Selected faith quotes

1. When I was crossing into Gaza, I was asked at the checkpost whether I was carrying any weapons. I replied: Oh yes, my prayer books.

2. When faith and hope fail, as they do sometimes, we must try charity, which is love in action. We must speculate no more on our duty, but simply do it. When we have done it, however blindly, perhaps Heaven will show us why.

3. Immortality alone could teach this mortal how to die.

4. I don't want to convert people to Buddhism - all major religions, when understood properly, have the same potential for good.

5. I am not sure exactly what heaven will be like, but I do know that when we die and it comes time for God to judge us, He will not ask, 'How many good things have you done in your life?,' rather He will ask, 'How much love did you put into what you did?

6. I see God in every human being. When I wash the leper's wounds, I feel I am nursing the Lord himself. Is it not a beautiful experience?

7. The dying, the cripple, the mental, the unwanted, the unloved they are Jesus in disguise.

8. Of course my moods change, but the average is serenity. I have a firm faith in art, a firm confidence in its being a powerful stream which carries a man to a harbor, though he himself must do his bit too; at all events, I think it such a great blessing when a man has found his work that I cannot count myself among the unfortunate. I mean, I may be in certain relatively great difficulties, and there may be gloomy days in my life, but I shouldn't like to be counted among the unfortunate, nor would it be correct if I were.

9. When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

10. I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.

11. There may be a time in life when one is tired of everything and feels as if all one does is wrong, and there maybe some truth in it - do you think this is a feeling one must try to forget and to banish, or is it 'the longing for God,' which one must not fear, but cherish to see if it may bring us some good? Is it 'the longing for God' which leads us to make a choice which we never regret? Let us keep courage and try to be patient and gentle. And not mind being eccentric, and make distinction between good and evil.

12. We now to peace and darkness And earth and thee restore Thy creature that thou madest And wilt cast forth no more.

13. He is your friend who pushes you nearer to God.

14. Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him, who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust, in the best way, all our present difficulty.

15. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.

16. The only person who is a worse liar than a faith healer is his patient.

17. Laugh at what you hold sacred, and still hold it sacred.

18. I believe that Providence would never have allowed us to see the victory of the Movement if it had the intention after all to destroy us at the end.

19. I go the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker.

20. Only so you can appeal to your God and pray Him to support and bless your courage, your work, your perseverance, your strength, your resolution, and with all these your claim on life.

21. In this world him who does not abandon himself the Almighty will not desert. Him who helps himself will the Almighty always also help; He will show him the way by which he can gain his rights, his freedom, and therefore his future.

22. I believe in Providence and I believe Providence to be just. Therefore I believe that Providence always rewards the strong, the industrious, and the upright.

23. If we pursue this way, if we are decent, industrious, and honest, if we so loyally and truly fulfill our duty, then it is my conviction that in the future as in the past the Lord God will always help us. In the long run He never leaves decent folk in the lurch. Often He may test them, He may send trials upon them, but in the long run He always lets His sun shine upon them once more and at the end He gives them His blessing.

24. Remain strong in your faith, as you were in former years. In this faith, in its close-knit unity our people to-day goes straight forward on its way and no power on earth will avail to stop it.

25. May therefore God give us the strength to continue to do our duty and with this prayer we bow in homage before our dead heroes, before those whom they have left behind in bereavement, and before all the other victims of this war.

26. I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so.

27. I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God.

28. If I would follow your advice and Jesus could perceive it, he, as a Jewish teacher, surely would not approve of such behavior.

29. God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.

30. What has been presented as Christianity during these nineteen centuries is only a beginning, full of mistakes, not full blown Christianity springing from the spirit of Jesus.

31. 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.

32. I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.

33. Today a new faith is stirring: the myth of blood, the faith that along with blood we are defending the divine nature of man as a whole.

34. Providence conceals itself in the details of human affairs, but becomes unveiled in the generalities of history.

35. In the end, all journeys are spiritual. So go off the main road. Be givers of hospitality and gracious takers of it too. Accept the serendipitous moments of life because, when all is said and done, you may find out that they were not serendipitous at all. And know that faith is as real as bread broken among friends. What you believe will take you far on your journey. If you search carefully, you will find good food all along the way.

36. 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.

37. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

38. It is to hope, though hope were lost.

39. Once I returned to the Church and began to see the universe as a place that really did incorporate redemption and really tried to understand the implications of there being a God, my identification with the vampires as outcasts, as outsiders and lost souls began to totally wane. It no longer worked for me. I had done it. It had led me to this point.

40. I promised that from now on I would write only for the Lord.

41. It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.

42. A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.

43. Christianity has sufficient inner strength to survive and flourish on its own. It does not need state subsidies, nor state privileges, nor state prestige. The more it obtains state support the greater it curtails human freedom.

44. A soul so pitiably forlorn, If such do on this earth abide, May season apathy with scorn, May turn indifference to pride; And still be not unblest- compared With him who grovels, self-debarred From all that lies within the scope Of holy faith and christian hope; Or, shipwrecked, kindles on the coast False fires, that others may be lost.

45. One in whom persuasion and belief Had ripened into faith, and faith become A passionate intuition.

46. To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.

47. God is either cruel or incompetent.

48. How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?

49. I do occasionally envy the person who is religious naturally, without being brainwashed into it or suckered into it by all the organized hustles.

