We Believed In You Quotes & Sayings

In a society so estranged from animals as ours, we often fail to credit them with any form of language. If we do, it comes under the heading of communication rather than speech. And yet, the great silence we have imposed on the rest of life contains innumerable forms of expression. Where does our own language come from but this unfathomed store that characterizes innumerable species?
We are now more than halfway removed from what the unwritten word meant to our ancestors, who believed in the original, primal word behind all manifestations of the spirit. You sang because you were answered. The answers come from life around you. Prayers, chants, and songs were also responses to the elements, to the wind, the sun and stars, the Great Mystery behind them. Life on earth springs from a collateral magic that we rarely consult. We avoid the unknown as if we were afraid that contact would lower our sense of self-esteem. — John Hay

Means of knowing. I am certain of this, for I have witnessed it myself. When I swung myself into the fire as a young man, I saw that the storehouses of the human mind are rarely ever fully opened. When we open them, nothing remains unrevealed. When we cease all argument and debate - both internal and external - our true questions can be heard and answered. That is the powerful mover. That is the book of nature, written neither in Greek nor in Latin. That is the gathering of magic, and it is a gathering that, I have always believed and wished, can be shared." "You speak in riddles," Alma said. "And you speak too much," Ambrose replied. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Son, quite aside from my own conditioned reflex against munching a roast haunch of - well, you, for example - quite aside from that trained-in emotional prejudice, for coldly practical reasons I regard our taboo against cannibalism as an excellent idea . . . because we are not civilized." "Huh?" "Obvious. If we didn't have a tribal taboo about the matter so strong that you honestly believed it was an instinct, I can think of a long list of people I wouldn't trust with my back turned, not with the price of beef what it is today. Eh? — Robert A. Heinlein

I want you to know that I remember the conversations we had in Year Twelve, when you told me you wanted to do a cultural studies degree because you believed in trade, not aid, and you believed that the only way was to ask the questions and listen to the needs of the people and I remember thinking that exact moment, I want to change the world with her. And I remember feeling that again in Georgie's attic. That's a pretty powerful gift you have there, Ms. Finke. To make the laziest guy around want to change the world with you. So next time you remember standing in your bedroom naked, know that it is the most amazing view from any angle, especially the one where we get to see inside.
Love always,
Always,
Tom — Melina Marchetta

Every experience I'd ever had with a guy had changed me in some way. Whether it was a single idea, or an altered view, I was never quite the same girl after as I had been before. I firmly believed that wasn't a bad thing, either. The only way we could truly know what we wanted in a partner was to figure out the things we didn't want. Process of elimination, I supposed, but you risked losing pieces of your heart along the way. — J. Sterling

My second point, in fact, was something the convicts had taught me. They all believed that the White people who insisted that it was their Constitutional right to keep military weapons in their homes all looked forward to the day when they could shot Americans who didn't have what they had, who didn't look like their friends and relatives, in a sort of open-air shooting gallery we used to call in Vietnam a "Free Fire Zone." You could shoot anything that moved, for the good of the greater society, which was always someplace far away, like Paradise. — Kurt Vonnegut

I asked her if she believed you could ever truly understand another culture. I told her the longer I stayed, the more asinine the attempt seemed, and that what I'd become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilisation, right and wrong. — Lily King

Those who created this country chose freedom. With all of its dangers. And do you know the riskiest part of that choice they made? They actually believed that we could be trusted to make up our own minds in the whirl of differing ideas. That we could be trusted to remain free, even when there were very, very seductive voices - taking advantage of our freedom of speech - who were trying to turn this country into the kind of place where the government could tell you what you can and cannot do. — Nat Hentoff

I feel like that's a way people can change the way music is - to be guided by someone they believe in and trust. Larson and I really believed in each other. It was like brother/sister, father/daughter, we were laughing and yelling, that's how it is when you make an album! Essentially the trust was there and I got something great. — Laura Bell Bundy

You can't leave the show," King told Nichols. "We are there because you are there." Black people have been imagined in the future, he continued, emphasizing to the actress how important and ground breaking a fact that was. Furthermore, he told her, he had studied the Starfleet's command structure and believed that it mirrored that of the US Air Force, making Uhura --- a black woman! --- fourth in command of the ship. — Margot Lee Shetterly

It's not that everything needs to have substance, but when nothing does then you know we're living in a bankrupt society, an artistically bankrupt society, and that's not okay. I think there's room for forms of entertainment that are very light and frivolous and fun, but when those forms of entertainment, forms of "art" if you will, become presented as something more than that, and are believed to be something more than that, then we've got a lot of problems. — Davey Havok

An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Blake, Cole, and I have been family for each other, because the ones we started with were for crap. Why they let me in, I still don't know. But because they did, I believed I was worth more than I would have otherwise." He nodded and gathered his thoughts for a moment.
"Blake's company made me want to hug trees and hear music. Cole's company made me want to try harder to be a better person. I never imagined that anyone could love either of these men enough for me to let them go."
"But I didn't know about the McHugh girls. Their love is fiercer than guns. More powerful than fistfuls of money. I can walk away because of them. Officer McHugh? I want to thank you again for letting me see this through. I know my peace of mind is far from your concern, but I appreciate it anyway."
Beckett held his glass up high. "To my brothers. They've finally gotten the lives they deserve. — Debra Anastasia

