Great Throughts Treasury

"When you have put all your faith in man and continue to be disappointed, don't you hope there is something out of there that is not of human element?" - Natalie Cole

"Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. When man rejects reason as his standard of judgement, only one alternative standard remains to him: his feelings. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feelings with knowledge." - Nathaniel Branden

"Children can have no better inheritance than believing parents. Religion can become real in the midst of the family as in practically no other way. Many of us have inherited great riches from our parents - the bank account of their personal faith and family prayers." - Nels F. S. Ferré, fully Nels Fredrick Solomon Ferré

"I am fundamentally an optimist. Whether that comes from nature or nurture, I cannot say. Part of being optimistic is keeping one's head pointed toward the sun, one's feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lays defeat and death." - Nelson Mandela, fully Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

"All the tensions and contradictions in life are, and ought to be, reflected in one’s philosophy, and one should not attempt to compose them for the sake of neat philosophical construction. Philosophy cannot ever be divorced from the totality of man’s spiritual experience, from his struggles, his insights, his ecstasies, his religious faith and mystical vision." - Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev

"Since God is not knowable in this world, where reason, opinion, and teaching lead us, by means of symbols, from the better known to the unknown, God is grasped only where persuadings leave off and faith enters in. Through faith we are rapt in simplicity so that, while in a body incorporeally, because in spirit, and in the world not in a worldly manner but celestially." - Nicholas of Cusa, also Nicholas of Kues and Nicolaus Cusanus NULL

"When according to all its intellectual powers our spirit turns by faith to the purest and eternal truth, to which it subordinates all else, and when it chooses and loves this truth as alone worthy of being loved, then, indeed, there is a turning of our spirit. " - Nicholas of Cusa, also Nicholas of Kues and Nicolaus Cusanus NULL

"He had the highest regard for my attainments and gave me every evidence of his complete faith in my ability to ultimately achieve what I had set out to do. I am unwilling to accord to some small−minded and jealous individuals the satisfaction of having thwarted my efforts. These men are to me nothing more than microbes of a nasty disease. My project was retarded by laws of nature. The world was not prepared for it. It was too far ahead of time, but the same laws will prevail in the end and make it a triumphal success." - Nikola Tesla

"While I have not lost faith in its potentialities, my views have changed since. War can not be avoided until the physical cause for its recurrence is removed and this, in the last analysis, is the vast extent of the planet on which we live. Only though annihilation of distance in every respect, as the conveyance of intelligence, transport of passengers and supplies and transmission of energy will conditions be brought about some day, insuring permanency of friendly relations. What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride, which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife. No league or parliamentary act of any kind will ever prevent such a calamity. These are only new devices for putting the weak at the mercy of the strong." - Nikola Tesla

"Youth without faith is a day without sun." - Ouida, pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, preferred to be called Marie Louise de la Ramée NULL

"I am present in front of anyone who has faith in me, just as the moon casts its reflection, effortlessly, in any vessel filled with water." - Padmasamabhava, "The Lotus-Born", aka Guru Rinpoche "Precious Guru" or Lopon Rinpoche or Padum in Tibet NULL

"A strong man who puts his faith in others, May play with life, But a weakling who is always wary, Escapes death, Even at the hands of the strongest men." - Panchatantra or The Panchatantra NULL

"Absolute, unquestioning faith in God is the greatest method of instantaneous healing." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh

"Fearlessness means faith in God: faith in his protection, His justice, His wisdom, His mercy, His love, and His Omnipresence... To be fit for Self-realization man must be fearless." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh

"When the faith dies, the culture dies, the civilization dies, the people die. That is the progression. And as the faith that gave birth to the West is dying in the West, peoples of European descent from the steppes of Russia to the coast of California have begun to die out, as the Third World treks north to claim the estate. The last decade provided corroborating if not conclusive proof that we are in the Indian summer of our civilization." - Pat Buchanan, fully Patrick Joseph "Pat" Buchanan

