Quotes about faith (both the secular and spiritual kinds)

Faith is a prerequisite for the Newcreator. It awakens the superpower Transcend the Mundane, which in turn activates the superpowers Create the New and Enrich the World.

Faith is a precondition for activating the three superpowers

Faith can be religious or secular, and you can read the selected quotes through either lens.

Faith is a much-abused term, often derided in modern secular circles as the blind obedience to some arbitrary authority. But it has a wiser and more useful meaning: faith as a critical but curious mind’s readiness to adopt a reality model (even if provisionally) for which there is less than absolute, empirical proof. I propose that this kind of faith is the necessary adaptation by any rational mind to the challenges of life in the real world in which reality presents us with far too much, far too quickly. Events, personalities and relationships that carry embedded meaning and value are not the sorts of existents that can pass any rigid absolute-empirical-proof test.

All trust relationships contain a measure of faith. So when the term faith is used in this essay, it refers to reasonable faith, as in the faith that is necessary for a reasonable mind to operate in the real world. Faith in this sense requires courage. Reasonable faith is heuristic in the sense that it is only by means of growing trust that we can open ourselves to the full range of knowledge that the universe presents to us.

There is a faith path from Isaac Newton through Baruch Spinoza to Albert Einstein that has propelled the scientific enterprise: Each of these great minds was moved by the faith-based conviction that the universe has been endowed with an elegant underlying deign, so miraculously intelligible to human intelligence that scientists are justified in doggedly pursuing its secrets.

Jay B. Gaskill, The Dialogic Imperative

Faith represents an existential commitment of the heart, a way of life, a set of behaviors and emotional responses woven into every hour of everyday life — expressed through constant choices both when alone and in social situations.

Peter A. Georgescu, Faith isn’t irrational, but beliefs may be, on Huffington Post | Peter A. Georgescu is Chairman Emeritus of advertising agency network Young & Rubicam, Inc.

Jack: Please clarify the difference between trust and faith.

ChatGPT: Trust and faith are closely related concepts, but they differ in important ways, particularly in their basis and context.

Trust:

Basis: Trust is often based on experience, evidence, or the reliability of a person, institution, or system. It involves a belief that someone or something is dependable, consistent, and will act in a way that meets expectations.

Context: Trust is typically built over time through repeated interactions and observations. For example, you trust a friend because they have consistently supported you, or you trust a bank because it has a history of safeguarding your money.

Scope: Trust can be specific to certain areas. You might trust someone with your secrets but not with your finances.

Faith:

Basis: Faith often goes beyond evidence and is more about a strong belief or conviction in something that may not be fully provable or verifiable. It can exist even without direct evidence or in the face of uncertainty.

Context: Faith is frequently used in religious or spiritual contexts, where it represents a belief in a higher power, the unseen, or the unknown. However, it can also be applied in secular contexts, like having faith in the future or in a cause.

Scope: Faith is usually more general and encompassing. It’s about a broader belief system or trust in the overall goodness or purpose of something, even without specific evidence.

Summary:

Trust is grounded in past experiences and evidence, and it often develops over time through consistent interactions.

Faith is more about a deep-seated belief that often persists despite a lack of concrete evidence, and it’s more about a broader conviction or worldview.

Everything is faith, including faith in science. The extent that science can reduce the world into objective certainties is absurdly limited, and most of human life and experience will always remain faith-based.

Benedict Waterson, commenting on the UnHerd article Shroud of Turin shows that science only enhances mystery, by Esme Partridge

FAITH is the only agency through which the cosmic force of Infinite Intelligence can be harnessed and used by man.

Napoleon Hill — Think and Grow Rich, Chapter 2

Download pdf of entire book

Read about Infinite Intelligence

“With faith no larger than a grain of sand, a man can move mountains.”

If we substitute the word ‘intent’ for faith, the equation takes on a somewhat more visceral and actionable meaning.

Della Van Hise, The Energetic Marriage of Love & Intent

Choosing to believe or not believe in anything wholeheartedly is a question of faith.

