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Belief Quotes


"Haven't you got any romance in your soul?' said Magrat plaintively. 'No,' said Granny. 'I ain't. And stars don't care what you wish, and magic don't make things better, and no one doesn't get burned who sticks their hand in a fire. If you want to amount to anything as a witch, Magrat Garlick, you got to learn three things. What's real, what's not real, and what's the difference."


"If Aliosha had come to the conclusion that neither God nor immortality existed, he would immediately have become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not only a question of the working classes; it is above all, in its contemporary incarnation, a question of atheism, a question of the tower of Babel, which is constructed without God's help, not to reach to the heavens, but to bring the heavens down to earth."


"You possess a potent force that you either use, or misuse, hundreds of times every day."


"The faith in an afterlife, however much our reason ridicules it, very modestly extends our faith that each moment of our consciousness will be followed by another - that a coherent matrix has been prepared for this precious self of ours. The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, of what we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified."


"I'm not superstitious. I'm a witch. Witches aren't superstitious. We are what people are superstitious of."


"You cannot force someone to believe something they do not believe, you can only manage to force them to speak or act as if they do."


"We are all born agnostics. Atheism and theism is sold to us."


"Just because someone wakes up one morning and says, "Today I am going to be rich, does not automatically make them rich. So the same is true with forgiveness, it has to come from the heart with meaning, that is when it works best."


"Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" "I can't remember. Which?" "Do you know what those words mean?" "Not really." "An optimist is positive and hopeful. A pessimist is negative and cynical." "I'm an optimist." "Well, that's good, because there's no irrefutable evidence. There's nothing that could convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced. But there is an abundance of clues that would give the wanting believer something to hold on to."


"A skeptical man with a credo, 'Seeing is believing'. One day he found something so alien and said, 'I can't believe what I just saw'. Then the other man with different credo, 'Blessed are they who believe without seeing'. One day he found something so alien and said,'This is blasphemy, sinful and evil'."


"Every man wherever he goes is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions which move with him like flies on a summer day."


"No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high."


"Being able to unlock your subconscious mind depends on knowing what you want before you can achieve it."


"Fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony."


"We live in a thought-suggestive Universe. The sky's the limit. Believe and you'll receive."


"I learned about religion the way most children learned about sex, [in the schoolyard]. . . . They terrified me by telling me there was a dead man in the sky watching everything I did and I retaliated by explaining where babies came from. Some of their mothers phoned mine to complain, though I think I was more upset than they were: they didn't believe me but I believed them."


"Believe what you believe and it will be, believe what others believe and they will consume you!"


"Possibly the most debilitating deception of all is to create a god of my own making, fool myself into believing that this limp god of mine is the true God, and then construct the entirety of my life on this flamboyantly fictional character. Possibly the most devastating realization of all is when the real God shows up, and in the showing up all of this come crashing down."


"...he said firmly, "God can help you. All the men I've seen in your position turned to Him in their time of trouble." "Obviously," I replied, "they were at liberty to do so, if they felt like it." I, however, didn't want to be helped, and I hadn't time to work up interest for something that didn't interest me."


"Everything cannot be possible without thinking that everything is possible!"


"What would behoove me to instantly declare God not to be God unless He followed my script in some tediously exacting manner? I must confess that I am less likely to believe that it's a matter of some narcissistic demand that I freely pen my own script. Rather, I think it's fear that I'm too inadequate to follow God's."


"When my problems seem overwhelming and impossible to solve, I hold fast to these facts: God is real, He is right, and He cares."


"Just as you first eat with your eyes, you also first desire things with your subconscious mind!"


"If you still believe in magic, you're subject to enchantment."


"Whatever may be the position of science, whatever may be the position of philosophy, as long as there is such a thing as death in the world, as long as there is such a thing as weakness in the human heart, as long as the human heart sheds a drop of tear in weakness, there shall be a faith in God and divinity."


"Night poured over the desert. It came suddenly, in purple. In the clear air, the stars drilled down out of the sky, reminding any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way."



"I had also read somewhere that if a man didn't truly believe or understand what he was espousing, somehow he could do a more convincing job."


"One can win only if he believes himself to be a winner."


"There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call "atheists," and those who think they are facts are "religious." Which group really gets the message?"


"Truth is in all our hearts. He who stands by his heart has God in him. Our conscience is what unites us with God."
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