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faith |
Faith is a living
and unshakeable confidence,
a belief in the grace of God so assured that
a man would die a thousand deaths for its sake.
Martin Luther
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Grant
us a common faith
that we shall know bread
and peace--that
we shall
know justice and righteousness,
freedom and
security,
an equal opportunity and an equal
chance to do our best not only
in our own lands, but
throughout the
world. And in
that faith let us
march toward
the clean
world
our hands can make.
Stephen
Vincent Benet
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To have faith where
you cannot see; to be willing to work
on in the dark; to
be conscious of the fact that,
so long as you strive for
the best, there are
better things on the way, this in
itself is success. |
Katherine
Logan |
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Michael Ramsey
Reason is an action of the mind;
knowledge
is a possession of the mind;
but faith is an attitude of
the person.
It means you are prepared to stake yourself
on something being so. |
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Here's
the thing about faith: It gives us the strength to go on when
we want to give in. It gives us the courage to get up when we
want
to lie down. It gives us the power to make a way out of no way
when
there ain't no way. Just as love can't make you strong until
love has
made you weak, well, faith can't lift you up until life has knocked
you down. With faith or without it, we can't stop the
waves.
But with it, we don't need to. Because with it we can ride the
surf.
Patti
LaBelle |
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Don't try to hold God's
hand; let Him hold yours.
Let Him do the holding, and you
do the trusting.
Hammer William
Webb-Peploe |
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Faith is
the daring of the soul to go
farther than it can see.
William Newton Clarke |
Belief is a truth held
in the mind;
faith is a fire in the heart.
Joseph Fort Newton
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When
all our efforts have come to nothing, we naturally tend
to doubt
not just ourselves, but also whether God is just.
At those moments,
our only hope is to seek every evidence
that God is just,
by communing with the people we know
who are strongest in faith.
Bill
Moyers |
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Faith is the sense of
life, that sense by virtue of which humans
do not destroy themselves, but continue to live on.
It is the force
whereby we live.
Leo Tolstoy |
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Adams
Faith can
have a profound impact on health. It is a very personal
experience
of thought and surrender, which can comfort in
every situation. Faith is free
and available to all
people at all times. It only requires that one fully
embrace
possibility, and the ultimate value is in the
depth of the embrace. |
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It often seems easier
not to move on; even the muck and mire in which
we're
stuck seems less fearful and less challenging than the
unknown path ahead. Some people use faith as a
reason to remain stuck. They often say,
"I
have faith, so I'm waiting." But faith is not
complacent; faith is action.
You don't have faith
and wait. When you have faith, you move.
Complacency
actually shows lack of faith. When it's time to
move
in a new direction in order to progress, the right
people will come to us.
Betty Eadie |
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| I've found that the
people I most admire in this world are people of great
religious faith--people who recognize not only the
existence of God, but also the goodness and the Love and
the caring of God. These people walk in peace, and I find
that their lives aren't at all troubled by the things
that go on around them--they deal with those things, and
they deal with them effectively, not spending time
worrying "Why is this happening to poor me?"
I
must admit that my faith is often of the shaky kind, but
as time goes on and I learn more from these role models,
I grow to learn that my faith is what I make it. If I
have faith that God will provide, then I'll find ways to
keep on, no matter what the circumstances. If I don't
have faith in God, then my faith must ultimately fall in
people, and I know from experience that that kind of
faith will fall short as people let us down time and time
again. People have let me down; God never has. I see this
fact far too often in retrospect, but I'm working at
seeing it all day, every day. I know that working at
developing my faith is work that will develop my life in
a way that will make it beautiful and fulfilling.
I've learned of a few things that faith is
NOT: faith is not dogma, believing that there is
only one way to do things, and that's MY way. Faith
is not memorizing the Bible or the Talmud or the Koran
and spouting off passages to impress others and to keep
from having to think for ourselves. Faith is not
going to church every week and ignoring the message the
other 6 and 23/24 days of the week.
Faith is a calm knowledge that things will
be okay, because we were created to be just who we are,
and no matter how bad things seem, they will work out--and
the faithful person knows that they may take a bit longer
to work out than we want them to. Faith is knowing that
we are loved, just as we are, and that we are worth
loving, just as we are. That's hard for me to
accept sometimes, but I know in my heart that it's true,
and God gave us hearts so that we could know such things.
tdw
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Life without faith in something is
too narrow a space in which to live.