... the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea ... . It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and thus compelling words to a shape ... .
You have not finished with it because you have read it, any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up and alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered. So we look back upon essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm, knowing that, come September or May, we shall sit down with them and talk. — Virginia Woolf

When we get out of this, let's go somewhere again. Me and you."
The tension in her chest loosened, relief washing over her. He'd said when. Even in his beaten condition, he believed in whens and not ifs. She never should have doubted his strength.
"Where do you want to go?" she asked.
His smile was faint and lopsided. "Doesn't matter . . . I just want to spend time alone with you."
Aria wanted exactly the same thing. And she ached to see him smile - really smile - so she said, "And this isn't good enough for you? — Veronica Rossi

It took a couple of months before we were both convinced there were no rules about sexual activities in Hell and our spouses were not going to show up out of the blue. It was hard to start a sexual relationship in circumstances of such bizarre uncertainty, especially for an active Mormon and a good Christian, both lost in a Zoroastrian Hell. We were like virgin newlyweds. All my life I'd been raised to believe this kind of thing was wrong. All my life I had lived with a strong sense of morality. How do you give it up? How do you do things you thought you'd never do? Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives? It was difficult. So tricky to untangle. — Steven L. Peck

Among the greatest tragedies is a person who believes that they aren't meant to win--by winning I mean find their purpose, passion and joy in life.
They believe that other people have better DNA or happiness genes or something, but that they themselves are missing a critical chromosome.
This is a lie and it is begging to be un-believed.
For the moment we know the truth about ourselves, we can take both responsibility for our own lives and inspired action to create exactly the life which is our birthright.
In other words, you were meant to win. You were created for joy. — Jacob Nordby

Have you ever seen stars like this? You can't have. They don't make them like this anywhere in the world." Above our heads, the sky was a brimming treasure box. Some of the stars seemed to want to pull free and leap down onto my shoulders - and though these were the only ones I had ever known, I believed Denys when he said they were the finest. I thought I might believe anything he said, in fact, even though we had just met. He had that in him. — Paula McLain

My wife believes in it not one whit, but is scrupulous in its observance," said Charles Leiden, sipping from his glass. "A curious state of affairs, don't you think? We are kosher, Fermi probably attends synagogue, Albert believed in Spinoza's God and helped raise money for Israel, Teller may end up teaching in a Jewish parochial school one day, Szilard has the soul of a Jewish prophet. And we tinker with light and atomic bombs, with the energy of the universe. Do you wonder that the world doesn't know what to make of its Jews? No one is on more familiar terms with the heart of the insanity in the universe than is the Jew, and no one is more frenetic and untidy in the search for the an answer. — Chaim Potok

And just as He appeared before the holy Apostles in true flesh, so now He has us see Him in the Sacred Bread. Looking at Him with the eyes of their flesh, they saw only His Flesh, but regarding Him with the eyes of the spirit, they believed that He was God. In like manner, as we see bread and wine with our bodily eyes, let us see and believe firmly that it is His Most Holy Body and Blood, True and Living.For in this way our Lord is ever present among those who believe in him, according to what He said: "Behold, I am with you all days even to the consummation of the world." — Francis Of Assisi

Do you think I care if Aslan doomes me to death?" said the King. "That would be nothing, nothing at all. Would it not be better to be dead than to have this horrible fear that Aslan has come and is not like the Aslan we have believed in and longed for? It is as if the sun rose one day and were a black sun. — C.S. Lewis

We live in our heads. You know, we are these vast things that just go in and in forever, and not only that but we comprise all of the things that we imagine, we comprise all of the things we've dreamed, we comprise the things that we've believed and we comprise the things that we used to believe but we manage no longer to believe in. — Neil Gaiman

I was the Fool and the Fool was me. He was the Catalyst and so was I. We were two halves of a whole, sundered and come together again. For an instant I knew him in his entirety, complete and magical, and then he was pulling apart from me, laughing, a bubble inside me, separate and unknowable, yet joined to me. "You do love me !" I was incredulous. He had never truly believed it before. "Before, it was words. I always feared it war born of pity. But you are truly my friend. This is knowing. This is feeling what you feel for me. So this is the Skill". For a moment he reveled in simple recognition. — Robin Hobb

I didn't believe you when you said there was a red statue that read "LOVE," with the LO stacked on top of the VE. LO VE It sounded like something out of one of the old fairy tales you used to tell me when I was a little girl. I thought you were kidding when you said people in the past believed in love so much that they made statues to celebrate it, so they wouldn't forget to LOVE ... well, that seemed kind of ridiculous - but when we dove down and you shined the thermal lantern, and it turned out to be true, I felt like there were so many possibilities in the world - like I'm only beginning to discover what's achievable. Maybe I will find a pure love - like what you and Mom have. — Matthew Quick

Is there more that we can discern about the nature and content of the unity for which Jesus prayed? One essential element of this unity has already emerged from our considerations thus far: it depends on faith in God and in the one whom he sent: Jesus Christ. The unity of the future Church therefore rests on the faith that Peter proclaimed in the name of the Twelve in the synagogue at Capernaum, after other disciples had turned away: "We have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God" (Jn 6:69). This — Pope Benedict XVI

