belief Quotes

Mrs. Thomas told me that God made my hair red on purpose, and I’ve never cared about Him since.

“John, my child, you have been my friend now many years, and yet did you ever know me to do any without good cause? I may err—I am but man; but I believe in all I do.”

It is so hard to accept at once any abstract truth, that we may doubt such to be possible when we have always believed the ‘no’ of it;

“No one would listen or believe me, because everyone thought me mad; but you, who must know that I am not, listen to me, and believe me so afterwards if you will.”

“You persist in your incredulity, Edmond,” continued Faria. “My words have not convinced you. I see you require proofs.”

His mother holds, I know, the secret belief that some of our brave friend’s spirit has passed into him.

What! you do not believe in God when he is striking you dead? you will not believe in him, who requires but a prayer, a word, a tear, and he will forgive?

If Jurgis did not believe it, he could try it, said the little Jew—let them meet at a certain house on the morrow and make a test.

“I have a strong faith in ghosts: I have a conviction that they can, and do, exist among us!”

I didn’t ask you whether you believe that ghosts are seen, but whether you believe that they exist.”

All the people nearest to him who were good in their lives were believers. The old prince, and Lvov, whom he liked so much, and Sergey Ivanovitch, and all the women believed, and his wife believed as simply as he had believed in his earliest childhood, and ninety-nine hundredths of the Russian people, all the working people for whose life he felt the deepest respect, believed.

He, an unbeliever, had fallen into praying, and at the moment he prayed, he believed. But that moment had passed, and he could not make his state of mind at that moment fit into the rest of his life.

Ever since, by his beloved brother’s deathbed, Levin had first glanced into the questions of life and death in the light of these new convictions, as he called them, which had during the period from his twentieth to his thirty-fourth year imperceptibly replaced his childish and youthful beliefs—he had been stricken with horror, not so much of death, as of life, without any knowledge of whence, and why, and how, and what it was. The physical organization, its decay, the indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy, evolution, were the words which usurped the place of his old belief. These words and the ideas associated with them were very well for intellectual purposes. But for life they yielded nothing, and Levin felt suddenly like a man who has changed his warm fur cloak for a muslin garment, and going for the first time into the frost is immediately convinced, not by reason, but by his whole nature that he is as good as naked, and that he must infallibly perish miserably.

“If I do not accept the answers Christianity gives to the problems of my life, what answers do I accept?” And in the whole arsenal of his convictions, so far from finding any satisfactory answers, he was utterly unable to find anything at all like an answer.

“Now I say that I know the meaning of my life: ‘To live for God, for my soul.’ And this meaning, in spite of its clearness, is mysterious and marvelous. Such, indeed, is the meaning of everything existing.”

“She is a religious maniac!”

“Yes, she is. For she is credulous and good-hearted, and she believes everything from the goodness of her heart and... and... and she is like that... yes... You must excuse her,” said Sonia, and again she got up to go.