c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
God doesn't expect us to be a walking encyclopedia of biblical knowledge. He wants us to know Him, to be in a relationship with Him. This means not only hearing but allowing our understanding of God to change the way we live. Like the wise builder who laid the foundation of his house on the rock, we learn to let our knowledge of God change us.
— Tyler Edwards, Zombie Church: Breathing Life Back Into the Body of Christ
You will never get everything in life but you will get enough.
— Sanhita Baruah
I see it in your eyes as I see it in hers. Remember, there is always light where there is love and if that is what is meant to happen between the two of you, then it was destined.
— L.G. Castillo, Lash
Something about being rejected at Church Camp felt so much more awful than being rejected at school. 
— Craig Thompson, Blankets
Your faith was strong, but you needed proof...
— Leonard Cohen
to have faith is precisely to lose one's mind so as to win God.
— Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening
It is extremely important for you to believe in yourselves not only for what you are now but for what you have the power to become. Trust in the Lord as He leads you along. He has things for you to do that you won't know about now but that will unfold later. If you stay close to Him, You will have some great adventures. You will live in a time where instead of sometimes being fulfilled, many of them will actually be fulfilled. The Lord will unfold your future bit by bit.
— Neal A. Maxwell
The only thing that guarantees an open-ended collaboration among human beings, the only thing that guarantees that this project is truly open-ended, is a willingness to have our beliefs and behaviors modified by the power of conversation.
— Sam Harris
There is no one true church, no one chosen people.
— Terry Tempest Williams, Leap
because it seemed too simple to accept that life was an act of faith.
— Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
Remember, an easy question can have an easy answer. But a hard question must have a hard answer. And for the hardest questions of all, there may be no answer - except faith.
— Charles Sheffield, Brother to Dragons
Really, there was only one sensible thing to do. Stay the course. Pray it through, day by day, minute by minute. The Lord had an answer and it would surely come. (p. 203)
— Janice Hanna, Love Finds You in Poetry, Texas
We need faith and the mind of the Lord Jesus to recognize something of lasting value in even our most ordinary tasks.
— Philip Yancey
Faith is simply whatever is real to us.
— Elizabeth Kostova, The Swan Thieves
The lust of the flesh directs these desires [of personal union], however, to satisfaction of the body, often at the cost of a real and full communion of persons.
— John Paul II, Blessed Are the Pure of Heart: Catechesis on the Sermon on the Mount and Writings of St. Paul
(about William Blake)[Blake] said most of us mix up God and Satan. He said that what most people think is God is merely prudence, and the restrainer and inhibitor of energy, which results in fear and passivity and "imaginative death."And what we so often call "reason" and think is so fine, is not intelligence or understanding at all, but just this: it is arguing from our *memory* and the sensations of our body and from the warnings of other people, that if we do such and such a thing we will be uncomfortable. "It won't pay." "People will think it is silly." "No one else does it." "It is immoral."But the only way you can grow in understanding and discover whether a thing is good or bad, Blake says, is to do it. "Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires."For this "Reason" as Blake calls it (which is really just caution) continually nips and punctures and shrivels the imagination and the ardor and the freedom and the passionate enthusiasm welling up in us. It is Satan, Blake said. It is the only enemy of God. "For nothing is pleasing to God except the invention of beautiful and exalted things." And when a prominent citizen of his time, a logical, opining, erudite, measured, rationalistic, Know-it-all, warned people against "mere enthusiasm," Blake wrote furiously (he was a tender-hearted, violent and fierce red-haired man): "Mere enthusiasm is the All in All!
— Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit
This is a God who is not identified with the help of a dictionary but through a relationship.
— Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith
But we have seen how brightly light shines in the dark, how sweetly music fills the quiet. All these years you have known only shadow and silence, and we have so much to show you. To save you.We are all worth saving.We cannot ever know, not truly.But we have faith.
— Amie Kaufman, Their Fractured Light
Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.
— C.S. Lewis
The vermin explain their sin with sanctimonious language like, "We've prayed about it and sought counsel, and we feel it's the right thing to do." Don't let it down on them that to the Enemy what they feel is inconsequential. His moral laws don't give a rip about how any of them feel. The sludgebags have no more power to vote them in and out of existence than they have power to revoke the law of gravity.
— Randy Alcorn, Lord Foulgrin's Letters
I believe in free will. I think we make our own decisions and carry out or own actions. And our actions have consequences. The world is what we make it. But I think sometimes we can ask God to help us and He will.