I know we are miles and miles away from one another, but I always believed that as long as our souls are connected to each other, the flame of our love will burn forever. Only souls can resist death, our physical connection is meaningless ... you always stayed in me and me in you, I never lose my hug I admit sweetie . I appreciate and admire my hug. — Abdul'Rauf Hashmi

I've never believed protectionism of that kind will lead us anywhere. I think you can have certain specific rules for engaging with India.. for example, not allowing mineral resources to be taken out of the country.. but there is not a shred of doubt in my mind that when you open an economy you should do it in totality. Foreign investment adds a sense of competition; we should see this as a wake-up call to modernise and upgrade. Companies that do not will undoubtedly die. — Ratan Tata

You probably can't imagine there being a glory in your life, let alone one that the Enemy fears. But remember
things are not what they seem. We are not what we seem. You probably believed that your heart was bad too. I pray that fog of poison gas from the pit of hell is fading away in the wind of God's truth. And there is more. Not only does Christ say to you that your heart is good, he invites you now out of the shadows to unveil your glory. You have a role you never dreamed of having ... — John Eldredge

We shouldn't expect popularity. What should we expect? Paul gave us the list: affliction, crushing, persecution, being knocked flat, and always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus. That doesn't describe some mystical asceticism; it simply means that He was always on the brink of death, always ready to die, always being pursued by some who were plotting death. He knew that every day He awakened could be the day He died. Death was working in Him as a daily experience, a constant anticipation. In His mind, He had to live daily through His own funeral because He could die any time. Yet this great truth never changed: "I believed and therefore I spoke." That's it, Christian. You believe, and you speak. — John F. MacArthur Jr.

I hadn't felt such disgust for a boy since the early days, when they'd tease girls on the playground, kicking us and throwing gravel and raising their voices in high screechy mockery. "They do that because they like you," all the adults said, grinning like pumpkins. We believed them, back then. Back then we thought it was true, and we were drawn toward all that meanness because it meant we were special, let them kick us, let them like us. We liked them back. But now it was turning out that our first instincts were right. Boys weren't mean because they liked you; it was because they were mean. — Daniel Handler

(You do not have to be shamed in my closeness. Family are the people who must never make you feel ashamed.)
(You are wrong. Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you are deserving of shame.)
(And you are deserving of shame?)
(I am. I am trying to tell you.) 'We were stupid,' he said, 'because we believed in things.'
'Why is this stupid?'
'Because there are not things to believe in.'
(Love?)
(There is no love. Only the end of love.)
(Goodness?)
(Do not be a fool.)
(God?)
(If God exists, He is not to be believed in.) — Jonathan Safran Foer

You see, this people [Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, etc.] simply believed that God existed in the situation they were faced with, and they trusted Him rather than themselves. The result? God said, "That pleases Me." They were men and women just like you and I, which is the most encouraging part of all. We don't find golden haloes, or perfect backgrounds, or sinless lives, we just find people. People who failed, who struggled, who doubted, who experienced hard times and low times in which their faith was eclipsed by doubt. But their lives were basically characterized by faith. — Charles R. Swindoll

Because who knows? Who knows anything? Who knows who's pulling the strings? Or what is? Or how? Who knows if destiny is just how you tell yourself the story of your life? Another son might not have heard his mother's last words as a prophecy but as drug-induced gibberish, forgotten soon after. Another girl might not have told herself a love story about a drawing her brother made. Who knows if Grandma really thought the first daffodils of spring were lucky or if she just wanted to go on walks with me through the woods? Who knows if she even believed in her bible at all or if she just preferred a world where hope and creativity and faith trump reason? who knows if there are ghosts (sorry, Grandma) or just the living, breathing memories of your loved ones, inside you, speaking to you, trying to get your attention by any means necessary? Who knows where the hell Ralph is? (Sorry, Oscar.) No one knows.
SO we grapple with the mysteries, each in our own way. — Jandy Nelson

and were greatly distressed that their only son must be taken from them. We felt a spirit of prayer for him, and earnestly besought the Lord to spare his life. We believed that he would get well, although to all appearances there was no possibility of his recovery. It was a powerful season. My husband raised him in his arms, and exclaimed, 'You will not die, but live!' We believed that God would be glorified in his recovery. We left Dartmouth, and were absent about eight days. When we returned, the sick boy came out to meet us. He had gained four pounds in flesh. We found the household rejoicing in God for his wonderful work. — James White

People will tell you it was Vietnam brought this country to its knees. But I never believed that. It was already in bad shape. Vietnam was just the icin on the cake. We didn't have nothin to give to em to take over there. If we'd sent em without rifles I dont know as they'd of been all that much worse off. You can't go to war like that. You cant go to war without God. I dont know what is goin to happen when the next one comes. I surely dont. — Cormac McCarthy

So turn off the television - in fact, why don't you turn off all the lights except for the one over your favorite chair? - and we'll talk about vampires here in the dim. I think I can make you believe in them, because while I was working on this book, I believed in them myself. — Stephen King

