Great Throughts Treasury

"Faith has to do with the basis, the ground on which we stand. Hope is reaching out for something to come. Love is just being there and acting." - Emil Brunner, fully Heinrich Emil Brunner

"History is often cruel, and rarely logical, and yet the wisest of realists are those who recognize that fate can indeed be shaped by human faith and courage." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger

"Friendship is never established as an understood relation. It is a miracle which requires constant proofs. It is an exercise of the purest imagination and of the rarest faith!" - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

"A man’s real faith is never contained in his creed, nor is his creed an article of his faith. The last is never adopted. This it is that permits him to smile ever, and to live even as bravely as he does. And yet he clings anxiously to his creed, as to a straw, thinking that that does him good service because his sheet anchor does not drag." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

"Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

"The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

"An artist is primarily one who has faith in himself. He does not respond to the normal stimuli: he is neither a drudge nor a parasite. He lives to express himself and in so doing enriches the world." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller

"Treat the other man's faith gently; it is all he has to believe with. His mind was created for his own thoughts, not yours or mine." - Henry S. Haskins

"Submission is the footprint of faith in the pathway to sorrow." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Love without faith is as bad as faith without love." - Henry Ward Beecher

"The soul is a temple; and God is silently building it by night and by day. Precious thoughts are building it; disinterested love is building it; all-penetrating faith is building it." - Henry Ward Beecher

"Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith. We should live for the future, and yet should find our life in the fidelities of the present; the last is only the method of the first." - Henry Ward Beecher

"Faith is nothing but spiritualized imagination." - Henry Ward Beecher

"The highest order that was ever instituted on earth is the order of faith." - Henry Ward Beecher

"The imagination is the secret and harrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith." - Henry Ward Beecher

"The imagination is the secret and marrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith." - Henry Ward Beecher

"The soul is a temple; and God is silently building it, by night and by day. Precious thoughts are building it; disinterested love is building it; all-penetrating faith is building it." - Henry Ward Beecher

"From their religious faith, the Founding Fathers enunciated the most fundamental law of human progress since the Sermon on the Mount, when they stated that man received from the Creator certain inalienable rights and that these rights should be protected from the encroachment of others by law and justice." -

"Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith." - Horace Greeley

"There is one inevitable criterion of judgment touching religious faith in doctrinal matters. Can you reduce it to practice? If not, have none of it." - Hosea Ballou

"I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith." - Immanuel Kant

"Limit knowledge to make room for faith." - Immanuel Kant

"The righteous man may say: I will that there be a God, that my existence in this world be also an existence outside the chain of physical causes and in a pure world of the understanding, and lastly that my duration be endless; I firmly abide by this, and will not let this faith be taken from me; for in this instance alone my interest, because I must not relax anything of it, inevitably determines my judgment." - Immanuel Kant

"We cannot live on probabilities. The faith in which we can live bravely and die in peace must be a certainty, so far as it professes to be a faith at all, or it is nothing." - James Froude, fully James Anthony Froude

"All the strength and force of man comes from his faith in things unseen. He who believes is strong; he who doubts is weak. Strong convictions precede great actions. The man strongly possessed of an idea is master of all who are uncertain or wavering. Clear, deep, living convictions rule the world." - James Freeman Clarke

"In the spirit of faith let us begin each day, and we shall be sure to “redeem the time” which it brings to us, by changing it into something definite and eternal. There is a deep meaning n this phrase of the apostle, to redeem time. We redeem time, and do not merely use it. We transform it into eternity by living it aright." - James Freeman Clarke

"High art, high morals, high faith, are impossible among those who do not believe their own inspirations, but only court them for pleasure or profit." - James Martineau

"Faith is the flame that lifts the sacrifice to heaven." - James Montgomery

"Committing to our creativity is an act of faith, a promise that we will keep at it despite our fears and failings and despite whatever obstacles we find in our paths." - Jan Phillips

"Logic and cold reason are poor weapons to fight fear and distrust. Only faith and generosity can overcome them." - Jawaharlal Nehru

"It is strange that anyone should be so foolish as to think that religion and faith can be thrust down a person’s throat at the point of the sword or a bayonet." - Jawaharlal Nehru

"We believe willingly what we love, and rarely what we love not. To the question of divine faith is united the question of divine virtue." - Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, fully Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

"In a closed system of energy based on fear and lack, abundance in one place creates lack in another. In an open system of energy, based on faith and love, abundance begets more abundance, and creativity flourishes." - Joan Borysenko

"In the end, the meaning of life is a matter of faith. Faith is less a set of beliefs than your willingness to surrender to a mysterious force of love and guidance that helps you find your way." - Joan Borysenko

"In the end, the meaning of life is a matter of faith… faith is less a set of beliefs than your willingness to surrender to a mysterious force of love and guidance that helps you find your way." - Joan Borysenko

"Reason is our soul’s left hand, faith her right; by these we reach divinity." - John Donne

"A lively faith will bear aloft the mind, an leave the luggage of good works behind." - John Dryden

"I believe in the immortality of the soul, not in the sense in which I accept the demonstrable truths of science, but as a supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of God’s work." - John Fiske

"The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith." - John Foster Dulles

"Religion indeed enlightens, terrifies, subdues; it gives faith, it inflicts remorse, it inspires resolutions, it draws tears, it inflames devotion, but only for the occasion." - John Henry Newman

"The end... of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith, makes up the highest perfection." - John Milton

"Let none henceforth seek needless cause to approve the faith they own; when earnestly they seek such proof, conclude they then begin to fail." - John Milton

"To make the people fittest to choose, and the chosen fittest to govern, will be to mend our corrupt and faulty education , to teach the people faith, not without virtue, temperance, modesty, sobriety, parsimony, justice; not to admire wealth or honor; to hate turbulence and ambition; to place every one his private welfare and happiness in the public peace, liberty and safety." - John Milton

"What is in reality cowardice and faithlessness, we call charity, and consider it the part of benevolence sometimes to forgive men’s evil practice for the sake of their accurate faith, and sometimes to forgive their confessed heresy for the sake of their admirable practice." - John Ruskin

"Superstition, in all times and among all nations, is the fear of a spirit whose passions are those of a man, whose acts are the acts of a man; who is present in some places, not in others; who makes some places holy and not others; who is kind to one person, unkind to another; who is pleased or angry according to the degree of attention you pay him, or praise you refuse him; who is hostile generally to human pleasure, but may be bribed by sacrifice of a part of that pleasure into permitting the rest. This, whatever form of faith it colors, is the essence of superstition." - John Ruskin

"Temperance, in the nobler sense, does not mean a subdued and imperfect energy; it does not mean a stopping short in any good thing, as in love or in faith; but it means the power which governs the most intense energy, and prevents its acting in any way but as it ought." - John Ruskin

"Religion, in its purity, is not so much a pursuit as a temper; or rather it is a temper, leading to the pursuit of all that is high and holy. Its foundation is faith; its action, works; its temper, holiness; its aim, obedience to God in improvement of self, and benevolence to men." - Jonathan Edwards

"In order that a man may stop believing in some things, there must be germinating in him a confused faith in others. It is curious to note that almost always the dimension of life in which the new faith begins to establish itself is art." - José Ortega y Gasset

"There is nothing which strengthens faith more than the observance of morality." - Joseph Addison

"To be an atheist requires an infinitely greater measure of faith than to receive all the great truths which atheism would deny." - Joseph Addison