"A belief that does not shape the life of the believer is not religion!

You shall stay here, a while, until the belief that you are dead has become a certainty; then you will go East with me.

It may be needful to remind the children of a larger growth, who persist in believing a saintly mother's beliefs to be final authority in their studies, that she is not infallible.

But the creed of St. Athanasius stands in the poet's road; and though he disposes of it with less reverence to the patriarch than is quite seemly, there is an indecision, if not in his conclusion, at least in his mode of deducing it, that shows an apt inclination to cut the knot, and solve the objection of the Deist, by alleging, that belief in the Christian religion is an essential requisite to salvation.

This belief in the moralising effects of intellectual culture, flatly contradicted by facts, is absurd a priori....

Having fallen in with Farmer's treatise on the Demoniacs, I carefully studied it; and found it to prove unanswerably, that a belief in demoniacal possession is a superstition not more respectable than that of witchcraft.

These beliefs, which in the place of their origin had all the sanctions of religion and social custom, became, in the shadow of the white man's civilization, a pale reflection of their former selves.

The belief that "thoughts are things," that the invisible is the only real world, that we are here to be trained into harmony with the laws of God, and that what we are here determines where we shall be hereafterall these ideas are Christian.

Belief in the necessity of this hostile relation is a sad mistake.

We are now awake to the all-important truth that belief in this or that detail of superstition is the result of an irrational state of mind, and flows logically from superstitious premisses.

The beliefs of an ordinary man are a complex structure of very subtle materials, all compacted into a whole, not by logic, but by lack of logic; not by syllogism or sorites, but by the vague.

At least he believed so, and fancy had so much power over him, especially in such a situation that belief became conviction.

Belief in God and immortality is a condition of the last.

I am not sure that implicit belief, unquestioning obedience, are the qualities most esteemed by those illustrious personages on whom they are lavished; and I think that the rebel who sends in his adhesion on his own terms is sometimes treated with more courtesy and consideration than the stanch vassal whose fidelity remains unaffected by coldness, ingratitude, or neglect.

Strong beliefs are a strong rampart, the slaves of truth are free men, and true independence begins in the heart.

If such a belief is not fanaticism then have I read Webster's Unabridged Dictionary in vain.

He encouraged us, his children, to hold on our way; and sweetly expressed his belief that our love of good (in the degree we had it) had been a stimulus and help to him."

But if Faith is a spiritual and personal thing, if Belief given at random to mere high pretensions is an immorality, if Truth is not to be quite trampled down, nor Conscience to be wholly palsied in us,then what, I ask, was I to do, when I saw that the genealogy in the first chapter of Matthew is an erroneous copy of that in the Old Testament?

For instance, in a brief passage discussing 'The Relations of Belief and Will,' James pointed out that belief is essentially an attitude of the will towards an idea, adding that in order to acquire a belief 'we need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real' (ii., p. 321).

This belief is not without some justification, since it establishes in theory, at least, the foundations of government on a base sufficiently different from that which supposes all power to be the property of one, and that one to be the representative of the faultless and omnipotent Ruler of the Universe.

If Mr. Darwin believes that the events which he supposes to have occurred and the results we behold were undirected and undesigned, or if the physicist believes that the natural forces to which he refers phenomena are uncaused and undirected, no argument is needed to show that such belief is atheism.

Any slackness in finding out which beliefs are the true ones would have to be answered for before the throne of Almighty God, at the sure risk and peril of everlasting damnation.

Our conviction that God exists is according to reason; the belief that there are more gods than one, or that a body can be in two different places at the same time, contrary to reason; the former is a truth which can be demonstrated on rational grounds, the latter an assumption incompatible with our clear and distinct ideas.

“The religious beliefs of individuals are a field in which the authority of a government cannot be effective; compliance can only lead to hypocritical professions.

Truly, he must have found in mehot, eager, passionate in my determination to know, resolute not to profess belief while belief was absentbut very little of that meek, chastened, submissive spirit to which he was accustomed in the penitents wont to seek his counsel as their spiritual guide.