I love you," I whispered brokenly against his lips. Tears leaked out at the corners of my eyes. He pushed the hair off my face, clearing me for his view. Our noses touched, we were so close. His fingers trailed over my face, drying the tears from my cheeks as quickly as they fell.
"Don't cry, baby. I love you. I love you, Emerson." He pronounced the words slowly, like he was savoring them. Or maybe he just wanted me to absorb them. Maybe he wanted them to sink in so that I would feel them as clearly and completely as I felt his hands on my face, his lips against mine ... his heartbeat vibrating from his chest into my body.
So that I would believe in them. Believe in him.
And I did. I felt them. I believed in them.
I believed in us. — Sophie Jordan

( ... ) and as I sat in bed thinking of the many good things that had to happen all over the world in order to even out and nullify the horrible bad things that had happened to Mom and me, I started to see why Mom believed in the Good Luck of Right Now. Believing - or maybe even pretending - made you feel better about what had happened, regardless of what was true and what wasn't.
And what is reality, if it isn't how we feel about things?
what else matters at the end of the day when we lie in bed alone with our thoughts?
and isn't it true, statistically speaking - regardless of whether we believe in luck or not - that good and bad must happen simultaneously all over the world? — Matthew Quick

Right at that moment it was as if we were the only two people left in the world. And I don't mean that to sound corny; it just honestly did. The only sounds were the droning crickets and chip-chips of the bats, the farawy wind against the sand, and the occasional distant yowl of a dingo. There were no car horns.No trains. No jack-hammers. No lawnmowers No planes. No sirens. No alarms. No anything human. If you'd told me that you'd saved me from a nuclear holocaust, I might have believed you. — Lucy Christopher

You always believed we could survive in the outside world. I'm doing everything I can to give at least some of us a chance of not only surviving but truly living. — Anne Bishop

Dragons and Afterlife .. I don't see any difference between both of them, we didn't see neither the dragons nor afterlife, we just heard about them and both of them are superstitions with no scientific or logical evidence .. But the only reason you believe in afterlife unlike dragons is that you've been taught to believe in it from your birthday. now if they taught you to believe in dragons and if it were mentioned in your Bible or your holy book you would have believed in it .. herein lies the danger of religions, you can believe something exists without any evidence .. and that's why you should only follow science and let go of your religious teachings — Sherif Gaber

I think that at that time none of us quite believed in the Time Machine. The fact is, the Time Traveler was one of those men who are too clever to be believed: you never felt that you saw all round him; you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness. Had Filby shown the model and explained the matter in the Time Traveller's words, we should have shown him far less skepticism. For we should have perceived his motives; a pork butcher could understand Filby. — H.G.Wells

(If God wills it) ... the number of angels ... may be infinite ... Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed. Once upon a time, atoms did not exist. There was no Dalton, no Rutherford. Albert Einstein was nothing more than a theorist, but you only have to look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to know that things invisible exist and bear great power. The power to destroy. Or the power to create ... Atoms and angels, reason and faith ... One without the other is less than half as strong and can be a danger to our vitality. Reason is subject to the tests of logic and observable, demonstrable phenomena. Faith is tested by our desire and will. One cannot see faith, just as one cannot pour out hope or love from a beaker. Self-sacrifice and devotion escape the strongest microscope, but such qualities of spirit can be shown and known by us all ... And so with God's messengers, more believed than seen, more felt than touched, our angel's exist in open hearts, if we have but faith. — Keith Donohue

Social media is basically standing at a bucket filled with other people's vomit and you suck the vomit through a straw, and gag and wince at the unbearable taste of other people's vomit. Yet strangely we continue to suck through the straw as if we've never tasted such lovely vomit. And then before you know it you're old and you're grey. And that's the end of you. A lonely death. Your gravestone is marked with the six saddest words:

Social Media Drained My Soul Away

And they all mourn your loss at a budget funeral service while updating their social media statuses on mobile phones apps. And in years to come nobody remembers any of your updates; even those updates that you deep-down believed were going to bring about world peace. The Digital Age is more disposable than nappies and just as full of shit. — Rupert Dreyfus

She waited, thinking you were different from those who used and betrayed her. She believed you would find her, come charging to her rescue. That belief was as misplaced as the monsters we faced were deadly. The day came she finally lost her faith in you, and I was there as I've always been there when she needed me. — Karen Marie Moning

Hive Queen: So many of your people are becoming Christians. Believing in the god these humans brought with them.
Human: You don't believe in God?
Hive Queen: The question never came up. We have always remembered how we began.
Human: You evolved. We were created.
Hive Queen: By a virus.
Human: By a virus that God created in order to create us.
Hive Queen: So you, too, are a believer.
Human: I understand belief.
Hive Queen: No - you desire belief.
Human: I desire it enough to act as if I believed. Maybe that's what faith is.
Hive Queen: Or deliberate insanity. — Orson Scott Card

It doesn't matter that you didn't believe in us," said Mr. Ibis. "We believed in you. — Neil Gaiman

My upbringing was faith-based, but we believed you should love all others as you want to be loved, because everyone should be treated equally. That's helped me have an understanding of people on different journeys and in different walks of life. At the end of the day, we're all the same, because we all want to be loved. — Nick Jonas

