Quotes about faith

For Einstein, as for most people, a belief in something larger than himself became a defining sentiment. It produced in him an admixture of confidence and humility that was leavened by a sweet simplicity. Given his proclivity toward being self-centered, these were welcome graces. Along with his humor and self-awareness, they helped him to avoid the pretense and pomposity that could have afflicted the most famous mind in the world.

His religious feelings of awe and humidity also informed his sense of social justice. It impelled him to cringe at trappings of hierarchy or class distinction, to eschew excess consumption and materialism, and to dedicate himself to efforts on behalf of refugees and the oppressed.

“You see…when you get right down to it, I don’t believe you have my daughter. I won’t until I see her. And having seen her, I won’t believe I could lose her again.”

Sherman looked at him for a long time.

“The universe is, so far as I know, Doctor Mayer, indifferent to what you believe or disbelieve.”

It doesn’t matter whether we consider ourselves "secular" or "religious": in some fundamental way, we're all reaching for the heavens.

Gadgets can be engineered, programs can be designed, institutions can be built, but belief has an organic quality, and it cannot be called into being by fiat. Once a faith is shattered, it takes a long time to grow again - for its soil is experience - and to become effective again.

It doesn’t matter, she thought, and realized in spite of everything, horror after horror, Roche still believed in God. He had been going to the church to say matins when he found the steward, and if they all died, he would go on saying them and not find anything incongruous in his prayers.

“The clerk is dying, Rosemund is dying, you’ve all been exposed. Why shouldn’t I give up hope?”

“God has not abandoned us utterly,” he said. “Agnes is safe in his arms.”

Safe, she thought bitterly. In the ground. In the cold. In the dark.

I think maybe it is better to believe than not to believe. But I couldn't tell you why.

I do not mock men who have faith. It gives them comfort, and oft times leads them to help others. Yet I have also seen great evils done in the name of the Source. And never have I witnessed a miracle. Until I do I shall remain sceptical.

“You can’t lose faith you never had to begin with.”

“Ah. So you never believed in the Bright at all?”

“Of course I believed. Even now I believe, in principle. But when I was sixteen, I saw the hypocrisy in all the things the priests had taught me. It’s all very well to say the world values reason and compassion and justice, but if nothing in reality reflects those words, they’re meaningless.”

I knew what it was at last—the visible manifestation of my will. My power, inherited from my god ancestors and distilled through generations of humanity, given shape and energy and potential. That was all magic was, really, in the end. Possibility. With it I could create anything, provided I believed.

When they’d gone the old man turned around to watch the sun’s slow descent. The Boat of Millions of Years, he thought; the boat of the dying sungod Ra, tacking down the western sky to the source of the dark river that runs through the underworld from west to east, through the twelve hours of the night, at the far eastern end of which the boat will tomorrow reappear, bearing a once again youthful, newly reignited sun.

Or, he thought bitterly, removed from us by a distance the universe shouldn’t even be able to encompass, it’s a vast motionless globe of burning gas, around which this little ball of a planet rolls like a pellet of dung propelled by a kephera beetle. Take your pick, he told himself as he started slowly down the hill...But be willing to die for your choice.

There is a distinction between belief in a set of propositions and a faith which enables us to put our trust in them.