quotations about faith
Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
Faith is a living, bold trust in God's grace, so certain of God's favor that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it. Such confidence and knowledge of God's grace makes you happy, joyful and bold in your relationship to God and all creatures.
MARTIN LUTHER
"An Introduction to St. Paul's Letter to the Romans", Dr. Martin Luthers Vermischte Deutsche Schriften
In the isolation of his clear, cold intellect, the sceptic abides in a glacial and spectral universe. No glow from the affections lights up the frost and shadow of the grave. He feels no prophecy in the thrill of the human heart--in the incompleteness of nature. He believes merely in things tangible, and sees only in the daytime. He will not confess the authenticity of that paler light of faith which was meant to shine when the sunshine of reason falls short, and the firmament of mystery is over our heads.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Funny thing about faith ... it goes a lot faster than it comes.
ROB THURMAN
Nightlife
We must not make a false faith by hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest achievement of the human intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and therefore it must be offered in sincerity.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Anima Hominis", Per Amica Silentia Lunae
To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Stakes of Diplomacy
We do not compromise our own faith by admitting the honesty of another's doubt.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
A golden thread, woven into the Old Testament history, renders the various lives whose stories it recounts only different phases of the same experience. That golden thread is faith.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
Cleave to no faith when faith brings blood.
ARTHUR MILLER
The Crucible
Faith has not lost its power. The soul still enjoys this privilege of receiving inspiration from above. It is not the special prerogative of a few saints. It is the common right of all. It is not an occasional, exceptional gift. It is constant, continuous, the law of our being. It is not a miracle, interfering with the operations of the human soul. It is the condition of our soul's true life.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
How necessary it is for our happiness now, and to come, that we possess faith. The dog has faith in its master, the child in its parent, then why have we not more childlike faith in God? Let us try and bear in mind the implicit faith of Abraham, and strive more to imitate the partriarch of old. We are too apt to put faith in man, and how often we have to bitterly regret it when too late; and man only turns to God when he has tried every other source and found it fail. Why not, from the beginning, trust in God, and God alone; for he who puts his trust in man, God help him. May God give us strength, then, to nourish in all its perfection and simplicity, the faith of the patriarchs who feared and trusted God alone.
T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH
"On Faith", Short Essays
All of our lives are governed by a certain degree of faith in bullshit.
DAN SIMMONS
Carrion Comfort
Faith enables many of us to endure life's difficulties with an equanimity that would be scarcely conceivable in a world lit only by reason.
SAM HARRIS
The End of Faith
We may still say perhaps "faith governs the world"--but the faith of the present is no longer in revelation or in the priest--it is in reason and science.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.
WILLIAM JAMES
"The Dilemma of Determinism"
Faith is reason denying absurdity in the face of the unknown.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
The Blazing Star
Faith is a pair of spectacles fitted by God in a dispensary for the poor, whereby the near-sighted can see truth at a distance, and get rid of pain from eye-strain.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
I believe faith is a human universal. We are endowed at birth with nascent capacities for faith. How these capacities are activated and grow depends to a large extent on how we are welcomed into the world and what kinds of environments we grow in. Faith is interactive and social; it requires community, language, ritual and nurture. Faith is also shaped by initiatives from beyond us and other people, initiatives of spirit or grace. How these latter initiatives are recognized and imaged, or unperceived and ignored, powerfully affects the shape of faith in our lives.
JAMES W. FOWLER
introduction, Stages of Faith
A faith is something you die for; a doctrine is something you kill for: there is all the difference in the world.
TONY BENN
The Observer, April 16, 1989
To follow, under all circumstances, the highest promptings within you; to be always true to the divine self; to rely upon the inward Voice, the inward Light, and to pursue your purpose with a fearless and restful heart, believing that the future will yield unto you the need of every thought and effort; knowing that the laws of the universe can never fail, and that your own will come back to you with mathematical exactitude -- this is faith and the living of faith.
JAMES ALLEN
Morning and Evening Thoughts