quotations about faith
Cleave to no faith when faith brings blood.
ARTHUR MILLER
The Crucible
Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Stakes of Diplomacy
Funny thing about faith ... it goes a lot faster than it comes.
ROB THURMAN
Nightlife
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
We do not compromise our own faith by admitting the honesty of another's doubt.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
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
Faith is reason denying absurdity in the face of the unknown.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
The Blazing Star
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
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
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
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
Faith is a recognition of those things which are above the senses.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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
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
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
We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness and toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other ... except through faith.
STEPHEN KING
Danse Macabre
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"
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