"Our intellectual, cultural, and political elites are today engaged in one of the most audacious and ambitious experiments in history. They are trying to transform a Western Christian republic into an egalitarian democracy made up of all the tribes, races, creeds, and cultures of planet Earth. They have dethroned our God, purged our cradle faith from public life, and repudiated the Judeo-Christian moral code by which previous generations sought to live." - Pat Buchanan, fully Patrick Joseph "Pat" Buchanan

"If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing." - Paul the Apostle, aka Saint Paul, Paul of Tarsus, originally Saul NULL

"People are asked to place their faith in economic and political systems that have polluted water, air, and sea; that have despoiled communities, sacked workforces, reduced incomes for most people in the world for the past three decades, and created a stratosphere sufficiently permeated with industrial gases that we are, in effect, playing dice with the planet." - Paul Hawken

"Absolute faith is the dependence of the experience of nonbeing on the experience on being and the dependence of the experience of meaninglessness on the experience of meaning. Even in the state of despair one has enough being to make despair possible." - Paul Tillich, fully Paul Johannes Tillich

"Absolute faith, the acceptance of being accepted. Of course, in the state of despair there is nobody and nothing that accepts. But there is the power of acceptance itself which is experienced. Meaninglessness, as long as it is experienced, includes an experience of the power of acceptance. To accept this power of acceptance consciously is the religious answer of absolute faith, of a faith which has been deprived by doubt of any concrete content, which nevertheless is faith and the source of the most paradoxical manifestation of the courage to be." - Paul Tillich, fully Paul Johannes Tillich

"Faith as ultimate concern is an act of the total personality. It happens in the center of the personal life and includes all its elements. Faith is the most centered act of the human mind. It is not a movement of a special section or a special function of man's total being. They all are united in the act of faith. But faith is not the sum total of their impacts. It transcends every special impact as well as the totality of them and it has itself a decisive impact on each of them." - Paul Tillich, fully Paul Johannes Tillich

"In the courageous standing of uncertainty, faith shows most visibly its dynamic character. " - Paul Tillich, fully Paul Johannes Tillich

"Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful. " - Paul Tillich, fully Paul Johannes Tillich

"Where there is no longer any opportunity for doubt, there is no longer any opportunity for faith either. " - Paul Tournier

"An act of faith is an act of a finite being who is grasped by and turned to the infinite." - Paul Tillich, fully Paul Johannes Tillich

"Faith in providence is faith altogether. It is the courage to say yes to one’s life and life in general, in spite of the driving forces of fate, in spite of the catastrophes of existence and the breakdown of meaning." - Paul Tillich, fully Paul Johannes Tillich

"I learned something recently: our true friends are those are with us when the good things happen. They cheer us on and are pleased by our triumphs. False friends only appear at difficult times, with the sad, supportive faces, when, in fact, our suffering is serving to console them for their miserable lives. When things were bad last year, various people I had never ever seen before turned up to ‘console’ me. I hate that… I learned that the search for God is a Dark Night, that Faith is a Dark Night. And that’s hardly a surprise really, because for us each day is a dark night. None of us knows what might happen even the next minute, and yet still we go forward. Because we trust. Because we have Faith… I learned that the world has a soul, and that whoever understands that soul can also understand the language of things. I learned that many alchemists realized their destinies, and wound up discovering the Soul of the World, the Philosopher's Stone, and the Elixir of Life. But above all, I learned that these things are all so simple they could be written on the surface of an emerald. " - Paulo Coelho

"Joy goes against the foundations of mathematics: it multiplies when we divide… Joy is sometimes a blessing, but it is often a conquest. Our magic moment help us to change and sends us off in search of our dreams. Yes, we are going to suffer, we will have difficult times, and we will experience many disappointments — but all of this is transitory it leaves no permanent mark. And one day we will look back with pride and faith at the journey we have taken… Join with those who sing, tell stories, talk pleasure in life, and have joy in their eyes, because joy is contagious, and can prevent others from becoming paralyzed by depression, loneliness and difficulties… Judging oneself to be inferior to other people was one of the worst acts of pride because it was the most destructive. " - Paulo Coelho