— Michael  Grant, Gone
What I admire about the modern atheist is not at all his logic, but rather his gift of imagination. There will always be the cartoon versions of Christianity further perpetuated by the extremist atheists who do not possess the humility to ask real scholars and theologians its difficult questions. There is little doubt that the atheist has the bigger imagination: the first reason is due to his persistent caricatures of what constitutes a Christian; the second because of his belief that most of his questions are actually rhetorical. From this I can infer that, instead of laughing at one another (the Christian at modern atheist immaturity and the modern atheist at Christian stupidity), we would have a better chance at productivity laughing with one another as we all dumb down what we don't understand.
— Criss Jami, Healology
What was the opposite of linkage blindness? What described being certain of something without any kind of evidence?.
— Barry Lyga, I Hunt Killers
We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world.
— Patti Smith, Just Kids
It is certain that an atom of goodness on the path of faith is never lost.
— Jalaluddin Rumi
For centuries the church has stood by while science picked away at religion bit by bit. Debunking miracles. Training the mind to overcome the heart. Condemning religion as the opiate of the masses. They denounce God as a hallucination - a delusional crutch for those too weak to accept that life is meaningless. I could not stand by while science presumed to harness the power of God himself! Proof, you say? Yes, proof of science's ignorance! What is wrong with the admission that something exists beyond our understanding? The day science substantiates God in a lab is the day people stop needing faith!
— Dan Brown, Angels & Demons
[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.
— Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
You asked the Holy Spirit for a miracle, and now that you’ve got one you’re trying to argue it away. People who don’t believe in miracles shouldn’t pray for them.
— David Wilkerson, The Cross and the Switchblade
The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
This day is not a sieve, losing time. With each passing minute, each passing year, there's this deepening awareness that I am filling, gaining time. We stand on the brink of eternity.
— Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are
Trusting God's grace means trusting God's love for us rather than our love for God. […] Therefore our prayers should consist mainly of rousing our awareness of God's love for us rather than trying to rouse God's awareness of our love for him, like the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18:26-29).
— Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners
Faith requires following the power of a whisper.
— Shannon L. Alder
Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith.
— Henry Ward Beecher
When you SEE into the invisible, you will DARE to do the impossible!
— John Paul Warren
Failure is a reality; we all fail at times, and it's painful when we do. But it's better to fail while striving for something wonderful, challenging, adventurous, and uncertain than to say, " I don't want to try because I may not succeed completely.
— Jimmy Carter, Sources of Strength: Meditations on Scripture for a Living Faith
I guarantee you that after you die you will not say 'I spent too much time praying
—  I wish I had watched more TV instead.
Forgiveness without understanding is like faith without proof.
— Jessica Francis Kane, The Report
So as I shivered, naked and damp, in front of the bathroom mirror, I raised my eyes skyward. "I hope we're still okay."I got no answer, but then, I didn't really expect one. Answer or not, it didn't matter. That's the thing about faith, I guess.
— Chloe Neill
I guess that's where faith comes in, the faith of a child to believe in Santa, the faith of an adult to believe in God, maybe faith is what makes something real? Maybe Rose had believed enough to create her own afterlife, maybe that's the reward of faith...
— Gillibran Brown, Fun With Dick and Shane
The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God's will, the lessI value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do; andas the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently,without asking too many questions.
— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
You can’t give somebody faith. They either got it or they don’t.
— Karen Marie Moning, Iced
The only opportunity you will ever have to live by faith is in the circumstances you are provided this very day: this house you live in, this family you find yourself in, this job you have been given, the weather conditions that prevail at the ...moment.
— Eugene H. Peterson
The response to war is to live like brothers and sisters. The response to injustice is to share. The response to despair is a limitless trust and hope. The response to prejudice and hatred is forgiveness. To work for community is to work for humanity. To work for peace is to work for a true political solution
—  it is to work for the Kingdom of God. It is to work to enable every one to live and taste the secret joys of the human person united to the eternal.
What has happened to create this doubt is that a problem (such as a deep conflict or a bad experience) has been allowed to usurp God's place and become the controlling principle of life. Instead of viewing the problem from the vantage point of faith, the doubter views faith from the vantage point of the problem. Instead of faith sizing up the problem, the situation ends with the problem scaling down faith. The world of faith is upside down, and in the topsy-turvy reality of doubt, a problem has become god and God has become a problem.
— Os Guinness
Perhaps true faith is a form of insanity.
— Kristine Kathryn Rusch, The Sacrifice
those who have loved are those that have found God
— Guru Nanak
The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said, When Allah loves a people, He tries them.
— Leila Aboulela, Lyrics Alley
Although the far territory of the extreme can exert an intoxicating pull on susceptible individuals of all bents, extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits. Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off.
— Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
I can't make those two realities -- what I've lost and what I've found -- fit together in some tidy pattern of divine causality. I just have to hold them on the one hand and on the other, just like that.
— Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me: A True Story
There is nothing anti-intellectual in the leap of faith, for faith is not believing without proof but trusting without reservation.
— William Sloane Coffin Jr., Credo
But I don't know how to fight. All I know how to do is stay alive.
— Alice Walker
Come Judgment Day, we may find that Mumbo Jumbo the God of the Congo was the Big Boss all along.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Спомням си как през летните следобеди, които прекарвах там, баба ми, привършила домашната работа, сядаше до прозореца на светло и вадеше от своя скришен сандък една огромна Библия с твърди корици, обвита с тогавашния официозен вестник "Работническо дело" по конспиративни причини. Вече знаех, че комунизмът и Библията никак не се обичаха.
— Georgi Gospodinov, Невидимите кризи
I believed in immaculate conception and spontaneous combustion. I believed in aliens from outer space and vampires, prophecy, and the resurrection of the dead. I had deja vu many times each day. I was thirteen.
— Kate Braverman, Small Craft Warnings: Stories
As the essence of courage is to stake one's life on a possibility, so the essence of faith is to believe the possibility exists.
— William Salter
I guess this thing we call faith is a climb. I always wanted to think of it as a big slide straight into the arms of God who waits at the bottom to catch us. But instead, He's a God who's on top of things - & like any mountain you climb, the closer we get to Him, the steeper the terrain.
— Lisa Samson
He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.
— Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
Belief creates the actual fact.
— William James
But all the while, there was one thing we most needed even from the start, and certainly will need from here on out into the New Jerusalem: the ability to take our freedom seriously and act on it, to live not in fear of mistakes but in the knowledge that no mistake can hold a candle to the love that draws us home. My repentance, accordingly, is not so much for my failings but for the two-bit attitude toward them by which I made them more sovereign than grace. Grace - the imperative to hear the music, not just listen for errors - makes all infirmities occasions of glory.
— Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace
Faith is a luxury for those who are able to ignore what the rest of us must see every day. Pessimism, distrust, and irony are the holy trinity of my religion, irony in particular.
— Brando Skyhorse, The Madonnas of Echo Park
Her heart felt as if it were breaking in her breast, bleeding and bleeding, young and fierce. From grief over the warm and ardent love which she had lost and still secretly mourned; from anguished joy over the pale, luminous love which drew her to the farthest boundaries of life on this earth. Through the great darkness that would come, she saw the gleam of another, gentler sun, and she sensed the fragrance of the herbs in the garden at world's end.
— Sigrid Undset, The Wife
That the stars guide us, but do not compel us. It is our free will that determines the outcome of all things. God does impose his will on us, rather he makes it known and allows us to choose if we will follow it.
— Kathleen McGowan, The Poet Prince
Stone, steel, dominions pass,Faith too, no wonder;So leave alone the grassThat I am under.
— A.E. Housman, More Poems
Christian hands never claspand He doesn't give gifts for gainbecause a gift can never stop being a gift - it is always meant to be given.
— Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are
Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.
— Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
He does not regard the quantity of faith, but the quality. He does not measure its degree, but its truth. He will not break any bruised reed, nor quench any smoking flax. He will never let it be said that any perished at the foot of the cross.
— J.C. Ryle
That was the last cruel irony of Tobias’s life: that he doomed the woman he would have died to save.
— Cassandra Clare, The Lost Herondale
It may be a procession of faithful failures that enriches the soil of godly success. Faithful actions are not religious acts. They are not even necessary actions undertaken by people of faith. Faithful actions, whether they are marked by success or they end in failure, are actions that are compelled by goodness.
— Desmond Tutu
Men cannot expect to do ill and fare well, but to find that done to them which they did to others.
— Matthew Henry, Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible
How do we remain faithful to our own spiritual imagination and not betray what we know in our own bodies? The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy.
— Terry Tempest Williams, Leap
I believe we are more ready to embrace our lives in the here and now when we are able to recognize the continuity between the immanence of God in our world and eternity. Rather than simply waiting to be liberated to another time or place, we are being invited to collaborate in the healing and redemption of our world.
— Mark Scandrette, Soul Graffiti: Making a Life in the Way of Jesus
Dusty, dark, cold, and hard, coal has no beauty of its own, but when it is consummated by fire it is beautiful and becomes what it was designed to be.
— Frederica Mathewes-Green, At the Corner of East and Now: A Modern Life in Ancient Christian Orthodoxy
As goes the family, so goes the faith; as goes the faith, so goes the culture.
