beliefs Quotes

“You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply don’t know what you believe, before that. You are too complex to understand yourself.”

“If you’re going to insist on bending the world to your way, you better have your reasons. If you’re going to stand your ground, you better have your reasons. You better have thought them through. You might otherwise be in for a very hard landing.”

“It takes careful observation, and education, and reflection, and communication with others, just to scratch the surface of your beliefs.”

I brought them up here to illustrate the point of conformity: the difficulty in maintaining your own beliefs in the face of others.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.

You have to trust yourself and choose to believe or not to believe what someone says to you.

“Man is buffeted by circumstances so long as he believes himself to be the creature of outside conditions, but when he realizes that he is a creative power, and that he may command the hidden soil and seeds of his being out of which circumstances grow, he then becomes the rightful master of himself.”

“When it comes to controlling human beings there is no better instrument than lies. Because, you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts.”

“JUROR #9: No. He wouldn’t really lie. But perhaps he made himself believe he heard those words and recognized the boy’s face.”

“Psychologists call it ‘learned helplessness’ when a person believes, as I did during my youth, that the choices I made had no effect on the outcomes in my life.”

“There’s one thing I still haven’t told you: I now believe, by the way, that miracles can happen.”

“True prayer is done in secret, but this does not rule out the fellowship of prayer altogether, however clearly we may be aware of its dangers. In the last resort it is immaterial whether we pray in the open street or in the secrecy of our chambers, whether briefly or lengthily, in the Litany of the Church, or with the sigh of one who knows not what he should pray for. True prayer does not depend either on the individual or the whole body of the faithful, but solely upon the knowledge that our heavenly Father knows our needs.”

“If you believe, take the first step, it leads to Jesus Christ. If you don’t believe, take the first step all the same, for you are bidden to take it.”

“Beliefs create reality”

“All I know about the Bible is that wherever it goes there’s trouble. The only time I ever heard of it being useful was when a stretcher bearer I was with at the battle of Dundee told me that he’d once gotten hit by a Mauser bullet in the heart, only he was carrying a Bible in his tunic pocket and the Bible saved his life.”

“Behind [the elders] was the big and ancient silk-cotton tree which was sacred. Spirits of good children lived in that tree waiting to be born. On ordinary days young women who desired children came to sit under its shade.”

“He told them that the true God lived on high and that all men when they died went before Him for judgment. Evil men and all the heathen who in their blindness bowed to wood and stone were thrown into a fire that burned like palm-oil. But good men who worshipped the true God lived forever in His happy kingdom. ”

“I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn’t. I don’t blame him. If I was him I’d have the same opinion about me that he does.”

“This deep internalized shame gives rise to distorted thinking. The distorted thinking can be reduced to the belief that I’ll be okay if I drink, eat, have sex, get more money, work harder, etc.”

“I want deliberately to encourage this mighty longing after God. The lack of it has brought us to our present low estate.

“People who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration.”

“We can well afford to make God our All, to concentrate, to sacrifice the many for the One.”

“I believe in God, but I don’t think you have to go crazy to prove it.”

“Jesus calls us to his rest, and meekness is His method. The meek man cares not at all who is greater than he, for he has long ago decided that the esteem of the world is not worth the effort.”

“Our own growing belief that man might nevertheless learn to fly was based on the idea that while thousands of the most dissimilar body structures, such as insects, fish, reptiles, birds and mammals, were flying every day at pleasure, it was reasonable to suppose that man might also fly.”

“O people of the earth, men and women born and made of the elements, but with the spirit of the Divine within you, rise from your sleep of ignorance! Be sober and thoughtful. Realize that your home is not on the earth but in the Light. Why have you delivered yourselves unto death, having power to partake of immortality?”

We have the power to believe where others deny, to hope where others despair, to love where others hurt.

I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games.

“Everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place.”

“God works, as is very well known, in mysterious ways. There is just nothing you can name that He won’t do, now and then.”

