This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Faith builds a bridge from this world to the next." - Edward Young
"Faith is not reason’s labor, but repose." - Edward Young
"It takes vision and courage to create - it takes faith and courage to prove." - Owen D. Young
"The foundation of service is faith." - Zerahia Ha Yevani, aka Zerahiah the Greek or acronymistic nickname "Ra'ZaH" NULL
"Health alone does not suffice. To be happy, to become creative, man must always be strengthened by faith in the meaning of his own existence." - Stefan Zweig
"It usually pays much greater dividends to invest in faith rather than in worry." - Carol Adrienne
"Suffering was a curse from which man fled, not it becomes a purification of the soul, a sacred trial sent by Eternal Love, a divine dispensation meant to sanctify and ennoble us, an acceptable aid to faith, a strange initiation into happiness." - Henri Frédéric Amiel
"Love is in the air that I breathe, like oxygen. When I lack it, I feel atrophied, asphyxiated. When I have it, I feel I am growing. And so this growth is linked to others, or to a collective other. If I realize that I do not love you, my faith diminishes, and I breathe less and less of the oxygen of life. When I feel linked to you,in communion with you, there is a current of love that passes between us, and the intensity can multiply. And the more this love grows, the more the faith becomes luminous, the more I feel linked to the collective other. I am speaking of God." - Jean-Bertrand Aristide
"Make truth thy prayer, faith thy prayer carpet." - Guru Arjan
"Reason has a legitimate function to fulfill, for which it is perfectly adapted; and this is to justify and illumine for man his various experiences and to give him faith and conviction in holding on to the enlarging of his consciousness. But reason cannot arrive at any final truth because it can neither get to the root of things nor embrace their totality." -
"The full circle of spiritual truth will be completed only when we realize that, but for a destiny not fully understood, we might actually have been born in the other person’s faith." - Marcus Bach, fully James Marcus Bach
"Faith is by its nature non-rational. Having faith does not in any way remove responsibility for one’s own ethical and existential decisions. Faith is about `opting out’ of the need for rational justification rather than a deliberate attempt to act contrary to reason." - Julian Baggini
"Love also sheds light on our desire for happiness. The desire for love is connected with the desire for happiness. But no one who truly loves can in good faith reduce love to the pursuit of happiness. Love is more bittersweet than that. True love, be it romantic, familial or platonic, persists through happiness and has as its subject the welfare of the persons loved, not the lover. Love, then, reflects the important role of happiness in the meaningful life, but also the shallowness of seeing happiness as all." - Julian Baggini
"Hope is the parent of faith." - Cyrus Augustus Bartol
"The dignity of man and the dignity of faith require the recognition of freedom to choose the truth, and freedom in the truth. Freedom cannot be identified with goodness or truth or perfection: it is by nature autonomous, it is freedom and not goodness." - Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev
"The political organization of the state rests both on force and on faith." - Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev
"The consciousness of abiding safety in the bosom of the Church is one of the most serious obstacles to an honest confrontation with the Christian faith." - Peter L. Berger, fully Peter Ludwig Berger
"The sexual act takes on qualitative significance and value which transcends the other meanings the sexual act can have, when lovers use the act purposely to become parents. For now the two lovers express their faith in love itself, in the possibilities open to their children within the social order and in this world." - Peter A. Bertocci, fully Peter Anthony Bertocci
"We need to find out, not a formula, but a temper - not a creed, but a Faith - which is common to all, and which underlies all, and supports all, and inspires all." - T. H. Bindley, fully Thomas Herbert Bindley
"The world is full of paradox. For example, [in Buddhism] though no notion of a creator is entertained, great stress is laid upon the need for faith and piety. By faith is meant not trust in a benevolent diety avid for love, praise and obedience, but conviction that beyond the seeming reality misreported by our senses which is inherently unsatisfactory, lies a mystery which, when intuitively unsatisfactory, lies a mystery which, when intuitively perceived, will give our lives undreamed-of meaning and endow the most insignificant object with holiness and beauty." - John Blofeld, fully John Eaton Calthorpe Blofeld
"If justice prevails, good faith is found in treaties, truth in transaction, order in government, the earth is at peace, and heaven itself sheds overus its beneficent light and radiates down to us its blessed influence." - Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
"Christianity is an uneasy, a tragic, an impossible faith, in high tension between the real and the ideal, and “is” and the “ought” - that is one of the sources of its strength." - Crane Brinton, fully Clarence Crane Brinton
"There is an absolute truth about everything; it lies behind all blunders and all partial knowledges, a calm, sure, unfound certainty, like the great sea beneath its waves, like the great sky behind its clouds. God knows it. It and the possession of it makes the eternal difference between God’s knowledge and man’s. It is a beautiful and noble faith when a man thus believes in the absolute truth, unfound, unfindable perhaps by man, and yet surely existent behind and at the heart of everything." - Phillips Brooks
"You can keep a faith only as you can keep a plant, by rooting it into your life and making it grow there." - Phillips Brooks
"Medieval churchmen… held that faith, hope and love are the fundamental Christian virtues and that the cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude) are needed to express faith, hope and love in all the varying circumstances of life in the world." - R. E. C. Browne, fully Robert Eric Charles Browne
"Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all." - Gilbert Keith "G.K." Chesteron