As if any one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.'
'But all the same,' insisted the Savage, 'it is natural to believe in God when you're alone - quite alone, in the night, thinking about death ... '
'But people are never alone now,' said Mustapha Mond. 'We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it's almost impossible for them to ever to have it. — Aldous Huxley

I'm a Mormon, but I share your faith in the atonement of the savior, Jesus Christ. In my faith, we have a guy who gave his life for what he believed in. You don't have to believe it; I'm not asking you to. I'm asking you, "What is it that you believe? Are you willing to give your life?" — Glenn Beck

I don't want to go through it all again. All that time without you, always waiting, my foolish optimism that someday it would be different-"
"Your optimism was justified! Look at me. Look at us! This is different. I know it is, Daniel. I saw us in Helston and Tibet and Tahiti. We were in love, sure, but it was nothing like what we have now."
They'd dropped back farther, out of earshot of the others. They were just Luce and Daniel, two lovers talking in the sky. "I'm still here," she said. "I'm here because you believed in us. You believed in me."
"I did-I do believe in you."
"I believe in you, too." She heard a smile enter her voice. "I always have."
They were not going to fail. — Lauren Kate

GRINGOTTS BREAK-IN LATEST
Investigations continue into the break-in at Gringotts on 31 July, widely believed to be the work of dark wizards or witches unknown. Gringotts' goblins today insisted that nothing had been taken. The vault that was searched had in fact been emptied the same day. 'But we're not telling you what was in there, so keep your noses out if you know what's good for you,' said a Gringotts spokesgoblin this afternoon. — J.K. Rowling

I fell, as they say. Into love. I practiced saying it, first to myself, in my head. I believed in it. I did. I thought love and I bought it completely. I was excited by my belief but was careful not to let this excitement influence or manipulate the belief in any way. The belief had to be pure. So I said it to her, I love you, and she said it back. And this was our contract. We treated the words seriously and respected that they came with implications. — Kyle Beachy

But I talk about my life anyway because if, on the one hand, hardly anything could be less important, on the other hand, hardly anything could be more important. My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours. Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but spiritually. — Frederick Buechner

I've always believed in a higher power. You can call it God, you can call it Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, Allah, I don't care. I really believe we are all a part of God. — Olivia Hussey

Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.
There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this. — Margaret Atwood

Every generation before us believed, like Snickers, that it had things figured out. We now know that every generation before us was wrong about a lot of it. Is it likely that you were born at the tipping point of history, in which humans know enough about reality to say we understand it? This is another case where humility is your friend. — Scott Adams

Chess worked for a wholesale grocery firm. He had thought of being a history teacher, but his father had persuaded him that teaching was no way to support a wife and get on in the world. His father had helped him get this job but told him that once he got in he was not to expect any favors. He didn't. He left the house before it was light, during this first winter of our marriage, and came home after dark. He worked hard, not asking that the work he did fit in with any interests he might have had or have any purpose to it that he might have once honored. No purpose except to carry us both toward that life of lawnmowers and freezers which we believed we had no mind for. I might marvel at his submission, if I thought about it. His cheerful, you might say gallant, submission.
But then, I thought, it's what men do. — Alice Munro

Writing poetry, we live among the wild beasts, and when we touch a man, the stuff of someone in whom we believed, and he goes to pieces like a rotten pie, you ... gather together whatever can be salvaged, while I cup my hands around the live coal of life. — Pablo Neruda

Heavenly Father, we thank You for preserving Jayden's life," Telford prayed. "Heal him physically and heal him spiritually as well. Jayden's a good child, but his heart is prone to wander. Even though he hasn't yet believed in You, we know that He's Yours. Help us as his friends and family to help him through his confusion and pain. However, we can't save him - only You can do that, and so we pray that You'll open his eyes and heart to Your love. Have him to — Juliette Duncan

Levi," Maria called. "Come back. We're not finished yet."
He paused
"What, Maria?"
"You asked me what I believe in? I believed in you."
He nodded his head sadly. "Yes, you did. And before you met me, you believed in nothing. But that's the thing with belief, Maria. It's easy to believe in something when it doesn't require anything from you. It's much harder, though, when the object of your belief requires something of you or asks for something you don't want to give. That's when real belief occurs. — Brian Keene

Part of me tingled with excitement. This was it. I was finally going to be with Will. We were going to make love for the first time - after all this time.
But the voices of doubt mocked me. What do you think you're doing? You can't give yourself to him - you've already been had! And by his father.
I reached the landing of the stairs and squeezed my eyes shut, desperately battling the raging war in my mind. If I'm with Will, it can erase the past. Our love is powerful enough to take the rape away. I truly believed I could delude myself into accepting he was my first - that what happened in Coach T's office was false. Yes, once we were together, it would change.
Melanie — Katie Ashley

I have not been one who believed in the global warming. But I tell you, they are making a convert out of me as these blistering summers. They have broken heat records in a number of cities already this year and broken all-time records and it is getting hotter and the ice caps are melting and there is a build up of carbon dioxide in the air. We really need to address the burning of fossil fuels. — Pat Robertson

What we believe affects our choices, our actions, and subsequently, our lives. The Greeks believed in thier gods, and this belief affected everything else. History is written according to what men believe, whether or not it's true. As the writer of your own history, what you believe influences the paths you take. Do you believe in something that may be a myth? I'm not talking about religious beliefs, per se. I'm talking about things you've told yourself, or things you've been told for so long that you just assume that they are true. — Amy Harmon

