Believing Quotes - page 25

Believing that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is only the wind does not cost much, but believing that a dangerous predator is the wind may cost an animal its life. (Michael Shermer)
The prejudice of unfounded belief often degenerates into the prejudice of custom, and becomes, at last, rank hypocrisy. When men from custom or fashion, or any worldly motive, profess or pretend to believe what they do not believe, nor can give any reason for believing, they unship the helm of their morality, and being no longer honest to their own minds, they feel no moral difficulty in being unjust to others. View quote
Thomas Paine
I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book. View quote
Barbara Kingsolver
Believing that a crisis is a useful thing to create, the Obama administration - which understands that, for liberalism, worse is better - has deliberately aggravated the fiscal shambles that the Great Recession accelerated. View quote
George Will
If it is an extraordinary blindness to live without investigating what we are, it is a terrible one to live an evil life, while believing in God. View quote
Blaise Pascal
I want my Pope to be a traditionalist. Otherwise religion has no meaning, whatsoever. I'm not a bagel-and-lox Jew; let me put it to you that way. I stopped going to the temple a long time ago when they did the bagel and lox job. I didn't go there to eat sponge cake. I didn't go there to hear about liberation theology in a synagogue and I'm sure many Catholics stopped going to church because they wanted to go to hear fire and brimstone. They wanted the priests to roar in the pulpit. They wanted him to bring heaven itself down into that church and they weren't getting what they went for. And so they stopped going, but they didn't stop wearing the cross, nor did they stop believing in God... View quote
Michael Savage
I have already related to you great and admirable things; but, if you might be induced to adventure upon the hazard of believing some other divinity of this sacred Pantagruelion, I very willingly would tell it you. Believe it, if you will, or otherwise, believe it not, I care not which of them you do, they are both alike to me. It shall be sufficient for my purpose to have told you the truth, and the truth I will tell you. View quote
François Rabelais
I hate the whole race. There is no believing a word they say, your professional poets, I mean there never existed a more worthless set than Byron and his friends for example. View quote
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington
I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation. View quote
Derek Walcott
The whole secret to our success is being able to con ourselves into believing that we're going to change the world because statistically we are unlikely to do it. View quote
Tom Peters
We truly believed in something back then, and we knew we were the kind of people capable of believing in something - with all our hearts. And that kind of hope will never simply vanish. (Haruki Murakami)
But that's part of faith. Believing and knowing despite what other people say, and despite what the world might think of your beliefs. View quote
James Frey
People assume when they come into a church and see a person up there speaking, 'That person must be a good person.' My challenge through the years has been believing that: 'I guess I must be a really good person.' I struggle with it. It just helps me to keep that confessional posture. View quote
Max Lucado
The divine in man is our sole ground for believing that there is anything divine in the universe outside of man. Man is the revealer of the divine. At bottom, the world is to be interpreted in terms of joy, but of a joy that includes all the pain, includes it and transforms it and transcends it. The Light of the World is a light that is saturated with the darkness which it has overcome and transfigured. View quote
Felix Adler
All that we can find inside are the symptoms of underdevelopment and the secondary factors that make for poverty. Mistaken interpretations of the causes of underdevelopment usually stem either from prejudiced thinking or from the error of believing that one can learn the answers by looking inside the underdeveloped economy. The true explanation lies in seeking out the relationship between Africa and certain developed countries and in recognizing that it is a relationship of exploitation. View quote
Walter Rodney
The influence of friendship upon culture differs from that of love, in that it assumes the basic idiosyncrasies of personal taste to be unalterable. Love, in spite of all rational knowledge to the contrary, is always in the mood of believing in miracles. View quote
John Cowper Powys
Ferenczi was considered paranoid for believing his women patients; the men's confessions were not even discussed. Ernest Jones, the powerful English analyst who had been Ferenczi's analysand, now took up the cudgel against him in deadly seriousness. Jones let it be known after Ferenczi's death in 1933 (he died a few months after the quarrel with Freud) that he was really a homicidal maniac. While I was in London working in the Jones archives I discovered what this really meant: Jones believed that to disagree with Freud (the father) was tantamount to patricide (father murder). And so, because Ferenczi believed that children were sexually abused and Freud did not, Ferenczi was branded by Jones as a homicidal maniac, and this piece of scurrilous interpretation stuck. View quote
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
We have a priori reasons for believing that in every sentence there is some one order of words more effective than any other; and that this order is the one which presents the elements of the proposition in the succession in which they may be most readily put together. View quote
Herbert Spencer
We have a priori reasons for believing that in every sentence there is some one order of words more effective than any other. View quote
Herbert Spencer
As a soldier who has spent a quarter of his life in the study of the science of arms, let me tell you I went into the British Army believing that if you want peace you must prepare for war. I believe now that if you prepare thoroughly and efficiently for war, you get war. View quote
Frederick B. Maurice
Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no. That's not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim American kid believing that he or she could be president? (Colin Powell)
Although every believing Christian understands that God guides our steps, fewer and fewer emphasize the point. A God working actively in the world makes us uneasy. We tend to like our God distant and a bit malleable, ready to bend to every new human idea. A God with a will of his own is too scary, and, besides, he might get in the way of our satisfaction of immediate desire. View quote
Stephen L. Carter
The public knows that human beings are fallible. Only people blinded by ideology fall into the trap of believing in their own infallibility. View quote
Freeman Dyson
We do not dwell in the Palace of Truth. But, as was mentioned to me not long since, "There is a time coming when all things shall be found out." I am not so sanguine myself, believing that the well in which Truth is said to reside is really a bottomless pit. View quote
Oliver Heaviside
Journalism, spooked by rumors of its own obsolescence, has stopped believing in itself. Groans of doom alternate with panicked happy talk. View quote
Maureen Dowd