All Quotes By Tag: Belief

“Nobody really cares if you’re miserable, so you might as well be happy, and make the most of where you are”

“In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, ‘life’ is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big – ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.”

“Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”

“For where is the man that has incontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all he condemns; or can say that he has examined to the bottom all his own, or other men’s opinions? The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves than constrain others.”

“Theology, philosophy, metaphysics, and quantum physics are merely ways for God to have his smart people believe in him”

“If we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there’s nothing here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?”

“You are not just for the right or left, but for what is right over the wrong.”

“You can believe in whatsoever you like, but the truth remains the truth, no matter how sweet the lie may taste.”

“By what men think, we create the world around us, daily new.”

“I’m happy to tell you there is very little in this world that I believe in.”

“I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned.”

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

“Faith in faith’ he answered himself. ‘It isn’t necessary to have something to believe in. It’s only necessary to believe that somewhere there’s something worthy of belief.”

“It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.”

“My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.”