We're all Running People, as the Tarahumara have always known. But the American approach
ugh. Rotten at its core. It was too artificial and grabby, Vigil believed, too much about getting stuff and getting it now: medals, Nike deals, a cute butt. It wasn't art; it was business, a hard-nosed quid pro quo. No wonder so many people hated running; if you thought it was only a means to an end
an investment in becoming faster, skinnier, richer
then why stick with it if you weren't getting enough quo for your quid? — Christopher McDougall

He knows I have a soft spot for RLS and not just because he was sick or because we have the same initials but because there's something impossibly romantic about him and because before he started writing Treasure Island he first drew a map of an unknown island and because he believed in invisible places and was one of the last writers to know what the word adventure means. I could give you a hundred reasons why RLS is The Man. Look in his The Art of Writing (Book 683, Chatto & Windus, London) where he says that no living people have had the influence on him as strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. Or when he says his greatest friend is D'Artagnan from The Three Musketeers (Book 5, Regent Classics, London). RLS said: 'When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge, I take them like opium.' And when you read Treasure Island you feel you are casting off. That's the thing. You are casting off and leaving behind the ordinary dullness of the world. — Niall Williams

You know, it's very clear, as one looks back on history again of the Cold War that, following the crisis in Cuba, following the Khrushchev - beating down of Jack Kennedy in Vienna, that President Kennedy believed that we had to join the battle for the Third World, and the next crisis that developed in that regards was Vietnam. — Alexander Haig

But the truly ambitious teams find relief in honesty when they've lost, because it's the diagnostic tool that leads to a solution - here's what we did wrong and let's fix it, so we don't ever have to feel this way again. Great teams explain their failure; they don't excuse it. Then they pay a visit to Charles Atlas and get stronger. When you explain a loss aloud, it's no longer a tormenting mystery. I believed in that brand of honesty my whole career, and I knew at least one other coach who believed in it too. — Pat Summitt

Well, we are Americans. I've always believed that you work with where you are - I am a Mormon woman who was raised on the edge of the Great Salt Lake in the American West in the United States of America. But, by the same token, much of my life has been spent resisting traditional forms of democracy, resisting traditional forms of orthodoxy, be it the United States government or the Mormon Church. — Terry Tempest Williams

The thing is, I don't know if these stories he was telling were mine, or his, or someone else's. You spend your life among words, listening, making sense out of what you say and out of what you imagine other people are saying to you, believing that something in particular happened like this or that, as a result of this or that, with these or those consequences. But it is never so simple, is it? I suppose that if we read about ourselves in a book, we wouldn't recognize ourselves, we wouldn't realize that those people doing certain things and behaving in a particular manner are us. I always believed that I knew Alejandro, that I knew him intimately, I mean, the way you might know a doll you've once taken to pieces. But it wasn't true. — Alberto Manguel

If she possessed a genius - and a growing number of us think she did - it was a capacity for understanding and trusting the improvisational nature of her will. This might seem a contradictory state, and for most of us it would be. We have hopes and make plans, and if they are dashed or waylaid, we naturally rationalize and redraw the map to locate ourselves anew. Or else we brood and too firmly root. Very few can step forward again and again in what amounts to veritable leaps into the void, where there are no ready holds, where little is familiar, where you get constantly stuck in the thickets of your uncertainties and fears. Fan was different. As we have come to realize, she was not one to hold herself back. Or to be fettered. In this way she startles us, inspires us. She was someone who pursued her project as a genuine artist might, following with focus and intensity as well as an enduring innocence a goal she could not quite yet understand or see but wholly believed. — Chang-rae Lee

believed in The Good Luck of Right Now. Believing - or maybe even pretending - made you feel better about what had happened, regardless of what was true and what wasn't. And what is reality, if it isn't how we feel about things? What else matters at the end of the day when we lie in bed alone with our thoughts? And isn't it true, statistically speaking - regardless of whether we believe in luck or not - that good and bad must happen — Matthew Quick

Betsy Trotwood don't look a likely subject for the tender passion, but the time was, Trot, when she believed in that man most entirely. When she loved him, Trot, right well. When there was no proof of attachment and affection that she would not have given him. He was a fine-looking man when I married him", said my aunt, with an echo of her old pride and admiration in her tone. "I was a fool; and I am so far an incurable fool on that subject, that, for the sake of what I once believed him to be, I wouldn't have even this shadow of my idle fancy hardly dealt with. For I was in earnest, Trot, if ever a woman was. There, my dear. Now, you know the beginning, middle, and end, and all about it. We won't mention the subject to one another any more; neither, of course, will you mention it to anybody else. This is my grumpy, frumpy story, and we'll keep it to ourselves, Trot! — Charles Dickens

