All Quotes By Tag: Belief

“[W]hen someone finds himself quite unjustly attacked and hated on all sides, there is no need for such a person to feel dismayed by misfortune. See how Fortune, who has harmed many a one, is so inconstant, for God, Who opposes all wrong deeds, raises up those in whom hope dwells.”

“You may find that knowledge is not so great a thing as belief or hope.”

“Spirituality is not adopting more beliefs and assumptions but uncovering the best in you.”

“You know, it’s a sad and unfortunate state of affairs that you have to live in a world where eight-year-olds refuse to believe in anything that they cannot touch or measure, and anyone who happens to see a thing that is invisible to most people is immediately branded a lunatic.”

“What I’m asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.”

“Faith to me is trusting in every evidence that something is―that it is possible, that it is significant, that it is real.”

“Reading a book about something can be an obstacle to doing it because it gives you the impression that you are doing what you are only thinking about doing. It is tempting to remain in the comfortable theater of our imagination instead of the real world, to fall in love with the idea of becoming a saint and loving God and neighbor instead of doing the actual work, because the idea makes no demands on you. It is like a book on a shelf. But, as Dostoyevsky says, ‘love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams’ (The Brothers Karamazov).”

“If you have to say or do something controversial, aim so that people will hate that they love it and not love that they hate it.”

“When you SEE into the invisible, you will DARE to do the impossible!”

“I believed in immaculate conception and spontaneous combustion. I believed in aliens from outer space and vampires, prophecy, and the resurrection of the dead. I had deja vu many times each day. I was thirteen.”

“[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.”

“What is false about hope?”

“‎”You shouldn’t feel so bad about being afraid of so many things.” “Why not?” “Because if you weren’t afraid never ever, then you couldn’t be brave never ever.”

“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 nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.”