George Lancaster Spalding |
You
can do very little with faith,
but you can do nothing
without it.
Samuel
Butler |
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I think it is
impossible to explain faith.
It is like trying to
explain air,
which one cannot do by dividing it into its
component parts
and labeling them scientifically.
It
must be breathed to be understood.
Patrick White |
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All
the scholastic scaffolding falls, as a ruined edifice,
before a single word: faith.
Napoleon Bonaparte
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If we were logical, the future would be
bleak indeed.
But we are more than logical. We are human
beings,
and we have faith, and we have hope.
Jacques Cousteau
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I
never saw a moor;
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.
I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.
Emily Dickinson |
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I
would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded
by mystery
than live in a world so small that my mind
could comprehend it.
Henry Emerson Fosdick
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You do build in
darkness if you have faith. When the light returns you
have made of yourself a fortress which is impregnable to
certain kinds of trouble; you may even find yourself
needed and sought by others as a beacon in their
dark.
Olga Rosmanith |
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Faith
consists in believing when it is
beyond the power of
reason to believe.
It is not enough that a thing be possible
for it to be believed.
Voltaire
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Religious
faith is not a storm cellar to which men and women
can flee for refuge from the storms of life.
It is, instead,
an inner spiritual strength which enables them to face those
storms with hope and serenity.
Religious faith has
the miraculous power to lift ordinary human beings
to greatness in seasons of stress.
Sam J. Ervin, Jr.
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You
know that if you get in the water and have nothing to hold on to,
but try to behave as you would on dry land, you will drown.
But if,
on the other hand, you trust yourself to the water and let go,
you will float.
And this is exactly the situation of faith.
Alan Watts
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Doubts
are the messengers of the Living One to the honest.
They are the
first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be,
understood. . . . Doubts must precede every deeper assurance;
for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into
a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed.
George MacDonald
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Believing
is a daring adventure into the unseen, it is a radiant faith
in the unexplored, the undiscovered, the miracles of the future. . .
There is magic in the art of believing!
Believe!
Engrave these words
of the Master in your memory:
“All things are possible to those who believe.”
Believe!
Believe in the limitless supply of God’s goodness.
The universe
is filled with more wonders than you can imagine.
Wilferd A. Peterson
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Faith
is the gift of God and God will give it to those who ask for it.
You cannot argue or coax or reason or intellectualize and
get faith.
It is not something you learn.
Your teacher is simply a spiritual farmer who prepares
the soil for the seed which God drops into the fertile soil.
Faith in God enlarges our perspective.
It gives us an awareness that there is more to life than
the basic material one.
There is an invisible but real life which infuses us with
an indescribable peace of mind.
One reason why more people do not receive this gift is
because of pride.
How can we know God if we think we already know
everything and are filled with ourselves?
Esther Carls Dodgen |
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Faith is nothing at all tangible. . . . It is
simply believing in God;
and like sight, it is nothing apart from its object.
You might as well
shut your eyes and look inside, to see whether you have sight,
as to look inside to discover whether you have faith.
Hannah Whitall Smith
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Faith
is not something that is passive. Our faith requires a commitment
from us. If thoughts of lack come to mind, we counteract such
negativity
by counting our blessings and giving thanks for the abundance of
good things we have. The ability of our bodies to heal is enhanced
by our affirmations of life, which stimulate a positive response
from the life within our very cells.
unattributed
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I prefer to think of
faith, as Coleridge says of poetry, not as
the taking up of belief but as "the willing suspension of
disbelief". . . a willingness to be open, to explore, to
investigate.
Sharon Salzberg
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When
we plant a seed, we don't keep digging
up the soil to see if it's growing.
Susan
Santucci
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Why should we be willing to go by faith?
We do all things in this world
by faith in the word of others. By
faith only we know our position in the
world, our circumstances, our rights and privileges, our fortunes, our
parents, our brothers and sisters, our age, our mortality.
Why should Religion be an exception?
John Henry Newman
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