— Kenneth L. Gentry Jr., The Greatness of the Great Commission: The Christian Enterprise in a Fallen World
Ultimately we have nothing to fear. Jesus loves us, and he invites us to be confident in that love. As we seek to obey Him, we are not called to assess the risk involved and determine whether or not obedience will be beneficial or safe for us. We are simply called to trust and obey.
— Dan Baumann, A Beautiful Way: An Invitation to a Jesus-Centered Life
The conflicting missions of the two armies seemed to have no fog, no gray, only black-and-white clarity. I had lived my life in terms of compromise, rule-bending, trade-offs, concessions, bargaining, striking deals, finding middle ground. In these two great armies, there was no such thing. Good was good, and evil was evil, and they shared no common ground.
— Randy Alcorn, Edge of Eternity
sometime life is full of joy,and sometime life is full of pain and tears but we have to defeat it
— Meena Khan
Solitude is the soil in which genius is planted, creativity grows, and legends bloom; faith in oneself is the rain that cultivates a hero to endure the storm, and bare the genesis of a new world, a new forest.
— Mike  Norton, White Mountain
Faith moves mountains, but only knowledge moves them to the right place...
— Joseph Goebbels
It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
— G.K. Chesterton
Do you know, the only people I can have a conversation with are the Jews? At least when they quote scripture at you they are not merely repeating something some priest has babbled in their ear. They have the great merit of disagreeing with nearly everything I say. In fact, they disagree with almost everything they say themselves. And most importantly, they don't think that shouting strengthens their argument.
— Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio
Whatever has befallen you was not meant to escape you, and whatever has escaped you was not meant to befall you.
— عائض القرني
Some communities don't permit open, honest inquiry about the things that matter most. Lots of people have voiced a concern, expressed a doubt, or raised a question, only to be told by their family, church, friends, or tribe: "We don't discuss those things here."I believe the discussion itself is divine. Abraham does his best to bargain with God, most of the book of Job consists of arguments by Job and his friends about the deepest questions of human suffering, God is practically on trial in the book of Lamentations, and Jesus responds to almost every question he's asked with...a question.
— Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived
Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.
— Sarah Ban Breathnach
At times , he didn't understand the meaning of the Koran's words . But he said he liked the enhancing sounds the arabic words made as they rolled off his tongue . He said they comforted him , eased his heart . "They'll comfort you too . Mrariam jo , " he said . "You can summon then in your time of your need , and they won't fail you . God's words will never betray you , my girl . (pg.17)
— Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
Floating there I held onto faith. Because you can't know who might cross your path or who will take your breath away. You can't know what friends might actually become sisters because they stayed by your side. You can't know when there'll be an unexpected detour that'll take you to the place where you were always meant to be.
— Holly C. Corbett, The Lost Girls: Three Friends. Four Continents. One Unconventional Detour Around the World.
Religion doesn't just cloud our minds. It asks us to deliberately deceive ourselves-- to replace reason with its opposite, faith. And when men operate on faith, they can no longer be reasoned with, which makes them more dangerous than any sane man, good or evil.
— James L. Sutter, Death's Heretic
I need no master to punish me in order to behave as I ought. If I did, I would be no more than a child who obeys his father's rules only because he fears the whip, and not because he actually means good.
— Christopher Paolini, Inheritance
You know, it's a sad and unfortunate state of affairs that you have to live in a world where eight-year-olds refuse to believe in anything that they cannot touch or measure, and anyone who happens to see a thing that is invisible to most people is immediately branded a lunatic.
— Caitlín R. Kiernan, Daughter of Hounds
Each of them had done their best. Matt was still his friend. For Meredith, maybe the day would come when she could look at him and not think “inhuman” — or at least not think it immediately and constantly. Maybe Bonnie, the moth, would be able to stay away from the unholy flame. Now, there was something to worry about. He could all too easily see Bonnie taking a walk on the very wild side with Damon. His brother had a soft spot for her already, she knew. But if either of them had a problem, he already knew what he had to do to find a plan for a solution.Just look up.
— L.J. Smith, Blood Will Tell
All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.
— Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
Love and faith are not common companions. More commonly power and fear consort with faith....Power is not to be crossed; one must respect and obey. Power means strength, whereas love is a human frailty the people mistrust. It is a sad fact of life that power and fear are the fountainheads of faith.
— Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals
Sitting calmly on a ship in fair weather is not a metaphor for having faith; but when the ship has sprung a leak, then enthusiastically to keep the ship afloat by pumping and not to seek the harbor--that is the metaphor for having faith. (Concluding Unscientific Postscript)
— Søren Kierkegaard
Nothing will get you into trouble so deep or as sad as faith.
— Rick Bass, The Watch
I said, "Where's all that delivering God's supposed to do?"He snorted. "You're right, the only deliverance is the one we get for ourselves. The Lord doesn't have any hands and feet but ours.""That doesn't say much for the Lord.""It doesn't say much for us, either.
— Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings
They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn't try too hard to be all men and no animal. That's the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles. And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn't mix. Or at least we didn't think they did. We were fools. We tried to budge Darwin and Huxley and Freud. They wouldn't move very well. So, like idiots, we tried knocking down religion. We succeeded pretty well. We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated outflinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answer to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are lost people.
— Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
Grace is the celebration of life, relentlessly hounding all the non-celebrants in the world. It is a floating, cosmic bash shouting its way through the streets of the universe, flinging the sweetness of its cassations to every window, pounding at every door in a hilarity beyond all liking and happening, until the prodigals come out at last and dance, and the elder brothers finally take their fingers out of their ears.
— Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace
People think of faith as being something that you don't really believe, a device in helping you believe simply it. Of course that is quite wrong. As Pascal says, faith is a gift of God. It is different from the proof of it. It is the kind of faith God himself places in the heart, of which the proof is often the instrument...He says of it, too, that it is the heart which is aware of God, and not reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not be reason.
— Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom
Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.
— Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure. 
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Religious people tend to encounter, among those who are not, a cemented certainty that belief in God is a crutch for the weak and the fearful...Now the belief in God may turn out at the last trump to be a mistake. Meantime, let us be quite clear, it is not merely the comfort of the simple--though it is that too, much to its glory--it is a formidable intellectual position with which most of the first-class minds of the human race, century in and century out, have concurred, each in his own way....speaking of crutches--Freud can be a crutch, Marx can be a crutch, rationalism can be a crutch, and atheism can be two canes and a pair of iron braces. We none of us have all the answers, nor are we likely to have. But in the country of the halt, the man who is surest he has no limp may be the worst-crippled.
— Herman Wouk, This Is My God: The Jewish Way of Life
We worship…the powers that speak to our souls, if it seems they do. We do so knowing there is more to the world, and the half-world, and perhaps worlds beyond, than we can grasp. We always knew that. We can’t even stop children from dying, how would we presume to understand the truth of things? Behind things? Does the presence of one power deny another? [p. 176]
— Guy Gavriel Kay, Sailing to Sarantium
But miracles are not for the asking; they come only when the stern eyes of God droop shut for a moment, and Our Lady takes advantage of His inattention to grant an illicit mercy. God...is an Anglican, whereas Our Lady is of the True Faith; the two of Them have an uneasy relationship, unable to agree on anything, except that if They divorce, the Devil will leap gleefully into the breach.
— Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White
I had another reason for seeking Him, for trying to espy His face, a professional one. God and literature are conflated in my mind. Why this is, I’m not sure. Perhaps because great books seem heavensent. Perhaps because I know that each nove is a puny but very valiant attempt at godlike behavior. Perhaps because there is no difference between the finest poetry and most transcendent mysticism. Perhaps because writers like Thomas Merton, who are able to enter the realm of the spirit and come away with fine, lucid prose. Perhaps because of more secular writers, like John Steinbeck, whose every passage, it seems to me, peals with religiousity and faith. It once occured to me that literature — all art really — is either talking to people about God, or talking to God about people.
— Paul Quarrington, The Boy on the Back of the Turtle: Seeking God, Quince Marmalade, and the Fabled Albatross on Darwin's Islands
I accept the Organic Trinity of Mineral, Vegetable, and Animal with as much authority as I accept the Holy Trinity. Both are sacred.
— Terry Tempest Williams, Leap
Only add Deeds to thy knowledge answerable; add faith; Add virtue, patience, temperance; add love, By name to come called charity, the soul Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath To leave this Paradise; but shalt possess A paradise within thee, happier far.
— John Milton
At the tattoo parlor, my friend worked with needle and ink applying a design to the skin on his client's back, as the three of us sat discussing our spiritual desires and ambivalence about religion. In the midst of our conversation, the man under the needle turned and said, 'Jesus is cool, it's just that they have f***ed with Jesus. I mean, Christianity was at its best when it was secret and hidden and you could die for it.' This profound, if crass, statement recognizes that the power of the gospel lay in its ability to be a counter-cultural and revolutionary force - not only a story to believe, but a distinctive way of life. The man's comment prompted me to consider the questions: Am I in some measure complicit in the domestication of Jesus?
— Mark Scandrette, Soul Graffiti: Making a Life in the Way of Jesus
Before you have faith you must believe, and before you believe there must be evidence of some sort to persuade the mind. Faith is remembering that evidence and holding to it against all that seems to challenge or contradict it.
