All Quotes By Tag: Belief

“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–”

“When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence. Let it be the most obvious fabrication and you will still believe whatever truth is in it, because you can not deny truth no matter how shabbily it is dressed.”

“It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false. To admit that the false has any standing in court, that it ought to be handled gently because millions of morons cherish it and thousands of quacks make their livings propagating it—to admit this, as the more fatuous of the reconcilers of science and religion inevitably do, is to abandon a just cause to its enemies, cravenly and without excuse.”

“The number of people who believe a thing has no bearing upon its truth.”

“You cannot believe everything you hear”

“Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.”

“In all of knowable reality, God is unique. He is knowable not like the multiplication table or the table of elements; he alone is knowable as the one totally in control of being known. He is not at the disposal of the human mind. He is known when he wills to be known. Yet he is known in and through created reality, which is known naturally. Therefore the glory of God is exalted most not when we know God apart from observation and reading and study, but when we know God as a result of his free and gracious self-revelation in and through our earnest observation of and meditation on his work and Word in history.”