1,224 Belief Quotes

If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview.

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

It would be easier for the Devil to go to church and cross himself with holy water than for these people to comprehend the ideas which are accepted facts to us today.

Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.

I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.

Any religion or philosophy which is not based on a respect for life is not a true religion or philosophy.

Faith which refuses to face indisputable facts is but little faith. Truth is always gain, however hard it is to accommodate ourselves to it. To linger in any kind of untruth proves to be a departure from the straight way of faith.

Only when an ideal of peace is born in the minds of the peoples will the institutions set up to maintain this peace effectively fulfill the function expected of them.

In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.

I admit that my visions can never mean to other men as much as they do to me. I do not regret this. All I ask is that my results should convince seekers after truth that there is beyond doubt something worth while seeking, attainable by methods more or less like mine. I do not want to father a flock, to be the fetish of fools and fanatics, or the founder of a faith whose followers are content to echo my opinions. I want each man to cut his own way through the jungle.

Both now and for always, I intend to hold fast to my belief in the hidden strength of the human spirit.

When you fuse Christianity with power, it isn't long before Christians start imposing the cross on others rather than taking it up for themselves.

Will you tell them about that far off and mythical land And how a child to the virgin came? Will you tell them that the reason why we murdered Everything upon the surface of the world Is so we can stand right up and say we did it in his name?

The tolerant liberal suddenly becomes very intolerant when their official religion is challenged.

People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don't know why. No, I do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.

Men who cannot believe in the mystery of our Saviour's redemption can believe that spirits from the dead have visited them in a stranger's parlour, because they see a table shake and do not know how it is shaken; because they hear a rapping on a board, and cannot see the instrument that raps it; because they are touched in the dark, and do not know the hand that touches them.

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

One possible reason that I don't believe in fate is that I wasn't fated to.

I believe the stars can affect human lives, particularly by providing employment for thousands of astrologers.

You know, my faith is one that admits some doubt.

People are said to believe in God, or to disbelieve in Adam and Eve. But in such cases what is believed or disbelieved is that there is an entity answering a certain description. This, which can be believed or disbelieved is quite different from the actual entity (if any) which does answer the description. Thus the matter of belief is, in all cases, different in kind from the matter of sensation or presentation, and error is in no way analogous to hallucination. A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

I've lost my faith in science.

People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.

I do benefits for all religions - I'd hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality.

My music will go on forever. Maybe it's a fool say that, but when me know facts me can say facts. My music will go on forever.

I read a book lately by Nietzsche and he says religion is just to dull the senses of the people. I agree.

I can't help believing that these things that come from the subconscious mind have a sort of truth to them. It may not be a scientific truth, but it's psychological truth.

There's always a way. Where there's a will there is a way. You have to believe.

Faith makes it possible to achieve that which man's mind can conceive and believe.

There are lots of guys around the world that are lazy. They have big fat guts. They talk about chi power and things they can do, but don't believe it.

What does Christianity mean today? National Socialism is a religion. All we lack is a religious genius capable of uprooting outmoded religious practices and putting new ones in their place. We lack traditions and ritual. One day soon National Socialism will be the religion of all Germans. My Party is my church, and I believe I serve the Lord best if I do his will, and liberate my oppressed people from the fetters of slavery. That is my gospel.

We always believe God is like ourselves, the indulgent think him indulgent and the stern, terrible.

Science is paramount, but presents no challenge to a creed that rests on faith-based belief.

Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.

Global consciousness is not an objective belief that can be taught to anybody and everybody, but a subjective transformation in the interior structures that can hold belief in the first place, which itself is the product of a long line of inner consciousness development.

I hope I never need to believe in God. It would be an awful confession of failure.

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. I used to think that science would save us, and science certainly tried. But we can't stand any more tremendous explosions, either for or against democracy.

Half of wisdom is learning what to unlearn.

Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.

If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.

Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.

It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.

Even the nonreligious may exercise aesthetic judgment in matters of religion, and indeed our age has given the unbelieving a sophisticated taste in religious literature.

If power was an illusion, wasn't weakness necessarily one also?

There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.

Scientific criticism has no nobler task than to shatter false beliefs.

The criterion of truth is that it works even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it.

Animistic savages prostrating themselves before a painted stone have always seemed to me to be nearer the truth than any Einstein or Bertrand Russell.

To me, anything that is a church is really just far too close minded.

In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination.

It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

I may be wrong, but I'm never in doubt.

I don't like religion much, and I am glad that in the Bible the word is not to be found.

It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.

I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflexion, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture.

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

It is this belief in a power larger than myself and other than myself which allows me to venture into the unknown and even the unknowable.

Troubles are a blessing that force you to change, to believe.

If Ali says a mosquito can pull a plow, don't ask how. Hitch him up.

I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was.

I believe in the religion of Islam. I believe in Allah and peace.

I figured that if I said it enough, I would convince the world that I really was the greatest.

Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.

Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.

Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.

I don't say you're self-censoring - I'm sure you believe everything you're saying; but what I'm saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting.

[It] was written and sold. I knew it was a strong story because I cared about it and believed in it. I had no idea that it would have the effect it had on the audience. While most people ignored it, of course, and continue to live full and happy lives without reading it or anything else by me, there was still a surprisingly large group who responded to the story with some fervency.

All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe.

Your trust in rationality makes you irrational.

Our ancestors were very rich and eminent people, and they left us an enormous inheritance, which we have completely forgotten, especially since the time when we began to consider ourselves the descendants of a monkey.

The greatest barrier to consciousness is the belief that one is already conscious.

Christianity made us think there's one heaven.

With life and all I've been through, I do have a belief in goodness, a good spirit. I think what people have done with religion is personified good and evil, so good's become God with 'o' out, and evil's become Devil with a 'd' added. That's my theory of religion.

Belief is involuntary; nothing involuntary is meritorious or reprehensible. A man ought not to be considered worse or better for his belief.

Not one of them who took up in his youth with this opinion that there are no gods ever continued until old age faithful to his conviction.

Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.

None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed.

The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution.

120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.

All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.

That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

My whole life has been decided by fate.

You can kill a thousand; you can bring an end to life; you cannot kill an idea.

At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.

The Mosaic religion had been a Father religion; Christianity became a Son religion. The old God, the Father, took second place; Christ, the Son, stood in His stead, just as in those dark times every son had longed to do.

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.

There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.

In order to obey God, one must receive his commands. How did it happen that I received them in adolescence, while I was professing atheism? To believe that the desire for good is always fulfilled - that is faith, and whoever has it is not an atheist.