“He is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.”

“What you think you are is a belief to be undone.”

“I have heard men say that seeing is believing; but I should say that feeling is believing; for much as I had seen before, I never knew till now the utter misery of a cab-horse’s life.”

“The fundamental belief of metaphysicians is THE BELIEF IN ANTITHESES OF VALUES.”

“the real mission you have in life is to make yourself happy, and in order to be happy, you have to look at what you believe, the way you judge yourself, the way you victimize yourself”

“Belief is half of healing.”

“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany. I make no claims to have a life in Christ, or with Christ—and certainly not for Christ, which I’ve heard some zealots claim.”

“It occurred to me that the Catholics had done this to her—whatever it was, it surely qualified for the unmentioned UNSPEAKABLE OUTRAGE that Owen claimed his father and mother had suffered. There was something about Mrs. Meany’s obdurate self-imprisonment that smacked of religious persecution—if not eternal damnation.”

“Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.”

“But also because the underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us...”

“BELIEF IS NOT AN INTELLECTUAL MATTER,” he complained. “IF HE’S GOT SO MUCH DOUBT, HE’S IN THE WRONG BUSINESS.”

“Something is wrong when our lives make sense to unbelievers.”

“Becoming free from the clutches of ignorance is not as simple as learning about its cause. Even if you are honest and truly believe in the philosophy of yoga and mystical spirituality, all of your mental efforts to negate the ignorance will fail in the beginning.”

“Those who say that the Lord died first and then rose up are in error, for he rose up and then died, we are to receive the resurrection while we live.”

“She went to him. ‘Atticus,’ she said. ‘I’m—’ ‘You may be sorry, but I’m proud of you.’ She looked up and saw her father beaming at her. ‘What?’ ‘I said I’m proud of you.’ ‘I don’t understand you. I don’t understand men at all and I never will.’ ‘Well, I certainly hoped a daughter of mine’d hold her ground for what she thinks is right—stand up to me first of all.‘”

“And if I hadn’t believed in (Aslan) before, I would now. Back there among the Humans the people who laughed at Aslan would have laughed at stories about Talking Beasts and Dwarfs. Sometimes I did wonder if there really was such a person as Aslan: but then sometimes I wondered if there were really people like you. Yet there you are.”

“O, [you], with your mind far away, thinking that death will not come, Entranced by the pointless activities of this life, If you were to return empty-handed now, would not your [life’s] purpose have been [utterly] confused? Recognize what it is that you truly need! It is a sacred teaching [for liberation]! So, should you not practice this divine [sacred] teaching, beginning from this very moment?”

“And if Aslan himself comes, (Cair Paravel) would be the best place for meeting him too, for every story says that he is the son of the great Emperor-over-the-Sea, and over the sea he will pass.”

″‘But they won’t believe me!’ said Lucy. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Aslan.”

″‘I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian even if there isn’t any Narnia.‘”

“From the moment we are born, people tell us that the world is like this and like that, this way, that way. It is natural that – for a certain period of time – we end up believing what we are told. But we must soon push these ideas aside and discover our own way of living reality.”

“He drew near and saw that it was no natural fire he witnessed, but rather the dance of the witches.”

“Ultima’s spirit bathed me with its strong resolution.”

“Lieutenant Kaffee, I believe in God, and in His son, Jesus Christ. And because I do, I can say this: Private Santiago isn’t dead because of a Code Red. He’s dead because he had no honor. He’s dead because he had no Code. And God was watching.”

“We rode here in their minds, and we took root.”

“Its like bees and honey. Each bee makes only a tiny, tiny drop of honey. It takes thousands of them, millions perhaps, all working together to make the pot of honey you have on your breakfast table. Now imagine that you could eat nothing but honey. That’s what it’s like for my kind of people…we feed on belief, on prayers, on love. It takes a lot of people believing just the tiniest bit to sustain us.”