"Only faith in a life after death in a brighter world where dear ones will meet again - only that and the measured tramp of time can give consolation." - Winston Churchill, fully Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill
"Now whether the difficulty is real or whether it is imaginary, the results are the same, you become whatever you think. If God is with you, how can you possibly feel inferior to anyone? You have equal access to all the good that comes from God. You can demonstrate your faith in His ability to give it to you by living His life. So change your thought patterns right now. Make up your mind to beat this feeling by faith in God, and you will. He can who thinks he can!" - Albert E Cliffe
"Your subconscious mind produces in your daily life evidence of the thoughts you send back to it. The constant repetition of fear, anxiety and worry thoughts will bring upon you the same thing multiplied many times over, but the constant practice of positive thinking, making affirmations hour by hour that God is now healing your fears and worries, will bring magnificent results... You have the ability for successful living. You have the tools. The power you use is faith and the tools are your thoughts and ideas." - Albert E Cliffe
"Modern secularity has offered another way of dealing with religious pluralism. As religious traditions lose their importance as means of self-understanding and community identification, their differences and mutual exclusiveness diminish in importance. Alienation from any particular religious faith tends to move the question of religious particularity into the realm of indifference, as life is determined by nonreligious values and institutions. Yet secularity has been no more successful in establishing human community than has the religious vision. The competing claims of nationalism, economic imperialism, and ideological triumphalism are also demonic forms of particularity that have not been able to establish a new universality in human community." - Donald G. Dawe
"Difference of rite ought not to involve differences of faith." - Christopher Henry Dawson
"Jesus talked a great deal about money. Sixteen of the thirty-eight parables were concerned with how to handle money and possessions. In the gospels, an amazing one out of ten verses (288 in all) deal directly with the subject of money. The Bible offers 500 verses on prayer, less than 500 verses on faith, but more than 2,000 on money and possessions." - Howard Dayton, Jr.
"The things in our civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared that we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind." - John Dewey
"Faith is wealth! Obedience is wealth! Modesty also is wealth! Hearing is wealth, and so is Charity! Wisdom is sevenfold riches." - Dhammapada NULL
"If a man’s faith is unstable and his peace of mind troubled, his knowledge will not be perfect." - Dhammapada NULL
"I paint not by sight but by faith. Faith gives you sight." - Amos Ferguson
"Death is a great adventure, but none need go unconvinced that there is an issue to it. The man of faith may face it as Columbus faced his first voyage from the shores of Spain. What lies across the sea he cannot tell; but his special expectations all may be mistaken; but his insight into the clear meanings of present facts may persuade him beyond doubt that the sea has another shore." -
"Faith is people’s evolved and evolving ways of experiencing self, others and world (as they construct them) as related to and affected by the ultimate conditions of existence (as they construct them) and of shaping their lives’ purposes and meaning, trusts and loyalties, in light of the character of being, value and power determining the ultimate conditions of existence (as grasped in their operative images – conscious and unconscious of them)." - James W. Fowler III
"Faith, as imagination, grasps the ultimate conditions of our existence, unifying them into a comprehensive image in light of which we shape our responses and initiatives, our actions… Faith, then, is an active mode of knowing, of composing a felt sense or image of the condition of our lives taken as a whole. It unifies our lives’ force fields." - James W. Fowler III
"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
"Religious faith must enable us to face tragedy and finitude in the devastating and bewildering particular forms they come to us without giving in to despair or morbidity." - James W. Fowler III
"Religious faith must link us to communities of shared memory and shared hope with which we can join in symbolizing our human condition and in enacting the visions that can animate give new life. Religious faith cannot be reduced to the ethical or to the merely utilitarian. But, as part of this larger and indispensable contribution that religious faith can provide to making and keeping life human, it needs also to be held accountable for the renewal and extension of a universal covenant with being. It needs to be held accountable for its broader contribution to good faith on earth." - James W. Fowler III
"Like produces like. Good produces good. If our all day thinking is positive, constructive, kindly, we produce health, success, and freedom. If our hour-to-hour thinking is negative, pessimistic, mean, we produce sickness, failure, and unhappiness. If our life is governed by Faith we become younger, more prosperous, and more joyous, as the years pass. If our life is governed by fear, the fleeting years bring age, decrepitude, and frustration." - Emmet Fox
"Without faith man becomes sterile, hopeless and afraid to the very core of his being." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not in its taste, but in its effects." - J. W. Fulbright, fully James William Fulbright
"Faith does not contradict reason but transcends it." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"Faith is nothing but a living, wide-awake consciousness of God within." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"In the dictionary of the seeker of truth there is no such thing as being “not successful.” He is or should be an irrepressible optimist because of his immovable faith in the ultimate victory of Truth, which is God." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"It is impossible to realize perfect Truth so long as we are imprisoned in this mortal frame. We can only visualize it in out imagination. We cannot, through the instrumentality of this ephemeral body, see face to face Truth, which is eternal. That is why one has ultimately to fall back on faith." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu