#belief

"Each moment of worry, anxiety or stress represents lack of faith in miracles, for they never cease."

"Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous."

"I have no argument with those who see in organized religion a template or an imperative to live life according to a prescribed set of beliefs. Just give others the room, within the laws of civil society, to believe or not believe whatever they like."

"If you could disagree with kings, were gods so far above?"

"I accept the Organic Trinity of Mineral, Vegetable, and Animal with as much authority as I accept the Holy Trinity. Both are sacred."

"[When a religious couple wrote to Sagan about fulfilled prophecies, he wrote back in May 1996:]If ‘fulfilled prophecy’ is your criterion, why do you not believe in materialistic science, which has an unparalleled record of fulfilled prophecy? Consider, for example, eclipses."

"Your true friends echo your own philosophies back at you."

"I respect you as a person too much to respect your ridiculous beliefs."

"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."

"They all believed in him because of the authenticity of his musical talent and his faith in it."

"For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible."

"Belief in oneself is one of the most important bricks in building any successful venture."

"Her name is Faith, or that’s what I believe it to be."

"We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt."

"The highest court is in the end one’s own conscience and conviction—that goes for you and for Einstein and every other physicist—and before any science there is first of all belief."

"I believe the way to master my destiny is to serve others. If I raise up others, am I not also raised up?"

"We all reach a point that is the limit of our understanding. When we stare over the precipice of uncertainty and into the dark unknown that we cannot explain with hard evidence, that is when we trade understanding for belief. At best, we make an educated guess. At worst, we make blind leaps of faith."

"You don’t have to stay trapped in your thoughts just because you think them."

"[W]hen someone finds himself quite unjustly attacked and hated on all sides, there is no need for such a person to feel dismayed by misfortune. See how Fortune, who has harmed many a one, is so inconstant, for God, Who opposes all wrong deeds, raises up those in whom hope dwells."

"If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once."