Sermon quotes on beliefs
James A. Baldwin
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
Walter Darby Bannard
One needs to be right before getting righteous.
Bernard of Clairvaux
I believe though I do not comprehend, and I hold by faith what I cannot grasp with the mind.
Phillip K. Dick
Reality is what doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.
Galileo Galilei
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Madeline L’Engle
Those who believe they believe in God but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.
C. S. Lewis
We are what we believe we are.
Groucho Marx
Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes.
Jonathan Swift
You cannot reason someone out of something he or she was not reasoned into.
Bob Goff
Arguments won’t change people. Simply giving away kindness won’t either. Only Jesus has the power to change people, and it will be harder for them to see Jesus if their view of Him is blocked by our big opinions.
G.K. Chesterton
Creeds must disagree: it is the whole fun of the thing. If I think the universe is triangular, and you think it is square, there cannot be room for two universes. We may argue politely, we may argue humanely, we may argue with great mutual benefit: but, obviously, we must argue. Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence. To say that I must not deny my opponent’s faith is to say I must not discuss it.
Illustrated London News, 10 Oct. 1908
Sigmund Freud
Psychoanalysis . . . daily demonstrates to us how youthful persons lose their religious belief as soon as the authority of the father breaks down.
Taken from Leonardo da Vinci, Vintage/Random House.
Stanley Hauerwas
I do not put much stock in “believing in God.” The grammar of “belief” invites a far too rationalistic account of what it means to be a Christian. “Belief” implies propositions about which you get to make up your mind before you know the work they are meant to do.
Miguel de Unamuno
Those who believe that they believe in God, but without any passion in their heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the idea of God, not in God Himself.
Timothy R. Jennings
Medical literature is replete with case reports of patients dying, not from actual illness, but from believing they were sick, from the fear they were going to die.
Taken from The God-Shaped Brain by Timothy R. Jennings. ©2017 by Timothy R. Jennings. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove IL 60515-1426. www.ivpress.com
Julian of Norwich
Some of us believe that God is almighty and can do everything; and that he is all-wise and may do everything; but that he is all-love and will do everything—there we draw back. As I see it, this ignorance is the greatest of all hindrances to God’s lovers.
Julian of Norwich, Chapter 73
C.S. Lewis
You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.
George McDonald
To hold to a doctrine or an opinion with the intellect alone is not to believe it. A man’s real belief is that which he lives by.
Martin Luther
He who believes his doctrine to be perfectly right and true has only to lift his hands and touch his ears and discover they are the long furry ears of a donkey.
Ziyad Marar
If I am to give you credit, I need to find you credible, while avoiding the risk of seeming credulous in giving credence to your discreditable account. From religious credos to street cred, from professional credentials to political credibility, we trade in a currency that differs from all other animals.
Timothy Keller
It is always crucial to remember that our beliefs are formed not only through reason and argument but also through social conditioning.
Walking with God through Pain and Suffering, Penguin Publishing Group, p. 87.
Michael Scott (Steve Carrell)
“I’m not superstitious, but I am a little stitious.”
The Office
Paul E. Little
Belief doesn’t create truth. Unbelief doesn’t destroy truth. Christian faith goes beyond reason but not against reason.
Ziyad Marar
If I am to give you credit, I need to find you credible, while avoiding the risk of seeming credulous in giving credence to your discreditable account. From religious credos to street cred, from professional credentials to political credibility, we trade in a currency that differs from all other animals.
Jeanne d’Arc
Every man gives his life for what he believes. Every woman gives her life for what she believes. Sometimes people believe in little or nothing, and so they give their lives to little or nothing. One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it…and then it’s gone.
But to surrender who you are and to live without belief is more terrible than dying – even more terrible than dying young.
Robert Oxton Bolt
A belief is not merely an idea the mind possesses; it is an idea that possesses the mind.
Alexander Pope
’Tis with our judgments as our watches,
none Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
An Essay On Criticis
Ludwig Wittgenstein
“I know” seems to describe a state of affairs which guarantees what is known, guarantees it as a fact. One always forgets the expression, “I thought I knew.”
N. T. Wright
The call to ‘believe in the gospel’, or to ‘believe in me’, does not suggest that Jesus was inviting Galilean villagers to embrace a body of doctrine – not even a basic ‘theory’ about ‘salvation’ and how they might attain it… It evokes the historical picature of one who believed that, with his work, Israel’s god was inaugurating his long-awaited kingdom.
Jesus and the Victory of God, 263
Lauren F. Winner
To tell someone what you believe may be to answer the wrong question—better to say, instead, what the church believes, better to use the language the church has bequeathed to us to shape our experience of journey to God—for us and for our salvation he came down from Heaven.
Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis (HarperOne, 2013)
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