Belief Quotes

I believe in the simple things--the classic beginning of once upon a time, that good conquers evil in the end, fantasy and fate. My life is that of wondrous enchantment, a place of endless possibilities and dreams, where inspiration is found in the oddest of places. I aspire to inspire, and someday I will change the world

~ Andrew Kendall

There are three sources of belief: reason, custom, inspiration.

~ Blaise Pascal

Belief is blind but with patience it too shall become apparent in due time.

~ Tyconis D. Allison Ty

You have to believe that your voice can mean something. You have to believe that what you do matters. And you have to keep going even on days you can't find that belief. If you can't do it for yourself, you do it for all the other young souls who need to be shown that things are possible. That they too can do that thing they dream of. You do it despite the doubts and the struggles. You do it because it's what you came here to do.That's what makes an artist.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.

~ Isaac Asimov

What have I always believed?That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right.

~ Terry Pratchett

Just because I do not accept the teachings of the devotaries does not mean I've discarded a belief in right and wrong. determines what is right! right? I believe that my own morality -- which answers only to my heart -- is more sure and true than the morality of those who do right only because they fear retribution.

~ Brandon Sanderson

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

~ Stephen Roberts

It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith... these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I'm worried that our religious discourse- our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization.

~ Sam Harris

I respect you as a person too much to respect your ridiculous beliefs.

~ Johann Hari

The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.

~ Albert Einstein

What we do in every other area of our lives (other than religion), is, rather than respect somebody's beliefs, we evaluate their reasons.

~ Sam Harris

There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.

~ Erich Fromm

If you have to say or do something controversial, aim so that people will hate that they love it and not love that they hate it.

~ Criss Jami

What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.

~ Sam Harris

If faith is what you have to go on, if faith is the link between your beliefs and the world at large, your beliefs are very likely to be wrong. Beliefs can be right or wrong. If you believe you can fly, that belief is only true if indeed you can fly. Somebody who thinks he can fly, and is wrong about it, will eventually discover there's a problem with his view of the world.

~ Sam Harris

I have no argument with those who see in organized religion a template or an imperative to live life according to a prescribed set of beliefs. Just give others the room, within the laws of civil society, to believe or not believe whatever they like.

~ Michael J. Fox

It is great good health to believe as the Hindus do that there are 33 million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to want to understand one s dreams. It is great good health to desire the ambiguous and paradoxical. It is sickness of the profoundest kind to believe that there is one reality. There is sickness in any piece of work or any piece of art seriously attempting to suggest that the idea that there is more than one reality is somehow redundant.

~ Clive Barker

Your religious beliefs are your business. They are not and should not be the basis for law. If you use them as justification to discriminate against others, don’t be upset when others decide you’re an asshole.]

~ Jim C. Hines

What each of us believes in is up to us, but life is impossible without believing in something.

~ Kentetsu Takamori

The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.

~ Sam Harris

We rely on faith only in the context of claims for which there is no sufficient sensory or logical evidence.

~ Sam Harris

Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they'd have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City.

~ Douglas Adams

When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don't believe as you do.

~ Sam Harris

The problem I want to talk to you about tonight is the problem of belief. What does it mean to believe? We use this word all the time, and I think behind it lurk some really extraordinary taboos and confusions. What I want to argue tonight is that how we talk about belief- how we fail to criticize or criticize the beliefs of others, has more importance to us personally, more consequence to us personally and to civilization than perhaps anything else that is in our power to influence.

~ Sam Harris

When confronted by a ‘believer’ it is easy for me to contrast the views of the skeptic with those of the rationalist. I simply reach into my pocket and pull out my change.Holding a quarter aloft, I say, ‘This is a most remarkable coin, for it is heavier than all the sins of humanity committed since the beginning of the human race.’I then hold up a nickel and say, ‘This coin is even more amazing, as it is brighter and shinier than the flames that proceeded from the Burning Bush discovered on Mt. Sinai by Moses.’Then I raise a penny and state, ‘This portrait of President Lincoln is more realistic and true-to-life than any portrait of Satan ever painted.’And finally, I hold out a bright, shiny dime and say, ‘And this dime is the most amazing of all because it is heavier and contains more precious metals than all the gold bricks in the streets of Heaven.’I end with ‘Give to Caesar what is his, and hold the rest of it dear—for it is all you see and touch—and the Christian god can take care of all his things, for they amount to less than this 41 cents I hold here in my hand.

~ E. Haldeman-Julius

Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.

~ Sam Harris

To be a philosophical Sceptic is the first and most essential step towards being a sound, believing Christian.

~ David Hume

Religion! Is what you hear at church religion? Is that which can bend and turn, and descend and ascend, to fit every crooked phase of selfish, worldly society, religion? Is that religion which is less scrupulous, less generous, less just, less considerate for man, than even my own ungodly, worldly, blinded nature? No! When I look for religion, I must look for something above me, and not something beneath.

~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

I believe in God. Maybe not the Catholic God or even the Christian one because I have a hard time seeing any God as elitist. I also have a hard time believing that anything that created rain forests and oceans and an infinite universe would, in the same process, create something as unnatural as humanity in its own image. I believe in God, but not as a he or she or an it, but as something that defines my ability to conceptualize within the rather paltry frames of reference I have on hand.

~ Dennis Lehane

As I work in the afternoon on committing to paper some of my morning's thoughts, I find myself just about to close on the knotty question of whether or not I believe in God. In fact I am about to type, 'I do not believe in God', when the sky goes black as ink, there is a thunderclap and a huge crash of thunder and a downpour of epic proportions. I never do complete the sentence.

~ Michael Palin

Spirituality is not adopting more beliefs and assumptions but uncovering the best in you.

~ Amit Ray

No one, in the world's whole history, ever attempted to substantiate a truth by a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of miracle. Nothing but falsehood ever attested itself by signs and wonders. No miracle ever was performed, and no sane man ever thought he had performed one, and until one is performed, there can be no evidence of the existence of any power superior to, and independent of nature.

~ Robert G. Ingersoll

These days when Christians bicker they exaggerate passion into a legalistic belief and prosperity into a lukewarm belief.

~ Criss Jami

It's simpler to believe in a miracle.

~ William Golding

People who demand signs never believe them when they come.

~ Michael Card

If superstition could contradict science, the world may as well be on the back of a turtle. But giving into turtle worship was a bridge too far.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

All my life I have preserved in the depths of my heart a live faith in my Creator, the Defender of the World, in His Sanctifying Grace and in the expiatory sacrifice of Christ our Saviour, but never have I agreed that true religion demands outward manifestations.

~ Valery Bryusov

There are some doubters even in the western villages. One woman told me last Christmas that she did not believe either in hell or in ghosts. Hell she thought was merely an invention got up by the priest to keep people good; and ghosts would not be permitted, she held, to go 'trapsin about the earth' at their own free will; 'but there are faeries,' she added, 'and little leprechauns, and water-horses, and fallen angels.' I have met also a man with a mohawk Indian tattooed upon his arm, who held exactly similar beliefs and unbeliefs. No matter what one doubts one never doubts the faeries, for, as the man with the mohawk Indian on his arm said to me, 'they stand to reason.' Even the official mind does not escape this faith. (Reason and Unreason)

~ W.b. Yeats

I don't differentiate much, except in degree, between people who believe in religion from those who believe in astrology, magic or the supernatural.

~ Andy Rooney