Pastoral Resources

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Being, belief and reason are pure relations, which cannot be dealt with absolutely, and are not things but pure scholastic concepts, signs for understanding, not for worshipping, aids to awaken our attention, not to fetter it.

Faith is not belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active.

A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate.

And I know that the younger generation is doing things that are so ingenious. And for them it's not a matter of a political belief or an environmental stance. It's really just common sense.

The fifties - they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment and its power to satisfy.

After 12 years, the old butterflies came back. Well, I guess at my age you call them moths.

Belief in the absence of illusions is itself an illusion.

There are people who are very highly paid to cover the truth and who will protect their clients.

Belief is thought at rest.

There has to be some limit to what lawyers can take from their clients. Otherwise, cagey attorneys end up with the lion's share of the settlement and the victims end up with little more than scraps.

Given the fact that most religions share basic values, it is most unfortunate that religious people can be played off against each other so easily. One possible reason for this may be that people do not know enough about other people's beliefs.

I kill flies, I eat meat, you know, whatever.

Time flies over us, but leaves it shadow behind.

To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.

There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry toward religious beliefs... begins.

Broad tolerance in the matter of beliefs is necessarily a part of the new ethics.

It's an indulgence to sit in a room and discuss your beliefs as if they were a juicy piece of gossip.

Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.

I had seen so many injustices done in the court by well-meaning people. I had lost fourteen clients to gang violence in only seven years. I was angry at a system I thought had failed my clients, and I was part of it.