"If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine, it is lethal… If you understand life you need a reality check… If you want to achieve your objectives, you have to be prepared for a daily dose of pain or discomfort. At first, it's unpleasant and demotivating, but in time you come to realize that it’s part of the process of feeling good, and the moment arrives when, if you don't feel pain, you have a sense that the exercises aren't having the desired effect… In order to have faith in his own path, a warrior does not need to prove that someone else's path is wrong… In order for us to liberate the energy of our strength, our weakness must first have a chance to reveal itself." - Paulo Coelho

"It is always far easier to have faith in your own goodness than to confront others and fight for your rights. " - Paulo Coelho

"Playing the part of a charitable soul was only for those who were afraid of taking a stand in life. It is always far easier to have faith in your own goodness than to confront others and fight for your rights. It is always easier to hear an insult and not retaliate than have the courage to fight back against someone stronger than yourself; we can always say we're not hurt by the stones others throw at us, and it's only at night - when we're alone and our wife or our husband or our school friend is asleep - that we can silently grieve over our own cowardice… That's the way the human heart. People are afraid to pursue their dreams, most importantly, because they feel they are not entitled to receive it, or that they were unable to reach it. We, their hearts, to be daunted just by thinking about loved ones who would go on forever, or about the moments that should be good but it was not, or of treasures that probably should have found but buried in the ground forever. Because, when these things happen, we are suffering. " - Paulo Coelho

"Faith is not Desire. Faith is Will. Desires are things that need to be satisfied, whereas Will is a force. Will changes the space around us… Evil had to manifest itself and fulfill its role, so that ultimately Good could prevail... Evil needs to manifest itself, for them to understand the value of Good." - Paulo Coelho

"I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings. Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and the angels. I have enough for this life. If there is no other life, then this one has been enough to make it worth being born, myself a human being." - Pearl S. Buck, fully Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu

"Sören Kierkegaard has another answer: human existence is possible as existence not in despair, as existence not in tragedy; it is possible as existence in faith... Faith is the belief that in God the impossible is possible, that in Him time and eternity are one, that both life and death are meaningful." - Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker

"But the inveterate enemies of thought — the government, the lawgiver, and the priest — soon recover from their defeat. By degrees they gather together their scattered forces, and remodel their faith and their code of laws to adapt them to the new needs." - Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin

"With the eventual acceptance of Darwin's theory we reach a modern understanding of nature, one which has since then changed in detail rather than in fundamentals. Only those who prefer religious faith to beliefs based on reasoning and evidence can still maintain that the human species is the special darling of the entire universe, or that other animals were created to provide us with food, or that we have divine authority over them, and divine permission to kill them. " - Peter Singer

"The first way is the way of the Fakir. It is a long, difficult and uncertain way. A fakir works on the physical body, on conquering physical pain… The second way is the way of the Monk. This way is shorter, more sure and definite. It requires certain conditions, but above all it requires faith, for if there is no faith a man cannot be a true monk… The third way is the way of the Yogi, the way of knowledge and consciousness .... When we speak of yogis we really take only Jnana-Yoga and Raja-Yoga. Jnana-Yoga is the yoga of knowledge, of a new way of thinking. It teaches to think in different categories, not in categories of space and time and of causality. And Raja-Yoga is work on being, on consciousness… Then in the Fourth Way the first principle is that man must not believe in anything; he must learn; so faith does not enter into the Fourth Way. One must not believe what one hears or what one is advised, one must find proofs for everything. If one is convinced that something is true, then one can believe it, but not before. " - P.D. Ouspensky, fully Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, also Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, also Uspenskii or Uspensky