— John Christopher, The Prince in Waiting
Faith and science, I have learned, are two sides of the same coin, separated by an expanse so small, but wide enough that one side can't see the other. They don't even know they're connected. Father and Lily were two sides of the same coin, I've decided, and maybe I am the space in between.
— Mary E. Pearson, The Adoration of Jenna Fox
PRAISE FOR 'THE JOURNEY HOME'Many saints are known and praised by all. We pray to them in litanies and celebrate their feast days. But the vast majority of holy men and women live heroic lives quietly before God. Loyal to family, lovers of God, servants in the Church, these unsung saints live everyday life as an example for us. David Hanneman is one such man. His story is exemplary and should be told to the world. He not only lived a noble life, but also suffered with heroism and grace as he passed into glory. This is a story to encourage and bless us all. We are thankful to Joseph Hanneman for sharing his father and making his story known to us who need such examples to encourage us as we face the difficulties and challenges of life.
— Stephen K. Ray
I've got my own moral compass to steer byA guiding star beats a spirit in the skyAnd all the preaching voices -Empty vessels ring so loudAs they move among the crowdFools and thieves are well disguisedIn the temple and market placeLike a stone in the riverAgainst the floods of springI will quietly resistLike the willows in the windOr the cliffs along the oceanI will quietly resistI don't have faith in faithI don't believe in beliefYou can call me faithlessI still cling to hopeAnd I believe in loveAnd that's faith enough for meI've got my own spirit level for balanceTo tell if my choice is leaning up or downAnd all the shouting voicesTry to throw me off my courseSome by sermon, some by forceFools and thieves are dangerousIn the temple and market placeLike a forest bows to winterBeneath the deep white silenceI will quietly resistLike a flower in the desertThat only blooms at nightI will quietly resist
— Rush
Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information passed by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be of the greatest importance to us and which have the task of solving the riddles of the universe and of reconciling us to the sufferings of life -- it is precisely those elements that are the least well authenticated of any.
— Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
Faith is the surrender of the mind, it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other animals. It's our need to believe and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. ... Out of all the virtues, all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated
— Christopher Hitchens
No stars gleam as brightly as those which glisten in the polar sky. No water tastes so sweet as that which springs amid the desert sand. And no faith is so precious as that which lives and triumphs through adversity. Tested faith brings experience. You would never have believed your own weakness had you not needed to pass through trials. And you would never have known God’s strength had His strength not been needed to carry you through.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Focus on faith and grow your roots strong and deep so no one can make you believe in something that is not good for your soul.
— Molly Friedenfeld
I think this is what we all want to hear: that we are not alone in hitting the bottom, and that it is possible to come out of that place courageous, beautiful, and strong.
— Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith
Intellect takes us along in the battle of life to a certain limit, but at the crucial moment it fails us. Faith transcends reason. It is when the horizon is the darkest and human reason is beaten down to the ground that faith shines brightest and comes to our rescue.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Take God at His Word – because winning the battle doesn't requirephysical brawn, but spiritual brains!
— Pedro Okoro, Crushing the Devil: Your Guide to Spiritual Warfare and Victory in Christ
You can do anything you want to do, if you want to do it bad enough.
— Tim Carter my dad
You develop faith by doing things that require faith.
— John H. Groberg
Then I almost pity Judd.” Leaning in, she whispered, “Make him uncomfortable. Don’t take no for an answer. Push. Push him until he loses control. Remember, fire melts ice.” Brenna looked into those eerie night-sky eyes as Faith drew back. “Could be a dangerous game.” “You don’t seem to be the kind of woman content with safe and easy.” “No.” She also wasn’t the kind of woman who gave up at the first obstacle. Judd might be categorically Psy, but she was a SnowDancer.
— Nalini Singh, Caressed by Ice
[at CMC West Coast 2011, on 1 Samuel 14] If just a few of you would step up and be like Jonathan ... as you step out in faith, you know what's going to happen? There'll be people like Saul who'll say, "God's doing something through that guy, God's doing something through that girl. I want to be a part of that.
— Francis Chan
Make rules and follow rules as needed, but don't focus on riles. Focus on faith. Focus on grace. Focus on Jesus.
— Judah Smith, Jesus Is: Find a New Way to Be Human
Destroy what you have become and become what you did destroy/
— Muhammed Bhikha
He is cured by faith who is sick of fate.
— James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
Grace saved my life
—  it can revolutionize yours.
God is perceived by the heart, not by your reason. But what is reason? Your heart simplifying God’s guidance to fit your own needs.
