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
We are all drifting reefwards now, and faith is our only anchor.
BRAM STOKER
Dracula
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
Faith is the consolation of the wretched and the terror of the happy.
LUC DE CLAPIERS
MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES, Reflections and Maxims
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 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
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
Without faith to act as a governor, the human mind is a runaway worry generator, a dynamo of negative expectations.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Apocalypse
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
Walking is easy ... but it requires faith to find the right path.
JOHN TWELVE HAWKS
The Traveler
Faith is the realization of an invisible truth.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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
Without a mythology, faith is impersonal and heartless.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
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"
The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Dover Beach
Faith ... that faculty which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue.
BRAM STOKER
Dracula
Faith makes it possible to achieve that which man's mind can conceive and believe.
BRUCE LEE
Tao of Jeet Kune Do
A faithful person sees life from the perspective of trust, not fear. Bedrock faith allows me to believe that, despite the chaos of the present moment, God does reign; that regardless of how worthless I may feel, I truly matter to a God of love; that no pain lasts forever and no evil triumphs in the end. Faith sees even the darkest deed of all history, the death of God's Son, as a necessary prelude to the brightest.
PHILIP YANCEY
Reaching for the Invisible God: What Can We Expect to Find?
Cleave to no faith when faith brings blood.
ARTHUR MILLER
The Crucible
Faith is a pair of spectacles fitted by God in a dispensary for the poor, whereby the near-sighted can see truth at a distance, and get rid of pain from eye-strain.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought