Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Belief

"The seven traits of successful people: passion, belief, strategy, clarity of values, energy, bonding power, and mastery of communication." - Tom Butler-Bowdon

"If I err in my belief that the souls of men are immortal, I err gladly, and I do not wish to lose so delightful an error." -

"In spite of the fact that religion looks backward to revealed truth while science looks forward to new vistas and discoveries, both activities produce a sense of awe and a curious mixture of humility and arrogance in practitioners. All great scientists are inspired by the subtlety and beauty of the natural world that they are seeking to understand. Each new subatomic particle, every unexpected object, produces delight and wonderment. In constructing their theories, physicists are frequently guided by arcane concepts of elegance in the belief that the universe is intrinsically beautiful." - Paul Davies

"What you believe matters less than your capacity for belief - and your willingness to translate belief into constructive action." - Elizabeth Dole, fully Mary Elizabeth Alexander Hanford "Liddy" Dole

"If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once. Moreover, there would be nothing immoral then, everything would be permitted." -

"There is no enlightenment in questions, but only barbarism in belief." - Louis Dudek

"A conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order. This firm belief, a belief bound up with deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God." - Albert Einstein

"There is nothing in the whole world so dangerous as a sense of vocation without a belief in God." - W. R. Forrester, fully William Roxburgh Forrester

"Most often faith is understood as belief in certain propositional, doctrinal formulations that in some essential ands static way are supposed to “contain” truth. But if faith is relational, a pledging of trust and fidelity to another, and a way of moving into the force field of life trusting in dynamic center of value and power, then the “truth” of faith takes on a different quality. Truth is lived: it is a pattern of being in relation to others and to God. In this light, doctrines and creeds come to be seen as playing a different though still crucial role. Rather than being the repositories of truth, like treasure chests to be honored and assented to, they becomes guides for the construction of contemporary ways of seeing and being." - James W. Fowler III

"Every condition in your life is the out-picturing of a belief in the subconscious. Every ailment, every difficulty that you have, is but the embodiment of a negative idea somewhere in your subconscious, which is actuated by a charge of fear. Prayer wipes out these negative thoughts and then their embodiment must disappear too. The healing must come." - Emmet Fox

"If you try to see the Presence of God everywhere. If you realize that fundamentally you have nothing to deal with but your own thoughts. If, in short, you understand that you are in a mental universe, that things are thoughts, and that one’s life history is fundamentally the expression of his belief about God." - Emmet Fox

"The only way to get rid of your problem is to change your belief, or reverse the false process of thought. Fear is always present when there is in harmony, and an affirmation will not in itself destroy fear. You must refuse to be intimidated by the seeming danger, whatever it is, and put your reliance on the Love of God. Then fear will begin to go." - Emmet Fox

"The ancient belief that dreams reveal the future is not indeed entirely devoid of truth. By representing a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us into the future." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"I do not share the belief that there can or will be on earth one religion. I am striving, therefore, to find a common factor and to induce mutual tolerance" - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu

"Belief in something doesn’t make it true; only truth makes a belief true." - Os Guiness

"In humans, social conditioning establishes acceptable versus unacceptable behaviors and belief systems. Pejorative denunciations and condemnations are institutionalized, and judgmentalism is supported and encouraged. Behaviors are identified with morality and ethics and simply classified as good versus bad or right versus wrong." - David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins

"If you accept a limiting belief, then it will become a truth for you." - Louise L. Hay

"The essence of religion is belief in a relation to God involving duties superior to those arising from any human relation… duty to a moral power higher than the state." - Charles Evans Hughes, Sr.

"Belief consists not in the nature and order of our ideas, but in the manner of their conception, and in their feeling to the mind... something felt by the mind, which distinguishes the ideas of the judgment from the fictions of the imagination." - David Hume

"The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself… not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps trans-humanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature… I believe in trans-humanism: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny." - Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley

"The belief in progress, not as an ideal but as an indisputable fact, not as a task for humanity but as a law of Nature, has been the working faith of the West for about a hundred and fifty years." - William Ralph Inge

"“Were once asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”" - William James

"Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact." - William James

"The belief in free-will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but fatal decrees." - William James

"The part of wisdom as well as of courage is to believe what is in the line of your needs, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled. Refuse to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably perish. But believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save yourself." - William James

"I have an unshakable belief that mankind’s higher nature is on the whole still dormant. The greatest souls reveal excellencies of mind and heart which their lesser fellows possess – hidden." - Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller

"Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled… purpose." -

"Faith is trust, and it is therefore primarily volitional and emotional. Belief, on the other hand, is primarily intellectual: it is the assent of the mind. but while belief is not itself faith, faith where there is no belief in something quite impossible." - Edwin Lewis

"If each man relies on his individual reason for his religious beliefs, the result will be anarchy of belief or the annihilation of religious sovereignty." - Joseph de Maistre, fully Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre

"We were truly all the same (brothers) - because their belief in one God had removed the “white” from their minds, the “white” from their behavior, and the “white” from their attitudes... Each hour here in the Holy Land enables me to have greater spiritual insights into what is happening in America between black and white. The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities - he is only reacting to four hundred years of the conscious racism of the American whites. But as racism leads America up the suicide path, I do believe, from the experiences that I have had with them, that the whites of the younger generation, in the colleges and universities, will see the handwriting on the wall and many of them will turn to the spiritual path of truth - the only way left to American to ward off the disaster that racism inevitably must lead to." -

"The average man who goes wrong in belief does it when he forgets that there are other truths besides his favorite one." - Cleland Boyd McAfee

"The roots of reason are embedded in feelings – feelings that have formed and accumulated and developed over a lifetime of personality-shaping. These feelings are not a source of weakness but a resource of strength. They are not there for occasional using but are inescapable. To know what we think, we must know how we feel. It is feeling that shapes belief and forms opinion." - James E. Miller, Jr.

"A sound belief is always accompanied by a sane skepticism. It is only by disbelieving in some things that we can ever believe in others things. Faith does not mean credulity." - Samuel H. Miller

"Simple minds, less curious, less well instructed, are made good Christians, and through reverence and obedience hold their simple belief and abide by their laws." -

"The belief in authority is the source of conscience; which is therefore not the voice of God in the heart of man, but the voice of some men in man." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"We live in a world of many illusions and much of human belief is ritualized nonsense." - Wes Nisker, fully Wes "Scoop" Nisker

"Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem invincible." -

"No man is prejudiced in favor of a thing knowing it to be wrong. He is attached to it on the belief of its being right, and when he sees it is not, the prejudice will be gone." - Thomas Paine

"The only idea man can affix to the name of God is that of a first cause, the cause of all things. Incomprehensible and difficult as it is for a man to conceive what a first cause is, he arrives at the belief of it from the tenfold greater difficulty of disbelieving it." - Thomas Paine

"The heresy of one age is the orthodox belief and “only infallible rule” of the next." - Theodore Parker

"Today’s dogma holds that matter is eternal. The dogma comes from the intuitive belief of people who don’t want to accept the observational evidence that the universe was created – despite the fact that the creation of the universe is supported by all the observable data astronomy has produced so far. As a result, the people who reject the data can arguably be described as having a religious belief that matter must be eternal… Since scientists prefer to operate in the belief that the universe must be meaningless – that reality consists of nothing more than the sum of the world’s tangible constituents – they cannot confront the idea of creation easily, or take it lightly." - Arno Allan Penzias

"The belief that youth is the happiest time of life is founded upon a fallacy. The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts, and we grow happier as we grow older." - Edward John Phelps

"The notion of the need of penance and expiation is lost in proportion as belief in God is weakened, and the idea of an original sin and of a first rebellion of man against God becomes confused and disappears." -

"The visions of the mystics are determined in content by their belief, and are due to the dream imagination working upon the mass of theological material which fills the mind." - James Bisset Pratt

"When our vices quit us we flatter ourselves with the belief that it is we who quit them." -

"There is no one Hindu view of life or meaning, but rather multiple centers of meaning, belief and practice, all legitimately called Hinduism, and all connected yet radically different… Fundamentally, life and self-identity are seen as fluid, marked by impermanence, while ultimately there is an Absolute Oneness into which all the distinctions between multiple forms of the divine, the world, and human beings dissolve" - Joseph Runzo and Nancy M. Martin

"Belief is the thermostat that regulates what we accomplish in life." - David J. Schwartz, fully David Joseph Schwartz

"Believe Big. The size of your success is determined by the size of your belief. Think little goals and expect little achievements. Think big goals and win big success. Remember this, too! Big ideas and big plans are often easier – certainly no more difficult – than small ideas and small plans." - David J. Schwartz, fully David Joseph Schwartz

"The stumbling block of revelation is the belief in God in time, God in history." - Roger L. Shinn, fully Roger Lincoln Shinn