T. Bone, commenting on the UnHerd arfticle The trouble with political Christianity by Alex O’Connor

Making a joke is always a risk and an act of faith. Comedy, says comedian Charlie Demers¹, is “like throwing a rock into a window and turning it into stain glass”. Something is broken: a placid surface, an ideal, a politeness. But the breaking of a social nicety is only the prequel to a more beautiful transformation. We laugh. Laughing makes us feel better. We have had faith in others. That faith creates a connection.

1. Typo corrected.

Marilyn Simon, Ridicule is nothing to be scared of, on UnHerd website

I began the revolution with 82 men. If I had to do it again, I would do it with 10 or 15 and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and a plan of action.

Fidel Castro, speaking about his seizure of power in Cuba in 1959 | Cited in The Guardian (view)

Faith is not something we find, it is bestowed upon us as a consolatory gift.

Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files | View source

There is no true faith without the act.
There is no true act without faith.

Talking with Angels, Dialogue 30

We know more than we can tell. We believe more than we can.

Michael Polanyi

DO NOT BELIEVE IN THE DIVINE!
LIVE THE DIVINE!

Talking with Angels, Dialogue 69

In this skeptical age we, anyway, dwell far too much on the intellectual side of faith. shraddha (Pali: saddha) the word we render as “faith,” is etymologically akin to Latin cor, “the heart,” and faith is far more a matter of the heart than of the intellect.

Edward Conze, The Way of Wisdom: The Five Spiritual Faculties

Faith is an assent to dogmas which are not substantiated by immediately available direct factual evidence. To be a matter of faith, a belief must go beyond the available evidence and the believer must be willing and ready to fill up the gaps in the evidence with an attitude of patient and trusting acceptance. Faith, taken in this sense, has two opposites, i.e., a dull unawareness of the things which are worth believing in, and doubt or perplexity. In any kind of religion some assumptions are taken on trust and accepted on the authority of scriptures or teachers.

Generally speaking, faith is, however, regarded as only a preliminary step, as a merely provisional state. In due course direct spiritual awareness will know that which faith took on trust, and longed to know: “Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face².” Much time must usually elapse before the virtue of wisdom has become strong enough to support a vigorous insight into the true nature of reality. Until then quite a number of doctrinal points must be taken on faith.

Edward Conze, The Way of Wisdom: The Five Spiritual Faculties

2. Source: 1 Corinthians 13:12, Holy Bible, King James Version

CREATED WORLD – AND CREATING WORLD.
BETWEEN THEM: THE ABYSS.

Look at yourself: You are the bridge.
You cannot wish for creative rays,
you cannot long to be the bridge,
for to be the bridge is given to you.
The bridge is not wishing – but faith.

Talking with Angels, Dialogue with Gitta, Friday October 29, 1943

We’re wired for faith, so as we kill the old gods, we create new ones to replace them. New Atheism gave rise to Atheism+, a quasi-religion dedicated to “social justice”. In the spiritual void left by receding religion, many now worship “wokeness”, with a new Original Sin (whiteness) and Holy Trinity (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion).

Gurwinder, 30 Useful Principles (Autumn 2023) on Substack

What you may not understand is: the whole game you have been playing is also based on faith. You have had faith in the rational. We are living in a society which is a temple dedicated to the rational man.

Ram Dass, Be Here Now

If we are to move from relating to the world as fragmented parts to systemic wholes, we must change our basic way of thinking.

Not just what we think, but how we think. The change is:

from abstract and symbolic conception…to acute and profound observation;

from metaphorical thinking…to original and direct inquiry;

from the habit of not looking freshly…to the discipline of finely tuned investigation; and

from reliance on concepts to bring a sense of order to the world…to an open quest to see what’s really there, even if it makes us feel uncomfortable, unsure, insecure, and mystified.

To make this shift, we must move from presuming to know before we look, to looking freshly without the limitation of a concept, metaphor, theory, or history of previous experiences.

Another way to say this is: start with nothing, e.g., without an idea of what we might find.

Robert Fritz, in Reflections, The SoL Journal of Knowledge, Learning and Change, Vol. 5, Number 7 (no longer available online)

Gitta Mallasz: How can I know that I join spirit and matter?

