All Quotes By Tag: Belief
“Speak Life:You are loved.You have purpose.You are a masterpiece.You are wonderfully made.God has a great plan for you.”
“One Man’s Lie is Another Man’s Truth.”
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“As a younger man, I burned with enthusiasm for my work: I was to be a warrior, the champion of reviled or exiled passions. I would assail the forces marshaled to enslave these passions, the tyrannies imposed in the name of factitious moralities, the sadistic compulsions disguised as highest law. I would be, in my silent, expensive way, the apostle of a thrilling freedom. When did it abandon me, that faith? How often have I heard it repeated, nearly verbatim, that commonplace of every educated, sophisticated patient: I don’t believe in judgment, in divine judgment; I don’t believe that someone is sitting up in the sky frowning down at me. In the past I would have thought: Yes, you do— and that is your problem. In the fullness of time I would assist them in shaking free of this secret conviction. Now, though, my calling has deserted me. The premise wasn’t wrong: most patients suffer more than they know from obscure inner persecutions. What I did not realize, however, was how deeply I myself believed in such a judgment, how along with my patients I embraced with inalienable fidelity that very conviction. This conviction did not presume a personified judge— bearded, severe, enthroned. It presumed instead a law, inhuman, abstract, and implacable, the law to which we owed our lives, the law to which we owed our reckoning. Failure, worth, crisis, potential, fulfillment. Every patient returns to these words again and again. They are the words from which my profession is made, and each of these words presumes a judgment, a mark attained or missed. No one enters my office who does not believe in his very marrow that judgment, some judgment, is absolute and fixed. The person I am meant to be: that mythical creature, that being whom each patient longs and dreads to become, is itself a judgment, a standard one does not devise but to which one must account. What or who set the standard? What or who measured the body for its soul? What or who meant them to be the people they were meant to be? I am certain: belief in judgment is not what my patients reject or grow out of. The belief in judgment is what they cling to. Beneath their affections and afflictions, judgment is their one true love.”
“Let the Kingdom be always before you, and believe with certainty and consistency the things that are yet unseen. Let nothing that is on this side of eternal life get inside you.”
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“If you put your faith in the modern health care system, then there is a very good chance that they will prematurely kill you.”
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“If something is ugly, it’s likely that it’s only ugly because it’s never been given the opportunity to be beautiful. And never having had that opportunity is likely the ugliest thing of all.”
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“An aware atheist understands that disbelieving God does not equal knowing that God does not exist”
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“An aware theist understands that believing in God does not equal the fact of knowing that God exists.”
“If I’m not willing to accept a God who does the impossible, I’m left with what’s possible. And that takes me no further than myself.”
“It is my passion to rise to great heights, but instead I dig holes where I plummet to great depths. And when will I learn that God trades shovels for wings?”
“My fear has brazenly taken pen in hand and redefined a horizon as the termination of everything instead of the beginning of many things. And the first thing I need to do is get my pen back.”
“Faith is not whittling God down to a size that I can comprehend. Rather, it’s whittling my need to control down to a size that God can intersect.”
“The most difficult thing is not the belief in the infinite. No. The most difficult thing of all is to believe that the infinite would be so grand and gracious as to reside in the smallness of us. That is what requires the greatest faith.”
“I tried to cut through all our hurried centuries, lost in a forest within.Men broke by war emerged in frightful shape—more than human but also less, they were quite aware,the sovereign dead, that time is like a window opening up the sad patterns of never.As one they advanced— Lloyd George Georges ClemenceauAdolph Hitler —through history. But the past does not followso straightforward a path said I (predictably in Italian),and, burning under their masters, they proclaimedthe world a pendulum. It is possible, but this gives riseto the often-heard complaint that repetition is unavoidable. Still time issues into today,little fathers. The years, I believe, can be shaped with one’s hands.The world —its obscure moving fields, Persian tragedies,and countries in peace— I had to inform that council of the lost,remains an instrument, a valve instrument, which, when waning,is perfectly clear in the pit —and, being given to such classical conceptsas freedom and necessity, laboriously continued in the traditional way—I believe I believe.”