Quotes on Belief

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

They were the reason that he kept faith with his stars, that reinforced him in his belief that the universe had more in store for him than the mug's game of working for a modest salary until he retired or died.

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.

Every man gives his life for what he believes. Every woman gives her life for what she believes. Sometimes people believe in little or nothing, nevertheless they give up their lives to that little or nothing. One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it, and then it's gone. But to surrender what you are, and live without belief - that's more terrible than dying - more terrible than dying young.

It's the repetition of affirmations that leads to belief. And once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.

The gospel is like a caged lion,' said the great baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon. 'It does not need to be defended, it simply needs to be let out of it's cage' Today, the cage is our accommodation to the secular/sacred split that reduces Christianity to a matter of personal belief. To unlock the cage, we need to become utterly convinced that, as Francis Schaeffer said, Christianity is not merely religious truth, it is total truth- truth about the whole of reality.

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

Few things build a person up like affirmation. According to Webster’s New World Dictionary, Third College Edition (Simon and Schuster, 1991), the word affirm comes from ad firmare, which means “to make firm.” So when you affirm people, you make firm within them the things you see about them. Do that often enough, and the belief that solidifies within them will become stronger than the doubts they have about themselves.

You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one willl only in time come to hate. In this there is also a residue of belief that during the move the master will chance to come along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: "This man is not to be locked up again, He is to come with me.

What people really believe doesn't feel like a BELIEF, it feels like the way the world IS.

No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.

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

It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.

For we have never actually understood the revolutionary sense beneath them – the incredible truth that what religion calls the vision of God is found in giving up any belief in the idea of God.

Our notions about happiness entrap us. We forget that they are just ideas. Our idea of happiness can prevent us from actually being happy. We fail to see the opportunity for joy that is right in front of us when we are caught in a belief that happiness should take a particular form.

No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.

And, I think: I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence. Of the millions, I, too, was potentially everything at birth. I, too, was stunted, narrowed, warped, by my environment, my outcroppings of heredity. I, too, will find a set of beliefs, of standards to live by, yet the very satisfaction of finding them will be marred by the fact that I have reached the ultimate in shallow, two-dimensional living — a set of values.

Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position.

To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.

Many people and governments share the mistaken belief that science, with new, ingenious devices and techniques, can rescue us from the troubles we face without our having to mend our ways and change our patterns of activity. This is not so.