quotations about faith
A man's faith is just a subset of his beliefs about the world: beliefs about matters of ultimate concern that we, as a culture, have told him he need not justify in the present. It is time we recognized just how maladaptive this Balkanization of our discourse has become. All pretensions to theological knowledge should now be seen from the perspective of a man who was just beginning his day on the one hundredth floor of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, only to find his meandering thoughts--of family and friends, of errands run and unrun, of coffee in need of sweetener--inexplicably usurped by a choice of terrible starkness and simplicity: between being burned alive by jet fuel or leaping one thousand feet to the concrete below. In fact, we should take the perspective of thousands of such men, women, and children who were robbed of life, far sooner than they imagined possible, in absolute terror and confusion. The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not "cowards," as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith--perfect faith, as it turns out--and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.
SAM HARRIS
The End of Faith
The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'.
RICHARD DAWKINS
"The Irrationality of Faith,", New Statesman, Mar. 31, 1989
Faith is the consolation of the wretched and the terror of the happy.
LUC DE CLAPIERS
MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES, Reflections and Maxims
A transcendent faith, a cheerful trust turns the darkness into a pillar of fire, and the cloud by day into a perpetual glory. They who thus march on are refreshed even in the wilderness, and hear streams of gladness trickling among the rocks.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
A golden thread, woven into the Old Testament history, renders the various lives whose stories it recounts only different phases of the same experience. That golden thread is faith.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
Without faith to act as a governor, the human mind is a runaway worry generator, a dynamo of negative expectations.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Apocalypse
We are all drifting reefwards now, and faith is our only anchor.
BRAM STOKER
Dracula
Walking is easy ... but it requires faith to find the right path.
JOHN TWELVE HAWKS
The Traveler
The church has never been asked to explain anything, our speciality, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralisation of the overly curious mind through faith.
JOSé SARAMAGO
Death at Intervals
Faith is a recognition of those things which are above the senses.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Faith ... that faculty which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue.
BRAM STOKER
Dracula
The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
Faith is the realization of an invisible truth.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The cherubim of love are better far
Than pillared wisdom's most seraphic star.
And knowledge cannot bring the sweet delight
Of childhood's faith that pierces darkest night.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"The Quest for God"
Without a mythology, faith is impersonal and heartless.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
We must not make a false faith by hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest achievement of the human intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and therefore it must be offered in sincerity.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Anima Hominis", Per Amica Silentia Lunae
Though my sight be lost, I do not yet lose my faith: when I can no longer see, I can still believe.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
For just as the first general precepts of the law of nature are self-evident to one in possession of natural reason, and have no need of promulgation, so also that of believing in God is primary and self-evident to one who has faith: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is.
THOMAS AQUINAS
Summa Theologica
The want of faith, as well as faith itself, is best shewn by works. If a sceptic avoid the fire as much as those who believe it dangerous to go into it, we can hardly avoid thinking his scepticism to be feigned, and not real.
THOMAS REID
Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man
The Church has consistently and justly refused to allow that reason might stand in opposition to faith, and yet be placed under subjection to it. The human spirit in its inmost nature is not something so divided up that two contradictory elements might subsist together in it. If discord has arisen between intellectual insight and religion, and is not overcome in knowledge, it leads to despair, which comes in the place of reconciliation. This despair is reconciliation carried out in a one-sided manner. The one side is cast away, the other alone held fast; but a man cannot win true peace in this way. The one alternative is, for the divided spirit to reject the demands of the intellect and try to return to simple religious feeling. To this, however, the spirit can only attain by doing violence to itself, for the independence of consciousness demands satisfaction, and will not be thrust aside by force; and to renounce independent thought, is not within the power of the healthy mind. Religious feeling becomes yearning hypocrisy, and retains the moment of non-satisfaction. The other alternative is a one-sided attitude of indifference toward religion, which is either left unquestioned and let alone, or is ultimately attacked and opposed. That is the course followed by shallow spirits.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
Lectures on Philosophy of Religion