He is not a tame lion," said Tirian. "How should we know what he would do? We, who are murderers. Jewel, I will go back. I will give up my sword and put myself in the hands of these Calormenes and ask that they bring me before Aslan. Let him do justice on me."
"You will go to your death, then," said Jewel.
"Do you think I care if Aslan dooms me to death?" said the King. "That would be nothing, nothing at all. Would it not be better to be dead than to have this horrible fear that Aslan has come and is not like the Aslan we have believed in and longed for? It is as if the sun rose one day and were a black sun."
"I know," said Jewel. "Or as if you drank water and it were dry water. You are in the right, Sire. This is the end of all things. Let us go and give ourselves up."
"There is no need for both of us to go."
"If ever we loved one another, let me go with you now," said the Unicorn. "If you are dead and if Aslan is not Aslan, what life is left for me? — C.S. Lewis

Our old pilgrims believed stories in which the West was a promise, a place where decent people could escape the wreckage of failed lives and start over. Come along, the dream whispers, and you can have another chance. We still listen to promises in the wind. This time, we think, we'll get it right. — William Kittredge

We believed Paris was the start of us. It's the kind of city that makes you think of beginnings, or even juicy middles. Paris is a book to savor, in whole or in part, at any time and in any season. At age ninety or at thirty-four, you can open any chapter and read from there. — Michelle Gable

I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.
And you had a lot of luck, he told himself, to have had such a good life. You've had as good a life as any one because of these last days. You do not want to complain when you have been so lucky.
I wish there was some way to pass on what I've learned, though. Christ, I was learning fast there at the end. — Ernest Hemingway,

However this war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if some of you survive, the world would not believe him. There will perhaps be suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed: they will say they are the exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you. We will be the ones to dictate the history of the Lagers." -- SS Officer, quoted in The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi — Robert Harris

What am I to call it? Diffidence? The fear of ridicule? Inverted vanity? What matters names, if it has brought me to this? I could never bear to be bustling about nothing; I was ashamed of this toy kingdom from the first; I could not tolerate that people should fancy I believed in a thing so patently absurd! I would do nothing that cannot be done smiling. I have a sense of humour, forsooth! I must know better than my Maker. And it was the same thing in my marriage," he added more hoarsely. "I did not believe this girl could care for me; I must not intrude; I must preserve the foppery of my indifference. What an impotent picture!"
"Ay, we have the same blood," moralised Gotthold. "You are drawing, with fine strokes, the character of the born sceptic."
"Sceptic? - coward!" cried Otto. "Coward is the word. A springless, putty-hearted, cowering coward! — Robert Louis Stevenson

[I]t struck me how easy it is to bamboozle an uneducated audience if you have prepared beforehand a set of repartees with which to evade awkward questions."
...
"You can go on and on telling lies, and the most palpable lies at that, and even if they are not actually believed, there is no strong revulsion either. We are all drowning in filth. When I talk to anyone or read the writings of anyone who has an axe to grind, I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgment have simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Everyone's thought is forensic, everyone is simply putting a 'case' with deliberate suppression of his opponent's point of view, and, what is more, with complete insensitiveness to any sufferings except those of himself and his friends ... . But is there no one who has both firm opinions and a balanced outlook? Actually there are plenty, but they are powerless. All power is in the hands of paranoiacs. — George Orwell

Mom went on to tell me, as we sat there, that she really believed your personal life was personal. Secrets, she felt, rarely explained or excused anything in real life, or were even all that interesting. People shared too much, she said, not too little. She thought you should be able to keep your private life private for any reason or for no reason. — Will Schwalbe

I've never been more hopeful about our future. I have never been more hopeful about America. And I ask you to sustain that hope. I'm not talking about blind optimism, the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. I'm not talking about the wishful idealism that allows us to just sit on the sidelines or shirk from a fight. I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting. — Barack Obama

I think you can be depressed and flourish, I think you can have cancer and flourish, I think you can be divorced and flourish. When we believed that happiness was only smiling and good mood, that wasn't very good for people like me, people in the lower half of positive affectivity. — Martin Seligman

I held out my hand and George Mitchell said, "Like in everything else, you lead and I'll follow." And the crowd broke up, and we did a twirl or two around the dance floor. And that's like him, you know, he was there for his members, he campaigned for us, he believed in us, and he was really a good sport as well. — Barbara Mikulski

I remember all of these things happening and the places we lived in and the fine times and the bad times we had in that year. But much more vividly I remember living in the book and making up what happened in it every day. Making the country and the people and the things that happened I was happier than I had ever been. Each day I read the book through from the beginning to the point where I went on writing and each day I stopped when I was still going good and when I knew what would happen next. The fact the book was a tragic one did not make me unhappy since I believed that life was a tragedy and knew it could have only one end. But finding you were able to make something up; to create truly enough so that it made you happy to read it; and to do this every day you worked was something that gave a greater pleasure than any I had ever known. Beside it nothing else mattered. — Ernest Hemingway,

After the Jews crossed the sea and the desert, they reached the Promised Land. Scouts were sent to look at the land before settling. When the scouts came back, they reported that the people in the land were giants. "We looked at them and they looked at us as if we were grasshoppers," they said.
Sometimes when we make a decision to make a change in our lives, we feel just like those scouts. However, if you pay attention to the words of the Bible, it was not the giants living in the land of Israel who believed that the Jews looked like grasshoppers. It was the Jews' own perception. When they looked at the giants, they believed they were the grasshoppers. — Celso Cukierkorn