"Sensate culture, has these features: The defining cultural principle is that true reality is sensory – only the material world is real. There is no other reality or source of values. This becomes the ubiquitous organizing principle of society. It permeates every aspect of culture and defines the basic mentality. People are unable to think in any other terms. Sensate culture pursues science and technology, but dedicates little creative thought to spirituality or religion. Dominant values are wealth, health, bodily comfort, sensual pleasures, power and fame. Ethics, politics, and economics are utilitarian and hedonistic. All ethical and legal precepts are considered mere man-made conventions, relative and changeable. Art and entertainment emphasize sensory stimulation. In the decadent stages of Sensate culture there is a frenzied emphasis on the new and the shocking (literally, sensationalism). Religious institutions are mere relics of previous epochs, stripped of their original substance, and tending to fundamentalism and exaggerated fideism (the view that faith is not compatible with reason)." - Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin

"The ideational system of truth is the very opposite of the sensate system. It is preoccupied primarily with supersensory reality and values. It is based on revelation, divine inspiration, and mystic experience. As such it is considered to be authentic and absolute. Its main concern is with God and His kingdom as the true reality. Therefore revealed religion and theology become the queen of genuine wisdom and science, empirical knowledge serving as a mere handmaid. The mentality dominated by the truth of faith is dedicated to the eternal verities, in contradistinction to the temporal truth of the senses" - Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin

"Our hopes are high. Our faith in the people is great. Our courage is strong. And our dreams for this beautiful country will never die." - Pierre Trudeau, aka Pierre Elliott Trudeau, fully Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau

"Be firm in faith through life's tests and trials. Break not your word of honor whatever may befall. Hold your ideal high in all circumstances. Keep to your principles in prosperity as well as in adversity. Uphold your honor at any cost. Do not neglect those who depend upon you. Observe constancy in love. Blessed are the unselfish friends and they whose motto in life is constancy. Meet the world with smiles in all conditions of life. Bring out the Beloved in others." - Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan

"Mathematics, which as a student by nature he will take very easily, will be prescribed to train him to abstract thought and to faith in the unembodied; a moral being by native disposition, he must be led to make his virtue perfect; after the Mathematics he must be put through a course in Dialectic and made an adept in the science." - Plotinus NULL

"Together we all sense our duty to preach. Faced with problems and disappointments, many people will try to escape from their responsibility: escape in selfishness, escape in sexual pleasure, escape in drugs, escape in violence, escape in indifference and cynical attitudes. But today, I propose to you the option of love, which is the opposite of escape. Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth- in a word, to know himself- so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves. " - Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL

"Have no fear of moving into the unknown. Simply step out fearlessly knowing that I am with you, therefore no harm can befall you; all is very, very well. Do this in complete faith and confidence. " - Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL

"It is a mistake to apply American democratic procedures to the faith and the truth. You cannot take a vote on the truth. The value of democracy stands or falls with the values which it embodies and promotes." - Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL

"It is not credible that any one should possess so little understanding as to desire the faith and yet be destitute of the most necessary faculty to enable him to receive it. " - Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL

"The Church calls everyone to make faith a reality in their lives, as the best path . . . for attaining true freedom, which includes the recognition of human rights and social justice." - Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL

"In order to imbue civilization with sound principles and enliven it with the spirit of the gospel, it is not enough to be illumined with the gift of faith and enkindled with the desire of forwarding a good cause. For this end it is necessary to take an active part in the various organizations and influence them from within. And since our present age is one of outstanding scientific and technical progress and excellence, one will not be able to enter these organizations and work effectively from within unless he is scientifically competent, technically capable and skilled in the practice of his own profession." - Pope John XXIII, born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli NULL

"Nevertheless, in order to imbue civilization with sound principles and enliven it with the spirit of the gospel, it is not enough to be illumined with the gift of faith and enkindled with the desire of forwarding a good cause. For this end it is necessary to take an active part in the various organizations and influence them from within. And since our present age is one of outstanding scientific and technical progress and excellence, one will not be able to enter these organizations and work effectively from within unless he is scientifically competent, technically capable and skilled in the practice of his own profession." - Pope John XXIII, born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli NULL

"We consider Christmas as the encounter, the great encounter, the historical encounter, the decisive encounter, between God and mankind. He who has faith knows this truly; let him rejoice." - Pope Paul VI, born Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini NULL