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Quotes about faith

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Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Ambrose Bierce1842–1914The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)
- Anti-Religion
The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
Richard Dawkinsborn 1941The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 11. Memes: the new replicators
- Anti-Religion
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 James1842–1910The Dilemma of Determinism (1884)
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.
Richard Dawkinsborn 1941Speech at the Edinburgh International Science Festival (15 April 1992)
- Anti-Religion
The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions, by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.
Sigmund Freud1856–1939The Future of an Illusion (1927), Ch. 8
- Anti-Religion
Christian faith is a grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows. Standing without, you see no glory, nor can possibly imagine any; standing within, every ray of light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors.
Nathaniel Hawthorne1804–1864The Marble Faun (1860), Chapter XXXIII: Pictured Windows
- Christianity
I became my own only when I gave myself to Another.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963Letter (17 July 1953); Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966), p. 251
I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.
Charlotte Brontë1816–185515 January, 1849. As quoted in Elizabeth Gaskell The life of Charlotte Brontë (1870), p. 285
- Hope
At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded.
Ludwig Wittgenstein1889–1951On Certainty (1969), 253
- Knowledge
Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.
James Baldwin1924–1987“Stranger in the Village”
Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith; and in this sense atheism is a purification.
Simone Weil1909–1943“Faiths of Meditation; Contemplation of the divine” as translated in The Simone Weil Reader (1957) edited by George A. Panichas, p. 417
- Atheism
- Religion
The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance.
Abraham Lincoln1809–1865Letter to Eliza Gurney (4 September 1864); quoted in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 7 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), p. 535
- God
To believe that the desire for good is always fulfilled — that is faith, and whoever has it is not an atheist.
Simone Weil1909–1943Last Notebook (1942) p. 137
- Atheism
The divine in man is our sole ground for believing that there is anything divine in the universe outside of man.
Felix Adler1851–1933Life and Destiny (1913)
- God
What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of audacity. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but expressing them.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin1881–1955“The Evolution of Chastity” (February 1934), tr. René Hague in Toward the Future (1975)
- Courage