— Shannon L. Alder
It is a part of our nature to survive. Faith is an instinctive response to aspects of existence that we cannot explain by any other means, be it the moral void we perceive in the universe, the certainty of death, the mystery of the origin of things, the meaning of our lives, or the absence of meaning. These are basic and extremely simple aspects of existence, but our limitations prevent us from responding in an unequivocal way and for that reason we generate an emotional response, as a defense mechanism. It's pure biology.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game
And here she was. Lying on the floor of a dusty, empty, locked room thinking how grateful she felt.She smiled, though it hurt tremendously to do so, thinking how blessed she had been to have spent twelve years with the most precious gifts from God. She felt honored that they called her mother. She knew she had done the best she could teaching them about life and love, faith and family. Margo lay slowly dying from the wounds inflicted by a monster, but she was at peace. Because though the devil meant it for evil, God turned it to good.
— Karen Luellen, Winter's Awakening: The Metahumans Emerge
Souls reconstructed with faith transform agony into peace.
— Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams
Faith is only as good as the one in whom it's invested.
— Lee Strobel, The Case for the Real Jesus: A Journalist Investigates Current Attacks on the Identity of Christ
Our forgiving love toward men is the evidence of God's forgiving love in us. It is a necessary condition of the prayer of faith.
— Andrew Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer
A faith that hasn't been tested can't be trusted.
— Adrian Rogers
The purpose that you wish to find in life, like a cure you seek, is not going to fall from the sky. ...I believe purpose is something for which one is responsible; it's not just divinely assigned.
— Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist
God has arranged strange ways for some of us to find him. Sometimes He brings us on long physical journeys; sometimes He leaves us at home and makes the journey internal. Yours has been both. You have gone a long way and struggled a great deal, but I can see from your eyes that it was not for nothing.
— Abigail J. Hartman, The Soldier's Cross
Faith isn't absence of doubt. It's belief without proof, not without question.
— Rosemary Clement-Moore, Hell Week
Faith is a quiet certainty that there is both a higher purpose to life and a higher power that oversees that purpose. Faith is knowing that we do not have to go it alone during our darkest hours and, even when we feel utterly victimized and weak, there is still something brighter, purer, and more potent than anything we can imagine that cares enough to reach out and offer a shoulder for us to lean upon. The object of faith takes many forms and many names, but the universal truth is faith itself.
— Michelle Belanger, The Ghost Hunter's Survival Guide: Protection Techniques for Encounters with the Paranormal
It takes years and maturity to make the discovery that the power of faith is nobler than the power of doubt; and that there is a celestial wisdom in the ingenuous propensity to trust, which belongs to honest and noble natures.
— Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Pearl of Orr's Island: A Story of the Coast of Maine
The day you learn to be publically specific in your prayer, that is the day you will discover power.
— David Wilkerson, The Cross and the Switchblade
For several centuries, the Celtic church of Ireland was spared the Greek dualism of matter and spirit. They regarded the world with the clear vision of faith. When a young Celtic monk saw his cat catch a salmon swimming in shallow water, he cried, "The power of the Lord is in the paw of the cat!
— Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out
My righteousness is just as good as Jesus' righteousness, because it IS Jesus' righteousness!
— E.W. Kenyon
Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Each of us has an inner dream that we can unfold if we will just have the courage to admit what it is. And the faith to trust our own admission. The admitting is often very difficult.
— Julia Cameron
...those who break the law should be loved more and not less for their sin, for if we do not forgive then is sin added to sin and the end is death.
— Elizabeth Goudge, The White Witch
Real faith comes when you facing a problem you can't help, you can't change, and you can't work it out
— Cynthia A. Patterson, It Had to Happen
We are called to service in the kingdom of God. The Christian life is not about what you claim. It is about what you believe. True belief cannot be separated from what we do.
— Tyler Edwards, Zombie Church: Breathing Life Back Into the Body of Christ
The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens
— Bahá'u'lláh, The Kitab-i-Aqdas: The Most Holy Book
A faith that does not result in activity of any kind is a dead faith; it is empty, worthless, insincere.
— Derek Prince
Atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them -- and then they leap.
— Yann Martel
So many things which once had distressed or revolted him — the speeches and pronouncements of the learned, their assertions and their prohibitions, their refusal to allow the universe to move — all seemed to him now merely ridiculous, non-existent, compared with the majestic reality, the flood of energy, which now revealed itself to him: omnipresent, unalterable in its truth, relentless in its development, untouchable in its serenity, maternal and unfailing in its protectiveness.
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe
Faith as the state of being ultimately concerned implies love, namely, the desire and urge toward the reunion of the seperated.
— Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith
[A] great deal of what we believe we do not know firsthand
—  instead we have faith in the knowledge of specialists.
It's better to dare to dream big and achieve half of your dreams than to dream small dreams and achieve all
— Bernard Kelvin Clive, Your Dreams Will Not Die
In the end, only God can see the heart of an individual and distinguish the difference between legalistic deadweight and the passion of holy solemnity.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
The force that played havoc with the cortisol in my blood was the same force that helped my body recover; if I felt better one day and worse the next, it was unchanged. It chose no side. It gave the girl next to me in the hospital pneumonia; it also gave her white blood cells that would resist the infection. And the atoms in those cells, and the nuclei in those atoms, the same bits of carbon that were being spun into new planets in some corner of space without a name. My insignificance had become unspeakably beautiful to me. That unified force was a god too massive, too inhuman, to resist with the atheism in which I had been brought up. I became a zealot without a religion.
— G. Willow Wilson
We will experience the life we have the faith to experience.
— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will: Weathering the Storms in Our Spiritual Lives
Believe, my child. Faith is the food of survival.
— Tobsha Learner, The Witch of Cologne
Could a body broken and blood spilled two thousand years ago restore my own damaged life?
— Frederica Mathewes-Green, At the Corner of East and Now: A Modern Life in Ancient Christian Orthodoxy
For years I was deathly afraid of my own weaknesses, but when I closed my eyes and let myself be vulnerable to them it allowed miracles to take place. Miracles that were only alive when I accessed my BLIND faith.
— Bethany Brookbank, Write like no one is reading
Everything we do for God will be the overflow of intimacy with God.
— Dan Baumann, A Beautiful Way: An Invitation to a Jesus-Centered Life
...the ongoing suspicion that scientific discoveries or rigorous biblical scholarship will undermine faith is a tacit admission that faith is threatened by knowledge, because it is ultimately constructed on weak or faulty assumptions and, like the proverbial house of cards, needs to be "protected" from collapsing. (p. 21)
— Robin R. Meyers, Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus
Any profession of faith…entrusts the mind and heart to a truth that cannot be proven but can be lived.
— Luke Timothy Johnson, The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why it Matters
You didn’t just automatically become a Christian, did you? You weren’t made a Christian by just going to church. Just like you are not made a car by sitting in a garage all day! You have to make a decision.
— Corallie Buchanan, Watch Out! Godly Women on the Loose
All over India, all over the world, as the sun or the shadow of darkness moves from east to west, the call to prayer moves with it, and people kneel down in a wave to pray to God. Five waves each day - one for each namaaz - ripple across the globe from longitude to longitude. The component elements change direction, like iron filings near a magnet - towards the house of God in Mecca.
— Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
Faith is secured by adversity, but endangered by security.
— Margaret Jensen
...they needed someone to explain, to spin, the parts of the tale that couldn't be suppressed. Someone reputable and educated. Someone brilliant yet absolutely committed to the faith. Someone like my father.
— Martha N. Beck
Sometimes asking God for a reason for something is like asking Him why the sky is blue. There is a complex, scientific reason for it, Claire, but most children, including you, are content with knowing it is blue because it is. If we understood everything about everything, we would have no need for faith.
— Susan Meissner, Why the Sky Is Blue
Sometimes, the scariest thing you will ever have to do is trust God to fight the battles you can no longer fight.
— Shannon L. Alder
Wings are like dreams. Before each flight, a bird takes a small jump, a leap of faith, believing that its wings will work. That jump can only be made with rock solid feet.
— J.R. Rim
Regardless of your faith, you can never escape uncertainty.
— Shannon L. Alder
Faith is about going through hell, coming out with some scars, and becoming a wiser person from the lessons you’ve learned along the way. You must take the scars of your past and appreciate them for what they have taught you. You also have to take the scars, the lessons of your past and not let them control your future….
— James A. Murphy, The Waves of Life Quotes and Daily Meditations
Reading about the response of people in stories, plays, poems, helps us to respond more courageously and openly at our own moments of turning.
— Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
I mean that we here are on the wrong side of the tapestry,' answered Father Brown. 'The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person.
— G.K. Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown
Don't settle for anyone just to have a someone. Be patient. Have faith and wait for the right one.
— Elizabeth Bourgeret
Lovelessness is a huge sin in the church. The four primary personalities in the New Testament- Jesus, Paul, Peter, and John- all four of them say that love is the most important thing. But the only time love really counts is when something unlovely happens.
— Jeff Chu
To the knights of faith nobody believes.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987
Faith is love taking the form of aspiration.
— William Ellery Channing
When has faith ever been about feelings?
— Camy Tang, Deadly Intent