All Quotes By Tag: Belief

“You don’t believe things because they make your life better, you believe them because they’re true.”

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”

“If I were to believe in God enough to call him a murderer, then I might also believe enough that he, as a spirit, exists beyond death; and therefore only he could do it righteously. For the physical being kills a man and hatefully sends him away, whereas God, the spiritual being, kills a man and lovingly draws him nigh.”

“All right,” said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.”Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.”So we can believe the big ones?”YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.”They’re not the same at all!”YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.”Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”MY POINT EXACTLY.”

“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”

“I don’t believe in angels and I have trouble with the whole God thing. I don’t want to say I don’t believe in God but I don’t think I do. But I believe in people who do.”

“So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man,When Duty whispers low, ‘Thou must,’ The youth whispers, ‘I can.”

“We all ought to understand we’re on our own. Believing in Santa Claus doesn’t do kids any harm for a few years but it isn’t smart for them to continue waiting all their lives for him to come down the chimney with something wonderful. Santa Claus and God are cousins.”

“So they trust in the deity of the Old Testament, an incontinent dotard who soiled Himself and the universe with his corruption, a low-budget divinity passing itself off as the genuine article. (Ask the Gnostics.) They trust in Jesus Christ, a historical cipher stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster out of parts robbed from the graves of messiahs dead and buried – a savior on a stick. They trust in the virgin-pimping Allah and his Drum Major Mohammed, a prophet-come-lately who pioneered a new genus of humbuggery for an emerging market of believers that was not being adequately served by existing religious products. They trust in anything that authenticates their importance as persons, tribes, societies, and particularly as a species that will endure in this world and perhaps in an afterworld that may be uncertain in its reality and unclear in its layout, but which states their craving for values “not of this earth” – that depressing, meaningless place their consciousness must sidestep every day.”

“Is it folly to believe in something that is intangible? After all, some of the greatest intangibles are Love, Hope, and Wonder.Another is Deity.The choice to be a fool is yours.”

“Yes. There is one God, and he lives in the sky, and he hears all of us. It is just that here on earth, we are confused about how to believe in him. But what does it matter, as long as we trust he is there?”

“Personally, I always wondered about authors and celebrities who loudly declared there was no God. It was usually when they were healthy and popular and being listened to by crowds. What happens, I wondered, in the quiet moments before death? By then, they have lost the stage, the world has moved on. If suddenly, in their last gasping moments, through fear, a vision, a late enlightenment, they change their minds about God, who would know?”

“We try too much and trust too little. Count the times God’s Book tells us to “try.” Now count the times it tells us to “trust.”

“Atheism is a conclusion reached by the most reasonable methods and one which is not asserted dogmatically but is explained in its every feature by the light of reason. The atheist does not boast of knowing in a vainglorious, empty sense. He understands by knowledge the most reasonable and clear and sound position one can take on the basis of all the evidence at hand. This evidence convinces him that theism is not true, and his logical position, then, is that of atheism.We repeat that the atheist is one who denies the assumptions of theism. he asserts, in other words, that he doesn’t believe in a God because he has no good reason for believing in a God. That’s atheism — and that’s good sense.”

“The world is a goddamned evil place, the strong prey on the weak, the rich on the poor; I’ve given up hope that there is a God that will save us all. How am I supposed to believe that there’s a heaven and a hell when all I see now is hell.”