Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible; and as the test of belief is willingness t...o act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What else are we gonna live by if not dreams? We need to believe in something. What would really drive us crazy is to believe this... reality we run into every day is all there is. If I don't believe there's that happy ending out there--that will-you- marry-me in the sky--I can't keep working today.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Reasoning is compared to understanding as movement is to rest, or acquisition to possession.... Since movement always proceeds fro...m something immovable, and ends in something at rest, hence it is that human reasoning, in the order of inquiry and discovery, proceeds from certain things absolutely understood--namely, the first principles; and, again, in the order of judgment, returns by analysis to first principles, in the light of which it examines what it has found. Now it is clear that rest and movement are not to be referred to different powers, but to one and the same.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fa...ct she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You didn't just have faith in Paine or any other living man. You had faith in something bigger than that. You had plain, decent, e...very day common rightness. And this country could use some of that. Yeah, so could the whole cockeyed world. A lot of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think it saves much confusion to regard religion as quite distinct from morality, or the right conduct of life--as having necess...arily nothing to do with these, but as a system of faith and worship, a belief in something extranatural.... Indeed, the most religious people are by no means the most moral. Hence it is that religion so rarely changes the man, or makes him practically any better. Let us keep things separated, religion by itself, and morality by itself. Religion implies a belief in the supernatural; in a personal deity who takes sides with or against us. A man may be pure, noble, virtuous, high-minded, spiritual, and not have a religion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible in himself, though both the indestructible element and the t...rust may remain permanently hidden from him. One of the ways in which this hiddenness can express itself is through faith in a personal god.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To every instant there is a correspondence in something outside time. This world here and now cannot be followed by a Beyond, for ...the Beyond is eternal, hence it cannot be in temporal contact with this world here and now.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »