Quotes Tagged "faith"

Bir insan, anne babasız yaşayabilir ama Tanrı'sız yaşayamaz.

It is not true that fate slips silently into our lives. It steps in through the door that we have opened, and we invite it to enter.

We were only children, Steffan. God forgives us for being careless and not knowing what to do. We'll never be able to be good enough to make up for what happened. I guess we have to accept that God's grace is sufficient.

Don't be afraid to speak up. What is the point of free speech if you have nothing to say?

It is better to ultimately succeed with the truth than to temporarily succeed with a lie.

Despite the bad luck life had dealt him, he still had faith that tomorrow could indeed bring into being a new world.

Quit your job to saved your life and your health. No job is worth risking physical or mental health over. Get out.

When we lose the belief in ‘something better’ we’ve embraced the belief in ‘all things worse.’ And such a perspective is based less on things being worse, and more on our inability to believe that we can make it better.

In this imperceptibly vast sea of humanity, we are scarcely a drop. But in the sweeping vastness of such a turbulent sea we forget that these waters are in fact made up of a collection of drops, for without these individual drops the sea would be nothing but parched rumor and dusty myth. And because that’s the case, the turbulence engulfing this enormous body of water can be brought to a stilled calm by this single drop that we are touching the drop that everyone else is with the love that God has touched us with.

I will become discouraged and often I deeply lament of the fallenness that presses down in ever-darkening swells all around me. But I have learned that to be discouraged in the face of sin running rampant is simply my humanity finding itself vexed to exhaustion as I grapple with the wonder of ‘what could be’ as held against the depravity of ‘what is.’ Yet what I’ve learned is that discouragement is fortitude in the making, for God knows that to seize the vision of how good things can be we must first experience the wretchedness of how bad they can become. Only then will we understand the gravity of our mission and the power of goodness to achieve it.

A faith based on miracles will quickly fade, dependent on the next miracle. Such an attitude cannot even be called faith.

I wonder, sometimes, if the Continentals were like shoals of fish, & the slightest flick of one fish caused dozens of others to follow suit, until the entire shimmering cloud had changed course. And were the Divinities the sum of this cloud? An embodiment, perhaps, of a national subconscious? Or were they empowered by the thoughts & praises of millions of people, yet also yoked to every one of those thoughts – giant, terrible puppets forced to dance by the strings of millions of puppeteers. This knowledge, I think, is incredibly dangerous. The Continentals derive so much pride & so much power from having Divine approval … but were they merely hearing the echoes of their own voices, magnified through strange caverns & tunnels? When they spoke to the Divinities, were they speaking to giant reflections of themselves?

You closed your eyes. That was the difference. Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too-even when you're in the dark. Even when you're falling.

The cross which is the object of faith, is also, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the cause of it. Sit down and watch the dying Savior till faith springs up spontaneously in your heart. There is no place like Calvary for creating confidence. The air of that sacred hill brings health to trembling faith. Many a watcher there has said: 'While I view Thee, wounded, grieving, Breathless on the cursed tree, Lord, I feel my heart believing That Thou suffer'dst thus for me.

Sensuality is knowing deep down within yourself that you’re going to be okay no matter what happens. It’s having faith that you’re fundamentally worthy whether you get what you want or don’t.

God takes the impossible and makes it the inevitable.

There are many religious people who believe if they act or believe in accordance with God’s will, God should and will protect them from calamities such as bad health and early death. Many pious people have been afflicted with disease and many non-religious and evil people have lived long and healthy lives. It should be obvious to anyone there is simply no correlation between religiosity and being protected from illness. (There are measurable health benefits to leading the purposeful, family-centered, and community-centered life healthy religious practices provide, but that is another matter.) How could there be such a correlation? As Harold Kushner has observed, does the belief God protects the righteous mean a good religious person can go out in freezing weather without a coat and never get sick? If God really did protect religious people from all illness, why would any rational person not be religious? Moreover, faith would no longer be faith. It wouldn’t take any faith to believe in God and to lead a religious life. It would be a completely empirically based decision: Observe x and you will never get cancer; believe y and you will never get heart disease. That’s not faith, it’s a health care decision. The belief God protects those with proper observance or faith from all disease must ultimately lead to an unsympathetic, even judgmental, response to people who get sick: ‘If only they were more observant [or] if only they had a deeper faith—they wouldn’t have gotten cancer or had that heart attack.’ The victim of cancer or a heart attack is then doubly victimized.

The historians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had one great advantage; they felt themselves as citizens of the world. They were never strangers to their subject matter, and knew nothing of that shyness which the stranger always feels. They felt themselves at home throughout the inhabited world, at any rate, so long as they remained in their own country, or the lands immediately adjacent, in a bodily sense, and made all further journeyings in the spirit alone. They did not sit fumbling over their material, but went straight to the persons concerned, whether men of the immediate past or those of earliest ages; whether Romans or Greeks, French, English, Hindus, Chinese or Indians. The historian stepped forward without formality and took his hero cordially by the hand, spoke to him as friend to friend, or let us say, as one man of the world to another. There was never any fear, in those days, that differences of language, or of circumstances in a different age, might place obstacles in the way of a proper understanding. Men were inspired with faith in a common humanity, and by the certainty that if once the human element could be grasped, all the rest would work out of itself. All mankind were agreed as to what God was, what good and evil were; all were agreed in patriotism and citizenship, in love of parents and of children — in a word, agreed in all realities.

We believe that the sun is in the sky at midday in summer not because we can clearly see the sun (in fact, we cannot) but because we can see everything else.

Life is a helluva journey. You face situations. You meet people. You try to understand situations. You try to understand people. But you will never ever be able to understand people. You will never ever be able to understand why some things happen. You feel you desperately need someone to support you. But you won't find any support. You feel you need an anchor amidst the unpredictably nature of life. But there won't be an anchor. And you will feel your feet are losing their balance. You will feel you are falling down. You will feel the weight of life pulling you down. And you are drowning in the ocean. And you are shouting for help. But nobody can hear you because everybody is busy living their life to listen to you. You thus give up on people. You lose faith in people. You lose faith on life. You just go on living life without feeling anything. You live life in a state of numbness and indifference. And then one day you look at yourself in the mirror, and you have become a stranger to yourself!