Gitta’s angel: By the fact that you recognize it afterwards.

Talking with Angels, Dialogue 32

Faith is a state of openness or trust.

To have faith is like when you trust yourself to the water. You don’t grab hold of the water when you swim, because if you do you will become stiff and tight in the water, and sink. You have to relax, and the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging, and holding on.

In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.

Alan Watts

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my rational , and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason — Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

The poet John Keats, in a letter to his brothers George and Thomas | View letter (pdf)

The fruit of faith is love.

Mother Teresa

Faith has its etymological roots in the Greek pistis: trust, commitment, loyalty, engagement.

Brian Davis, cited by Peter A. Georgescu in Faith isn’t irrational, but beliefs may be, on Huffington Post | Peter A. Georgescu is Chairman Emeritus of advertising agency network Young & Rubicam, Inc., owned by WPP

Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.

Khalil Gibran

Faith is taking the first step, even when you don’t see the whole staircase.

Martin Luther King

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

Voltaire

Sorcerers call the ability to manipulate their mental attachments ‘believing without believing’. They have perfected that art to the point where they can identify sincerely with any idea. They live it, love it, and discard it without remorse if it comes to that.

Carlos Castaneda, cited in Further Conversations with the Nagual (pdf; 117 pages), by Armando Torres

Doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith.

Dieter F. Uchtdorf

The sense of finitude—the sense of the ultimate fragility of everything we care about—is at the heart of what I call secular faith. To have secular faith is to be devoted to a life that will end, to be dedicated to projects that can fail or break down….I will show how secular faith expresses itself in the ways we mourn our loved ones, make commitments, and care about a sustainable world. I call it secular faith because it is devoted to a life that is bounded by time…To be finite means primarily two things: to be dependent on others and to live in relation to death. I am finite because I will die. Likewise, the projects to which I am devoted are finite because they live only through the efforts of those who are committed to them and will cease to be if they are abandoned…I call it secular faith, since the object of devotion does not exist independently of those who believe in its importance and who keep it alive through their fidelity…Secular faith is committed to persons and projects that may be lost: to make them live on for the future. Far from being resigned to death, a secular faith seeks to postpone death and improve the conditions of life…The commitment to living on does not express an aspiration to live forever but to live longer and live better, not to overcome death but to extend the duration and improve the quality of a form of life.

Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, cited by Marty Bankson here

[Faith is] the unshakable knowing of the heart when nothing makes sense to the mind. Optimism is an expression of faith in action.

Faith is the breath of God that animates our soul. We cannot see it, we can only feel it — when we pay attention. Doubt is the uncertainty that our source of spiritual power will be available to us in times of misfortune, pain, and illness. It is normal to experience spiritual doubt. In fact, times of doubt can lead to our greatest transformative moments and is the ‘can opener’ to faith.

The future is unknowable and therefore brings with it a feeling of uncertainty. It is faith that teaches us to contemplate the invisible which is beyond our grasp; not through the power of knowledge.

Our faith connects the past to the future and gives us a kind of spiritual gravity. It reassures us that God is in the future just as in the present and past. All that is unknowable is held within God and that includes us, our families, friends, and all our collective well being; yesterday, today, and tomorrow in all ways.

Worry is a flag waving where faith is waiting to enter. Fall out of your mindsets and have confidence your heart will catch you. There are no accidental experiences or chance inner states. The spiritual dimensions of life are real, more real in fact than what we call life on this earth. Faith is the unifying principle that weaves together all experiences.

Kathy Tyler, InnerLinks

Lili: Does everyone have an angel, an ‘inner teacher’?

Lili’s angel: No. We consist of faith — purely of faith.
To those who have faith, who believe — we are.
And faith is the force of the divine.
If you believe that I have a voice … I can speak.
If you do not believe it … I am mute.
If you believe that I am you … I become you.
Believe in the high!
You can also believe in the low.
Today devils clamor and Angels are silent.
But through your belief we descend.
For belief is the bridge.

Talking with Angels, Dialogue 23