50. We're all capable if we have faith and passion.

51. I will see you tomorrow, if God wills it.

52. Priestly celibacy has been guarded by the Church for centuries as a brilliant jewel, and retains its value undiminished even in our time when the outlook of men and the state of the world have undergone such profound changes.

53. If evils increase, the devotion of the People of God should also increase.

54. Love is God's essence; Power but his attribute: therefore is his love greater than his power.

55. Thou canst not pray to God without praying to Love, but mayest pray to Love without praying to God.

56. Too much of our time is spent trying to chart God on a grid, and too little is spent allowing our hearts to feel awe. By reducing Christian spirituality to formula, we deprive our hearts of wonder.

57. A sweet attractive kinde of grace, A full assurance given by lookes, Continuall comfort in a face The lineaments of Gospell bookes.

58. 'The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief - call it what you will - than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle, and golf course.'

59. The bells they sound on Bredon And still the steeples hum. 'Come all to church, good people,' - Oh, noisy bells, be dumb; I hear you, I will come.

60. 'God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. He is not something to be sought in the darkness with the light of reason. He is the light.

61. 'We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers.'

62. 'Worship is a way of seeing the world in the light of God.'

63. 'The issue of prayer is not prayer; the issue of prayer is God.'

64. 'Man's sin is in his failure to live what he is. Being the master of the earth, man forgets that he is the servant of God.'

65. It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to Infidelity.

66. I do not ask, O Lord, that life may be A pleasant road.

67. We are a people of different faiths, but we are one. Which faith conquers the other is not the question; rather, the question is whether Christianity stands or falls. : We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity : in fact our movement is Christian. We are filled with a desire for Catholics and Protestants to discover one another in the deep distress of our own people.

68. I say that they can be solved; there is no problem that cannot be, but faith is necessary. Think of the faith I had to have eighteen years ago, a single man on a lonely path. Yet I have come to leadership of the German people. : Life is hard for many, but it is hardest if you are unhappy and have no faith. Have faith. Nothing can make me change my own belief.

69. Beloved are Israel, for they were called children of the All-present.

70. Even men without a gospel have their Mount of Olives. And one must not fall asleep on theirs either.

71. It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

72. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls.

73. Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous.

74. I was in the death struggle with self: God and Satan fought for my soul those three long hours. God conquered - now I have only one doubt left - which of the twain was God?

75. Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God.

76. Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet - Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.

77. It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.

78. A disciple said to him, 'I am ready, in the quest for God, to give up anything: wealth, friends, family, country, life itself. What else can a person give up?' The Master calmly replied, 'One's beliefs about God.'

79. And almost every one when age, Disease, or sorrows strike him, Inclines to think there is a God, Or something very like Him.

80. 'There is no God,' the wicked saith, 'And truly it's a blessing, For what He might have done with us It's better only guessing.'

81. He who serves our Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, serves Germany, and he who serves Germany, serves God.

82. I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

83. I believe there is one Supreme most perfect being. ... I believe He is pleased and delights in the happiness of those He has created; and since without virtue man can have no happiness in this world, I firmly believe He delights to see me virtuous.

84. The Way to see by Faith, is to shut the Eye of Reason.

85. Well, I kind of split my life into two pieces. One was where my chess career lies. There, I kept my sanity, so to speak, and my logic. And the other was my religious life. I tried to apply what I learned in the church to my chess career too. But I still was studying chess. I wasn't just 'trusting in God' to give me the moves.

86. Finally, two days ago, I succeeded- not on account of my hard efforts, but by the grace of the Lord. Like a sudden flash of lightning, the riddle was solved. I am unable to say what was the conducting thread that connected what I previously knew with what made my success possible.

87. You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe.

88. Wherever religion is resorted to as a strong drink, and as an escape from the dull, monotonous round of home, those of its ministers who pepper the highest will be the surest to please. They who strew the Eternal Path with the greatest amount of brimstone, and who most ruthlessly tread down the flowers and leaves that grow by the wayside, will be voted the most righteous; and they who enlarge with the greatest pertinacity on the difficulty of getting into heaven will be considered, by all true believers, certain of going there: though it would be hard to say by what process of reasoning this conclusion is arrived at.

89. The other day [the President] said, I know you've had some rough times, and I want to do something that will show the nation what faith that I have in you, in your maturity and sense of responsibility. (He paused, then said) Would you like a puppy?

90. 'I care more about what God knows than what man says.'

91. The best proof of love is trust.

92. Our hearts seemed safe in our breasts and sang to the Light - The marrow in the bone We dreamed was safe. . . the blood in the veins, the sap in the tree Were springs of Deity.

93. Unless you can muse in a crowd all day On the absent face that fixed you; Unless you can love, as the angels may, With the breadth of heaven betwixt you; Unless you can dream that his faith is fast, Through behoving and unbehoving; Unless you can die when the dream is past - Oh, never call it loving!

94. Because God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame.

95. 'Faith' is a fine invention When Gentlemen can see - But Microscopes are prudent In an Emergency.

96. Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.

97. Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it's important.

98. O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.

99. 'I simply state that I'm a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation-with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones. I've thought I was right about life at various times, but faith is difficult. One thing I know. If living isn't seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game.

100. Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken. . . .