intelligence.

The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. One can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit.

Religious belief is not a precondition either of ethical conduct or of happiness.