Faith

"I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning."

"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence."

"It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, "mad cow" disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate."

"Reason lives on the systematization of the past, but Faith is the promise of the future."

"Faith — is the Pierless Bridge Supporting what We see Unto the Scene that We do not."

"Faith is a fine invention For gentlemen who see; But Microscopes are prudent In an emergency."

"Faith sees God's face in every human face."

"Faith allows us to enter peacefully into the dark night which faces every one of us at one time or another."

"It is so important for us to have faith, trust, confidence in one another. It is the only way we can communicate. Without faith there is no communication, there is no love, or if there was a little love, it will die without hope, trust, and confidence. Even if it doesn't die right away, it will be so weak, so ill, and so tired that communication will be miserable as well."

"To take up half on trust, and half to try, Name it not faith but bungling bigotry."

"Love is no ingredient in a merely speculative faith, but it is the life and soul of a practical faith... A speculative faith consists only in the assent of the understanding, but in a saving faith there is also the consent of the heart."

"Love is the active, working principle in all true faith. It is its very soul, without which it is dead. "Faith works by love.""

"No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence."

"Faith lived in the incognito is one which is located outside the criticism coming from society, from politics, from history, for the very reason that it has itself the vocation to be a source of criticism. It is faith (lived in the incognito) which triggers the issues for the others, which causes everything seemingly established to be placed in doubt, which drives a wedge into the world of false assurances."

"I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing."

"Faith is a letting down our nets into the untranparent deeps at the divine command, not knowing what we shall take."

"Malory clung to his faith with fierce obliviousness to “facts”—in itself an indication that he had gone mad, if his critics were to be believed."

"The Way to ſee by Faith is to ſhut the Eye of Reaſon: The Morning Daylight appears plainer when you put out your Candle."

"Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love."

"Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe."

"Nimrod, becoming weary of arguing with Abraham, decided to cast him before his god--fire--and challenged Abraham's deliverance by the God of Abraham, but God saved him out of the fiery furnace. Haran too was challenged to declare his god, but halted between two opinions, and delayed his answer until he saw the result of Abraham's fate. When he saw the latter saved he declared himself on the side of Abraham's God, thinking that he too, having now become an adherent of that God, would be saved by the same miracle. But since his faith was not real, but depended on a miracle, he perished in the fire, into which like Abraham he was cast by Nimrod. This is hinted in the words (Gen. 11. 28): 'And Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees.'"

"We lean on Faith; and some less wise have cried, "Behold the butterfly, the seed that's cast!" Vain hopes that fall like flowers before the blast! What man can look on Death unterrified?"

"If you find it hard to believe in me, maybe it would help you to know that I believe in you."

"Die Botschaft hör' ich wohl, allein mir fehlt der Glaube; Das Wunder ist des Glaubens liebstes Kind."

"If you have any faith, give me, for heaven's sake, a share of it! Your doubts you may keep to yourself, for I have a plenty of my own."

"Faith is a device of self-delusion, a sleight of hand done with words and emotions founded on any irrational notion that can be dreamed up. Faith is the attempt to coerce truth to surrender to whim. In simple terms, it is trying to breath life into a lie by trying to outshine reality with the beauty of wishes. Faith is the refuge of fools, the ignorant, and the deluded, not of thinking, rational men."

"Faith in an order, which is the basis of science, will not (as it cannot reasonably) be dissevered from faith in an Ordainer, which is the basis of religion."

"If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?"

"Faith of consciousness is freedom Faith of feeling is weakness Faith of body is stupidity."

"Faith cannot be given to man. Faith arises in a man and increases in its action in him not as the result of automatic learning, that is, not from any automatic ascertainment of height, breadth, thickness, form and weight, or from the perception of anything by sight, hearing, touch, smell or taste, but from understanding. Understanding is the essence obtained from information intentionally learned and from all kinds of experiences personally experienced."

"Faith is the backbone of the social and the foundation of the commercial fabric; remove faith between man and man, and society and commerce fall to pieces. There is not a happy home on earth but stands on faith; our heads are pillowed on it, we sleep at night in its arms with greater security for the safety of our lives, peace, and prosperity than bolts and bars can give."

"God comes down in the rain, And the crop grows tall— This is the country faith, And the best of all."

"Faith is a grasping of Almighty power; The hand of man laid on the arm of God; — The grand and blessed hour In which the things impossible to me Become the possible, O Lord, through Thee."

"Faith, Quinn mused, was a strange power. They had committed their lives to the sect, never questioning its gospels. Yet in all of that time, they had the reassurance of routine … The bedrock of every religion, that your God is a promise, never to be encountered in this life, this universe."

"A Faith that sets bounds to itself, that will believe so much and no more, that will trust thus far and no further, is none. It is only Doubt taking a nap in an elbow chair. The husband, whose scepticism is prurient enough to contemplate the possibility of his wife's proving false, richly deserves that she should do so."

"The moderation we see among nonfundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has evolved; it is, rather, the product of the many hammer blows of modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt."

"Faith is generally nothing more than the permission religious people give to one another to believe things strongly without evidence."

"I've never understood how God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion by faith — it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe."

"Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness, but I don't argue with it — especially as I am rarely in a position to prove that it is mistaken. Negative proof is usually impossible."

"What sought they thus afar? Bright jewels of the mine? The wealth of seas, the spoils of war?— They sought a faith's pure shrine!"

"Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated."

"Faith is a gift of God, which man can neither give nor take away by promise of rewards or menace of torture."

"Faith draws the poison from every grief, takes the sting from every loss, and quenches the fire of every pain; and only faith can do it."

"The great act of faith is when a man decides that he is not God."

"The idealists give away their case when they write books. For it shows that they have done the great act of faith and decided that they are not God."

"Faith, as an intellectual state, is self-reliance, which, if you have a metaphysical turn, you will find is not so much of a paradox as it sounds at first."

"Mirror of constant faith, revered and mourn'd!"

"My faith is great: out of the transient darkness of the present the shadows will flee away, and Day will yet dawn. I am an Anarchist. No man who believes in force and violence is an Anarchist. The true Anarchist decries all influences save those of love and reason. Ideas are his only arms. Being an Anarchist I am also a Socialist. Socialism is the antithesis of Anarchy. One is the North Pole of Truth, the other the South."

"It’s a real shame that I let something as insignificant as simple belief rob me of my right to profound experience."

""I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith, I am nothing." "Oh," says man, "but the Babel fish is a dead give-away, isn't it? It proves You exist, and so therefore You don't." "Oh, I hadn't thought of that," says God, who promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. "Ah, that was easy," says man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white, and gets killed on the next zebra crossing. Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys."