All Quotes By Tag: Belief

“Listening to people espouse beliefs different from mine is informative, not threatening, because the only thing that can alter my worldview is a new and undeniable truth, and contrary to what Jack Nicholson says in ‘A Few Good Men’, “I CAN handle the truth.”

“You have perhaps heard some false reportsOn the subject of God. He is not dead; and he is not a fable. He is not mocked nor forgotten–Successfully. God is a lion that comes in the night. God is a hawk gliding among the stars–If all the stars and the earth, and the living flesh of the night that flows in between them, and whatever is beyond themWere that one bird. He has a bloody beak and harsh talons, he pounces and tears–And where is the German Reich? There alsoWill be prodigious America and world-owning China. I say that all hopes and empires will die like yours;Mankind will die, there will be no more fools; wisdom will die; the very stars will die;One fierce life lasts.”

“I don’t believe that aliens exist,but I do believe that any new facts can strengthen foundation of my belief.”

“Stories are masks of God.That’s a story, too, of course. I made it up, in collaborations with Joseph Campbell and Scheherazade, Jesus and the Buddha and the Brother’s Grimm.Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceiveable. Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth.Stories can also trivialize. Offered indelicately, taken too literally, stories become reductionist tools, rendering things neat and therefore false. Even as we must revere and cherish the masks we variously create, Campbell reminds us, we must not mistake the masks of God for God.So it seemes to me that one of the most vital things we can teach our children is how to be storytellers. How to tell stories that are rigorously, insistently, beautifully true. And how to believe them.”

“If we are to believe he is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without proof. And of course that is the only way it could be. If it could be somehow proved, then we would have no choice but to believe. We would lose our freedom not to believe. And in the very moment that we lost that freedom, we would cease to be human beings. Our love of God would have been forced upon us, and love that is forced is of course not love at all. Love must be freely given. Love must live in the freedom not to love; it must take risks. Love must be prepared to suffer even as Jesus on the Cross suffered, and part of that suffering is doubt.”

“Lord, I believe; help my unbelief’ is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough.”

“It is not by believing but by doubting that one can attain to the truth, which is ever changing form and condition.”

“Submitting seemed to me a lot like giving up. If God gave us the strength to bail- the gumption to try and save ourselves- isn’t that what he wanted us to do?”

“Jesus kept it simple. The lesson wasn’t complicated. ‘I speak; you believe My word; your son will be fine.’ We complicate what God has made simple by seeing the world through human eyes. We want to see in order to believe and presume that our limitations are His.”

“In some ways I admire Aunt Helen’s unwavering certainty in God’s divine plan. It must be comforting, to have faith like that. To believe so concretely that there’s someone—something—out there watching guard, keeping us safe, testing us only with what we can handle. I’ve never believed in anything the way Aunt Helen believes in God.”

“I don’t know what I believe anymore. If God does exist, then He’s just an asshole, creating this world full of human suffering and letting all these terrible things happen to good people, and sitting there and doing nothing about it. At June’s memorial service, a few people came up to me and said some really stupid things, like how everything happens for a reason, and God never gives us more than we can handle. All I could think was, does that mean if I was a weaker person, this never would’ve happened? Am I seriously supposed to buy that June’s death was part of some stupid divine plan? I don’t believe that. I can’t. It just doesn’t make sense.”

“I tell you, lad, that men will believe is one says, “The Gods say…” They will believe if one says, “I had a Vision…” They will believe if one says, “It was told me on a tablet of hidden gold…” But, if one says, “History teaches,” then they will not believe.”

“Trustful people are the pure at heart, as they are moved by the zeal of their own trustworthiness.”

“Although I’m an atheist, I try not to crap all over people’s belief in God. It may be nothing more than a placebo, a fairy tale that gives the hopeless hope, but sometimes a little hope is all people need to get through the day. Imagine a unit of soldiers under heavy enemy fire. They are told by their superiors to hold their position, even in the face of overwhelming fire power. The soldiers are being told that reinforcements are on the way, and that thought alone gives them the hope and courage to continue fighting, even if ultimately the reinforcements never arrive. I think some people simply need to believe that God is sending them reinforcements, to get through another day.”

“Doon was touched. Kenny looked like a tiny little wisp, but there was something strong inside him. –People of Sparks–”