″‘Gods are great,’ said Atsula, slowly, as if she were comprehending a great secret. ‘But the heart is greater. For it is from our hearts they come, and to our hearts they shall return . . .‘”

“Tirian had never dreamed that one of the results of an Ape’s setting up a false Aslan would be to stop people from believing in the real one.”

“They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”

“I believe in miracles.”

“There is a great difference between Christianity and religion at the south. If a man goes to the communion table, and pays money into the treasury of the church, no matter if it be the price of blood, he is called religious.”

“She had learned that when people were bent on doing something they believed was a good deed, it was usually impossible to dissuade them.”

“I never spoke more plainly in my life. Try believing the evidence instead of insisting that the cameras must be at fault because what they saw was not what you expected.”

“They ring true and that is all that matters the truth.”

“A belief in God and the rituals surrounding that belief—church every Sunday, grace before meals, prayers before bed—were an important part of the Deweys’ existence.”

“For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You’ll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you.”

“For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You’ll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won’t understand why or how.”

“People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible.”

“If you don’t understand Jesus, you can’t understand his prayer. ”

“All of us have our own inner fears, beliefs, opinions. These inner assumptions rule and govern our lives. A suggestion has no power in and of itself, its power arises from the fact that you accept it mentally.”

″‘Just because I do not accept the teachings of the devotaries does not mean I’ve discarded a belief in right and wrong. ... Must someone, some unseen thing, declare what is right for it to be right? I believe that my own morality -- which answers only to my heart -- is more sure and true than the morality of those who do right only because they fear retribution.‘”

“All things that have happened to you are based on thoughts impressed on the subconscious mind through belief. The subconscious mind will accept your beliefs and accept your convictions.”

“There are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there’s only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics”

“The image of her riding that bicycle typified her whole existence to me. Her oddness, her complete nonawareness of what the world thought of her, a nonchalance in the face of what I perceived to be imminent danger from blacks and whites who disliked her for being a white person in a black world. She saw none of it.”

“Whatever your conscious mind assumes and believes to be true, your subconscious mind will accept and bring to pass. Believe in good fortune, divine guidance, right action, and all the blessings of life.”

“God created me—and you—to live with a single, all-embracing, all-transforming passion—namely, a passion to glorify God by enjoying and displaying his supreme excellence in all the spheres of life.”

“Life is wasted if we do not grasp the glory of the cross, cherish it for the treasure that it is, and cleave to it as the highest price of every pleasure and the deepest comfort in every pain. What was once foolishness to us—a crucified God—must become our wisdom and our power and our only boast in this world.”

“God without Christ is no God.”

“You get one pass at life. That’s all. Only one. And the lasting measure of that life is Jesus Christ.”

“See the TURTLE of enormous girth ... On his shell he holds the earth.”

“If we aren’t willing to pay a price for our values, if we aren’t willing to make some sacrifices in order to realize them, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all.”

“It was a friendship founded on many common tastes and interests, on mutual like and admiration of each for what the other was, and an attitude of respect which allowed unhampered expression of opinion even on those rare subjects which aroused differences of views and of belief. It was, therefore, the kind of friendship that can exist only between two men.”

“In school, we learned about the world before ours, about the angels and gods that lived in the sky, ruling the earth with kind and loving hands. Some say those are just stories, but I don’t believe that. The gods rule us still. They have come down from the stars. And they are no longer kind.”

“During the whole underside of her life, ever since her first memory, Eleanor had been waiting for something like Hill House. Caring for her mother, lifting a cross old lady from her chair to her bed, setting out endless little trays of soup and oatmeal, steeling herself to the filthy laundry, Eleanor had held fast to the belief that someday something would happen.”

″ It is very clear that if African-Americans got their conception of religion from slaveholders, libertines, and murderers, there may be something wrong about it…”

“Make your own love. And whatever your beliefs, honor your creator, not by passively waiting for grace to come down from upon high, but by doing what you can to make grace happen... yourself, right now, right down here on Earth.”