The more time that passes without an answer and the longer we wander through the wilderness of silence and shadow, the more fearful we become that maybe God isn't all we have believed him to be. It's in those moments that Satan plants in us the temptation to 'throw away this confident trust in the Lord.' The enemy wants us to forget 'the great reward it brings you' (Hebrews 10:35). — Kasey Van Norman

We all had dreams, regrets, accomplishments, people we'd loved and disappointed, and at some point, for each of us, those earthly concerns would fall away, our lives replaced in an instant by darkness or--if you believed--light. Sometimes deaths came too soon, sometimes not soon enough, and only for certain sinners did it come at a time of one's choosing. — Laura McHugh

Many can only say of Jesus that they hope they love him; they trust they love him; but only a poor and shallow experience will be content to stay here. No one ought to give any rest to his spirit till he feels quite sure about a matter of such vital importance. We ought not to be satisfied with a superficial hope that Jesus loves us, and with a bare trust that we love him. The old saints did not generally speak with "buts," and "ifs," and "hopes," and "trusts," but they spoke positively and plainly. "I know whom I have believed," saith Paul. "I know that my Redeemer liveth," saith Job. Get positive knowledge of your love of Jesus, and be not satisfied till you can speak of your interest in him as a reality, which you have made sure by having received the witness of the Holy Spirit, and his seal upon your soul by faith. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

This was progress. This was modernity: you could cover over the past completely. You could bury the old under a relentless surface of new, stretched from corner to corner.
That's what I return to again and again, no matter how many times I think about it: how naive we were, how we believed in the promise, how we believed the past could be kept down. No. More than that
how we believed in a future that was distinct from the past. — Lauren Oliver

One day I saw something very strange, people walking around who looked like they had come directly from the grave, their skin was so pale. Mzungus. They carried a black machine that flashed bright when they pointed it at me. I screamed. I thought the machine was going to harm me, and so I fled. Later I learned it was a camera. Its flash and their voices terrified me. We didn't see them often, less than once in a year. But whenever I saw them, I ran and hid.
I had many ideas about them; first, I did not expect them to be smart, because they loved to take pictures of silly things like chickens on the street, shanties, and other things that were not interesting. Second, since I had seen a kid touching their skin and shouting, "How are you?," for many years I believed the name for all white people was "How are you?" I touched their skin as well and found it soft, but I was surprised and a bit disappointed because I thought touching it would leave a mark on my skin too. — Kennedy Odede

It's over for me, isn't it?" The old man glanced across the room mid-chew. "What do you mean?" "I'm not getting my body back." He shrugged. "Probably not." My head swam. It didn't matter that at some level I had suspected the truth; hearing the words spoken out loud felt like a kick in the teeth. "Why didn't you tell me before?" "You're a smart guy, Alexander, and we both know you had already figured it out. That's always the way with people - truth staring them in the face but unwilling to accept it." He ate another cookie quietly. "But," he added, "even if I had spelled it out you wouldn't have believed me. You weren't ready or willing to accept it yet. You'd just have gotten all worked up. — Linda Francis Lee

When he asked Saphira about it, she said, It matters little to me, Eragon. Dragons have never believed in higher powers. Why should we when deer and other prey consider us to be a higher power? He laughed at that. Only do not ignore reality in order to comfort yourself, for once you do, you make it easy for others to deceive you. — Christopher Paolini

And before you say this is all far-fetched, just think how far the human race has come in the past ten years. If someone had told your parents, for example, that they would be able to carry their entire music library in their pocket, would they have believed it? Now we have phones that have more computing power than was used to send some of the first rockets into space. We have electron microscopes that can see individual atoms. We routinely cure diseases that only fifty years ago was fatal. and the rate of change is increasing. Today we are able to do what your parents would of dismissed as impossible and your grandparents nothing short of magical. — Nicolas Flamel

No, we believed in ourselves all year. That's the position you want to be in. — Eli Manning

There are two kinds of patriotism
monarchical patriotism and republican patriotism. In the one case the government and the king may rightfully furnish you their notions of patriotism; in the other, neither the government nor the entire nation is privileged to dictate to any individual what the form of his patriotism shall be. The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is: "The King can do no wrong." We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: "Our country, right or wrong!" We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had:
the individual's right to oppose both flag and country when he (just he, by himself) believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism. — Mark Twain

When we met, we were two injured souls. But keeping the real out of our lives for fear of what we might find. But nothing could have kept us apart. I never believed in destiny. Thought that was a bunch of crap for people who read too many books. Until you. — Vi Keeland

I believed ... No. I knew we had an attraction. Then you left and I realized you were taking what you felt for me and giving it to another woman. A woman you didn't even know. And I wanted - needed - " Anna threw up her hands in frustration. "I wanted to be the one you-you swived with. — Elizabeth Hoyt

We believed that to understand literature, you had to understand its place in history and culture. — M.H. Abrams

It was easier to ignore the consideration of paternal genes then than it would be now. We did not then consider ourselves held in the genetic trap. We thought each infant was born pure and new and holy: a gold baby, a luminous lamb. We did not know that certain forms of breast cancer were programmed and almost ineluctable, and we would not have believed you if you had told us that in our lifetime young women would be subjecting themselves to preventative mastectomies. — Margaret Drabble