Belief

"By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox."

"We must be careful more than ever what we let our hearts believe in."

"Wings are like dreams. Before each flight, a bird takes a small jump, a leap of faith, believing that its wings will work. That jump can only be made with rock solid feet."

"Believe, my child. Faith is the food of survival."

"We are called to service in the kingdom of God. The Christian life is not about what you claim. It is about what you believe. True belief cannot be separated from what we do."

"I accept the Organic Trinity of Mineral, Vegetable, and Animal with as much authority as I accept the Holy Trinity. Both are sacred."

"You know, it's a sad and unfortunate state of affairs that you have to live in a world where eight-year-olds refuse to believe in anything that they cannot touch or measure, and anyone who happens to see a thing that is invisible to most people is immediately branded a lunatic."

"I believed in immaculate conception and spontaneous combustion. I believed in aliens from outer space and vampires, prophecy, and the resurrection of the dead. I had deja vu many times each day. I was thirteen."

"When you SEE into the invisible, you will DARE to do the impossible!"

"[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions."

"The only thing that guarantees an open-ended collaboration among human beings, the only thing that guarantees that this project is truly open-ended, is a willingness to have our beliefs and behaviors modified by the power of conversation."

"Always have faith in yourself and the universe, for one will not get you anywhere without the other. Both must be equally strong to reach your desires, for they are the wings that will lift you to your dreams."

"Well, see, I think it's that most people don't like that lonely feeling. People don't like looking up and feeling small or lost. That's what I think prayer is all about. It doesn't matter which stories they believe in, they're all doing the same thing, kind of casting a line out to outer space, like there's something out there to connect to. It's like people make themselves part of something bigger that way, and maybe it makes them less afraid."

"God is going to send you someone that will rescue you. Then one day you will rescue them in return and together your story will rescue others. He has always been a God of rescues and a maker of warriors for his grace. You only need to believe that you are part of something greater than you know."

"While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still holds immense prestige in our society. Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about. It is telling that this aura of nobility extends only to those faiths that still have many subscribers. Anyone caught worshipping Poseidon, even at sea, will be thought insane."

"When your only regret is if anyone thinks you regret anything - that is the definition of conviction."

"I believe in evolution in the sense that a short-tempered man is the successor of a crybaby."

"Even now, I wonder how much of my life is convinced."

"Of course you don't believe in fairies. You're fifteen. You think I believed in fairies at fifteen? Took me until I was at least a hundred and forty. Hundred and fifty, maybe. Anyway, he wasn't a fairy. He was a librarian. All right?"

"We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt."