Quotes Tagged "faith"

Strange are the pictures of the future that mankind can thus draw with this brush of faith and these many-coloured pigments of the imagination! Strange, too, that no one of them tallies with another!

How is faith to endure, O God, when you allow all this scraping and tearing on us? You have allowed rivers of blood to flow, mountains of suffering to pile up, sobs to become humanity's song--all without lifting a finger that we could see. You have allowed bonds of love beyond number to be painfully snapped. If you have not abandoned us, explain yourself. We strain to hear. But instead of hearing an answer we catch sight of God himself scraped and torn. Through our tears we see the tears of God.

When you're young, faith is often a matter of rules. What you should do and shouldn't do, that kind of thing. But as you get older, you realize that faith is really a matter of relationship - with God, with the people around you, with the members of your community.

On faith’s battered back calm eyes etch prayers that cool a nation’s hot rage.

I would rather believe God doesn't exist than believe he doesn't care.

And now they were weary and frightened because they had gone against a system they did not understand and it had beaten them. They knew that the team and the wagon were worth much more. They knew the buyer man would get much more, but they didn't know how to do it. Merchandising was a secret to them.

Should one continue to follow the faith of a group that's cast him out? Shouldn't it stand to reason that if he was true to that faith that the group should have been true to him? Is it unreasonable to ask forgiveness of one who is all-forgiving?

Fe es aquello que nos permite creer en cosas que sabemos que no son ciertas.

Faith which does not doubt is dead faith. -Miguel de Unamuno, philosopher and writer (1864-1936)

In addition to the kind of critical reflection on one's previous assumptive or tacit system of values we saw Jack undertake, there must be, for Stage 4, a relocation of authority within the self. While others and their judgments will remain important to the Individuative-Reflective person, their expectations, advice and counsel will be submitted to an internal panel of experts who reserve the right to choose and who are prepared to take responsibility for their choices. I sometimes call this the emergence of the executive ego. The two essential features of the emergence of Stage 4, then, are the critical distancing from one's previous assumptive value system and the emergence of the executive ego. . . . We find that sometimes many persons complete half of this double movement, but do not complete the other.

Why God should want and need us is a mystery. But it is true: otherwise he would not have created us and life would ultimately have no meaning for us. It is good to remember that in God the is a constancy, a consistency of attitude which never changes, irrespective of what we are or how we act: he never changes in is wanting us or needing us.

What a failure her life had been. Would she have lied to God if she’d had more faith, been more righteous? How could she possibly have a son at her age? And yet, if she had believed all along . . .

It seems all spirits need theatrics, eh? Even Christ himself requires incense and holy water. We're a skeptical people. We need convincing.

A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition. -Jose Bergamin, author (1895-1983)

Faith, sir, as to that matter, I don't believe one half of it myself.

I am not functioning very well. Living with the knowledge that the baby is dead is painful. I feel so far away from you, God. I can only try to believe that you are sustaining me and guiding me through this. Please continue to stand by my side.

Trying to justify a world we don't hold all the answers to is what bedevils the best of us. Sometimes it's better just to accept that things are as we see them.

Watching you has taught me that a man need not be weak to have a faith, but is made strong by it.

The average man has no central core of moral assurance, no spring within his breast, no inner strength to place him above the need for repeated psychological shots to give him the courage to go on living. He has become a parasite on the world, drawing his life from his environment, unable to live a day apart from the stimulation which society affords him.

Prophet,' he said, 'Your doctrines I do not know; therefore if I accepted them, I would do it out of fear like a coward and a base man. Are you anxious that your faith be professed by cowards and base people?