“I was a terrible believer in things, but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn’t know where to put my faith, or if there was such a place, or even what the word faith meant, in all of it’s complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake.”

“…the death of my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety: nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had.”

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted.”

“It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.”

“We tend to believe that if we were somewhere else – on vacation, with another partner, in a different career, a different home, a different circumstance – somehow we would be happier and more content. We wouldn’t!”

“Waiting is a sustained effort to stay focused on God through prayer and belief.”

“There are three things which inspire confidence in the orator’s own character-the three, namely, that induce us to believe a thing apart from any proof of it: good sense, good moral character, and goodwill.”

″‘I don’t see anything,’ persisted Curdie. ‘Then you must believe without seeing,’ said the princess; ‘for you can’t deny it has brought us out of the mountain.‘”

“Every time we say we believe in the Holy Spirit, we mean we believe that there is a living God able and willing to enter human personality and change it.”

“It’s easier going to the other world if one knows what there is there.”

“A doctor who knew nothing about local beliefs might end up at war with Voodoo priests, but a doctor-anthropologist who understood those beliefs could find ways to make Voodoo houngans his allies.”

“He was so carried away by his simulated emotion, that he was for one moment almost believing it himself.”

“‘The young nihilists,’ Dad called us. ‘What are nihilists?’ ‘Nihilists believe that nothing has any meaning. They believe in nothing.’ ‘Yeah,’ said Earl. ‘I’m a nihilist.’ ‘Me, too,’ I said. ‘Good for you,’ Dad said, grinning. Then he stopped grinning and said, ‘Don’t tell your mom.’ And that’s part of the backstory for me and Earl.”

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”

“Then one day I realized that my heart was withering, and in it there was nothing but pain. And that my beliefs, that I once held so passionately, had completely disappeared.”

“The person who understands the evil in his own heart is the only person who is useful, fruitful, and solid in his beliefs and obedience. ”

“Today Plato is nearly forgotten. His beliefs include the notion that people who govern should be intelligent, rational, self-controlled, and in love with wisdom, an idea that has long been discredited.”

“It was a moment in which he felt a desperate need to believe in a God that shepherded his own creations.”

Mind is the Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall.”

“I felt free and therefore I was free.”

“You are only as free as you think you are and freedom will always be as real as you believe it to be.”

“Finding Nirvana is like locating silence.”

“My karma was to be born in America where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially wisdom.”

“Are we fallen angels who didn’t want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?”

“The world of thought, belief and feeling is by definition far more difficult to decipher.”

“A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God or a big-cop-God or a big-king-God.”

“Bits of the Bible had...stayed with me even after I stop believing.”

“Used to think...God was only good for helping people...stand what they had to.”

“Yet, desires and and impulses are as much a part of a perfect human being, as beliefs and restraints;”

“Within the blink of a cosmic eye, a universe in which all was chaos and void came to include hunches, beliefs, sentiments, raw sensations, pains, emotions, wishes, ideas, images, inferences, the feel of rubber, Schadenfreude, and the taste of banana ice cream.”

“What matters to you is not necessarily what you say or believe, but what your actions and reactions reveal as important and serious to you…If small things have the power to disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that: small. That will be your unconscious belief.”

“We are all worms, but I do believe that I am a glow worm.”

“But I venture to think there will be some of you here who will believe it is very nearly that time the peaceful, philanthropic, socializing doctrines of Mr. Bright and Mr. Cobden were a little more considered by the statesmen who rule our land.”

“If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is true and Islam false, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.”

“If you believe that your existence is dependent upon this corporeal image, then you feel in danger of extinction.”

“Too many people believe that everything must be pleasurable in life, which makes them constantly search for distractions and short-circuits the learning process.”

