quotations about faith
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
Faith I have, in myself, in humanity, in the worthwhileness of the pursuits in entertainment for the masses. But wide awake, not blind faith, moves me.
WALT DISNEY
The Gospel According to Disney
I practice a faith that's been long abandoned
Ain't no altars on this long and lonesome road
BOB DYLAN
"Ain't Talkin'"
However logical our induction, the end of the thread is fastened upon the assurance of faith.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Through faith we are restored to paradise and created anew. We have no need of works in order to be righteous; however, in order to avoid idleness and so that the body might be cared for an disciplined, works are done freely to please God.
MARTIN LUTHER
The Freedom of a Christian
No man can be any greater of any stronger, in Christianity, than his faith.
JAMES WADDEL ALEXANDER
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.
ALEISTER CROWLEY
The Book of Lies
The struggle now going on for the world will never be decided by bombs or rockets, by armies or military might. The real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root, it is a test of moral will and faith.
RONALD REAGAN
speech for National Association of Evangelicals, March 8, 1983
For, no: not faith by fable lives,
But from the faith the fable springs
-- It never is the song that gives
Tongue life, it is the tongue that sings;
And sings the song.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
Love's Voice
I'm wary of faith outside of actions. I'm wary of religiosity that ignores the wider world.
BONO
Rolling Stone, Nov. 3, 2005
Faith was a longing that pretended to be a conviction.
IVAN KLIMA
Waiting for the Dark
Faith is belief without proof. Faith is fine, but don't call it science.
LOYD AUERBACH
Esp
I have learned that faith means trusting in advance what will only make sense in reverse.
PHILIP YANCEY
Finding God in Unexpected Places
Scepticism has never founded empires, established principles, or changed the world's heart. The great doers of history have always been men of faith.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
The discoveries of science have proved that the opinions concerning a firmament above, and a flat earth beneath, are completely inaccurate; but faith delights more in sublimity than truth; it soars far above science in its discoveries, and holds accuracy in contempt.
ETHAN ALLEN
Reason: The Only Oracle of Man
They bring me faith like a closed package in someone else's plate. They want me to accept it so that I don't open it.
FERNANDO PESSOA
The Book of Disquiet
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 a conscious apprehension of something inevident, something which unlike this desk and this chair is not seen to be there, even if it enters into the fabric of our personal relations to reality with at least as much force, relevance, and moment as things which are seen to be there.
BERNARD LONERGAN
A Second Collection
Faith only shuts the eye of reason, not picks it out.
WILLIAM MCEWEN
Selected Essays Doctrinal & Practical
Christianity, just as much as Islam, teaches children that unquestioned faith is a virtue. You don't have to make the case for what you believe. If somebody announces that it is part of his faith, the rest of society, whether of the same faith, or another, or of none, is obliged, by ingrained custom, to "respect" it without question; respect it until the day it manifests itself in a horrible massacre like the destruction of the World Trade Center, or the London or Madrid bombings.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The God Delusion