Quotes about Belief

I cannot imagine a Christian who does not know how to smile. May we joyfully witness to our faith.

Our society's obsession with tolerance leads to intolerance. Simply being a Christian today is an offense to our culture.

Religions are all alike- founded upon fables and mythologies.

Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living . What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.

Awe rather than faith is the cardinal attitude of the religious Jew.

To us, recollection is a holy act; we sanctify the present by remembering the past. To us Jews, the essence of faith is memory. To believe is to remember.

The grand premise of religion is that man is able to surpass himself.

This was a religious problem, my father felt; people can want to be deceived. Do not deceive, the Kotzker rebbe insisted, and that also means do not deceive oneself by being gullible.

We must never forget that there is a higher truth than the one we are able to comprehend at first sight.

The hysteria of suspicion has made us unreliable to ourselves, trusting neither our aspirations nor our convictions. Suspiciousness, not skepticism, is the beginning of our thinking.

The central commandment is in relation to the person. But religion today has lost sight of the person. Religion has become an impersonal affair, an institutional loyalty. It survives on the level of activities rather than in the stillness of commitment. It has fallen victim to the belief that the real is only that which is capable of being registered by fact-finding surveys.

In moments of great crisis they all fail—priests, philosophers, scientists—the prophets alone prevail.