“He knew this was childish, but all stubborn acts are childish acts. Here, stubbornness was his only weapon. Patience; stubbornness; love: he had to believe these would be enough.”

“He knew, of course, that he would work again: he had to believe it. Every actor did. Acting was a form of grifting, and once you stopped believing you could, so did everyone else.”

“It’s perfectly fine if you don’t believe in these ‘superstitions’. In fact, it’s better than fine—it’s perfect. Because no matter what you believe, fukú believes in you.”

″ I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.”

“Up, up, up. Faster and faster and faster and faster the little engine climbed until at last they reached the top of the mountain.”

″ I thought I could. I thought I could. I though I could. ”

“She tugged and pulled and pulled and tugged and slowly, slowly, slowly, they started off.”

“It’s like the people who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean.”

“It was as if some people believed there was a divide between the books that you were permitted to enjoy and the books that were good for you, and I was expected to choose sides. We were all expected to choose sides. And I didn’t believe it, and I still don’t. I was, and still am, on the side of books you love.”

“Trying not to believe things when in your heart you are almost sure they are true, is as bad for the temper as anything I know.”

“But there is one painting Olivia just doesn’t get. “I could do that in about five minutes.”

“They didn’t know being dead is only being asleep, and you’re bound to wake up somewhere or other, either where you go to sleep or some better place.”

“Grown-up people find it very difficult to believe really wonderful things, unless they have what they call proof. But children will believe almost anything, and grown-ups know this. That is why they tell you that the earth is round like an orange, when you can see perfectly well that it is flat and lumpy; and why they say that the earth goes round the sun, when you can see for yourself any day that the sun gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night like a good sun it is, and the earth knows its place, and lies as still as a mouse.”

“Grown-up people find it very difficult to believe really wonderful things, unless they have what they call proof.”

″...for otherwise he would have lost faith in his power to fly, and the moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.”

“The fact that it is sometimes difficult for me to believe in God doesn’t mean that I deny his existence. If I stopped believing in him, I wouldn’t be able to continue living.”

“The old monk winced in surprise and narrowed his eyes as he looked around at the manuscripts piled on the shelves around him.”

“But he didn’t believe in supernatural monsters. He shivered. He hoped they didn’t believe in him.”

“Old beliefs do not lead you to new cheese.”

“Regardless of WHAT we do in our lives, our WHY—our driving purpose, cause or belief—never changes.”

“Regardless of WHAT we do in our lives, our WHY—our driving purpose, cause or belief—never changes.”

“He was my father, and I wanted to believe him, but I wasn’t so sure anymore. It was January 1941. The Germans ruled Kraków. I was twelve years old. And for the first time in my life, I had begun to doubt my father.”

“If you want to bring a fundamental change in people’s belief and behavior...you need to create a community around them, where those new beliefs can be practiced and expressed and nurtured.”

“All the events you have experienced in your lifetime up to this moment have been created by the thoughts and beliefs you have held in the past.”

“Just imagine for a day that you do not know anything, that what you believe could be completely false. Let go of your preconceptions and even your most cherished beliefs. Experiment. Force yourself to hold the opposite opinion or see the world through your enemy’s eyes. Listen to the people around you with more attentiveness. See everything as a source for education—even the most banal encounters. Imagine that the world is still full of mystery.”

“The right question is: were there enough red flags to push you over the threshold of belief? If there weren’t, then by defaulting to truth you were only being human.”

″‘We believed your two hundred dollars.’ ‘You mean –?’ She seemed to not know what he meant. ‘I mean you paid us more than if you’d been telling the truth,’ he explained blandly, ‘and enough more to make it all right.‘”

“Man will lay down his life for his country, his society, his family. He will chose to throw himself on a grenade to save his comrades; he is capable of the highest generosity and self-sacrifice. But he has to feel and believe that what he is doing is truly heroic, timeless and supremely meaningful.”

“We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.”

“It is my belief that the House itself loves and blesses equally everything that it has created. Should I try to do the same?”

“It is an interesting reflection on the general climate of thought before the twentieth century that no one had suggested that the universe was expanding or contracting... this may have been due to people’s tendency to believe in eternal truths, as well as the comfort they found in the thought that even though they may grow old and die, the universe is eternal and unchanging.”

“People in both fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.”

“Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.”

“The more unnatural anything is, the more is it capable of becoming the object of dismal admiration.”

“I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.”

″ ‘What must be, must be. The luck of the house hangs on that clock. Its maker spent a good part of his life over it, and his last words were that it would bring good luck to the house that owned it, but that trouble would follow its silence. It’s my belief,’ she added solemnly, ‘that it’s a fairy clock, neither more nor less, for good luck it has brought there’s no denying.’ ”

“In medieval Europe the Church dictated what you should believe, but at least it allowed you to retain the same beliefs from birth to death. It didn’t tell you to believe one thing on Monday and another on Tuesday. ....In a sense his thoughts are circumscribed, but he passes his whole life within the same framework of thought. His emotions aren’t tampered with. Now, with totalitarianism exactly the opposite is true. The peculiarity of the totalitarian state is that though it controls thought, it doesn’t fix it. It sets up unquestionable dogmas, and it alters them from day to day. It needs the dogmas, because it needs absolute obedience from its subjects, but it can’t avoid the changes, which are dictated by the needs of power politics. It declares itself infallible, and at the same time it attacks the very concept of objective truth.”

“Self-forgiveness makes the world better. You don’t become a good person by believing you are a bad one.”

“Indeed, it has affirmed my belief that our purpose as spiritual beings is to follow our bliss, seek our passions, and live our lives as inspirations to each other.”

“Inman did not consider himself to be a superstitious person, but he did believe that there is a world invisible to us. He no longer thought of that world as heaven, nor did he still think that we get to go there when we die. Those teachings had been burned away. But he could not abide by a universe composed only of what he could see, especially when it was so frequently foul.”

“This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.”

“I believe in the power of connections, not just between people but between passion and productivity, between value and profit, between authenticity and purpose, and ultimately between your heart and your wallet.”

“Prayer is of no use when it is not used. Prayer is not only a matter of belief, it is a matter of practice. We can’t get caught in the trap of dogma or method. Prayer is not about right or wrong or “should” or “only.” It is about a personal or individualized way to talk with God or our Higher Power or Universal Energy or the collective unconscious or whatever we want to call it. Prayer is not about someone else telling us how to pray or what to say. It is about communication.”

“He looked in the birth and death room. It was once more used for storage. It seemed strange beyond belief that he had ever lain so long in the room. And in a way he had died in that room; at least something had happened and the bright little silversmith’s apprentice was no more. He stood here again at the threshold, but now he was somebody else.”

“He wanted to prove quickly what he felt in his bones: that no one owned the boat, that no one had the right to claim it from him.”

“ ‘You can’t look of royal blood, Pauline,’ she said, ‘by simply coming on with your head up. Dignity is trained into royal children before they can toddle; graciousness, consideration for others, an unshakable belief in the greatness of their position. You have got to think of yourself day and night like that until you have the reading of your part fixed. You are not Pauline Fossil; you are a boy who has known that one day he must rule, though he had not expected to so soon, but who has accepted his position, and is kingly in every movement.’ ”

“The only thing that was ever wrong with me was my belief that there was something wrong with me.”

We believe in happiness and stability.

Her beliefs were not extravagant. She believed steadily in the Sacred Heart as the most generally useful of all Catholic devotions and approved of the sacraments. Her faith was bounded by her kitchen but, if she was put to it, she could believe also in the banshee and in the Holy Ghost.

“What should I have been, and how should I have spent my life, if I had not had these beliefs, if I had not known that I must live for God and not for my own desires? I should have robbed and lied and killed. Nothing of what makes the chief happiness of my life would have existed for me.”