Faith

Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all. Gilbert K. Chesterton

In the presence of eternity, the mountains are as transient as the clouds.

“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” Winston Churchill quote

Let us choose to expand our minds and embrace the grace of life.

“My faith runs so very much faster than my reason that I can challenge the whole world and say, 'God is, was and ever shall be'” Mahatma Gandhi

Action is the anidote to despair.

For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.

Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.

Reason and faith are banks of the same river.

Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.

We all have the power to give love. And if we do so, we change the kind of person we are, and we change the kind of world we live in.

Change the story and you change perception; change perception and you change the world.

There is no substitute for hard work. God rewards your faithfulness. Whatever you do, do it well.

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.

For each new morning with its light,
For rest and shelter of the night,
For health and food,
For love and friends,
For everything Thy goodness sends.

An optimist isn't necessarily a blithe, sappy whistler in the dark. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. If we remember those times and places where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us energy to act and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

The dry seasons in life do not last. The spring rains will come again.

Hope, O my soul, hope. You know neither the day nor the hour. Watch carefully, for everything passes quickly, even though your impatience turns a very short time into a long one.

When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens like one of those fluted Japanese blossoms, flimsy and spastic, bright and warm. This almost always seems to happen in community.

Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows.

We know the future will outlast all of us, but I believe that all of us will live on in the future we made."

It is essential that in a society, divine thoughts and power should co-exist. Simple Faith, not backed by material forces, is weak and Strength without touch of Divinity is monstrous.

Fearlessness is a result of faith in oneself and faith in God.

Hope is a stance, not an assessment.

What is hope? It is the pre-sentiment that imagination is more real and reality is less real than it looks. It is the hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress and repress us is not the last word. It is the suspicion that reality is more complex than the realists want us to believe. That the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual. . . . So let us plant dates even though we who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see. That is the secret discipline. It is the refusal to let our creative act be dissolved away by our need for immediate sense experience and it is a struggled commitment to the future of our grandchildren.

Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.

The Grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.

We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics. And they will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks and months to come. We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.

Joy and sorrow are inseparable. . . together they come and when one sits alone with you . . . remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Let us use science to discover truth. That done, let us use science and the humanities to guide our use of newly discovered truths. But let us recognize that the road to truth is forked, dimly lit, strewn with obstacles. We need, therefore, to recognize and to applaud the role of faith and the spiritual as founts of strength and of perseverance.

Hope -- Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope! In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us. . . A belief in things not seen. A belief that there are better days ahead.

Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire; what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation; what led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom's cause. Hope is what led me here today--with a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas; and a story that could only happen in the United States of America. Hope is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have courage to remake the world as it should be.

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.

We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world. We will see it when we believe it.

"Wherefore, whoso believeth in God might with surety hope for a better world, yea, even a place at the right hand of God, which hope cometh of faith, maketh an anchor to the souls of men, which would make them sure and steadfast, always abounding in good works, being led to glorify God."

We are all children of the same mother, and the same fate awaits us all. We, too, have our religion, and it is this: Help for the living--Hope for the dead.

The falling leaf that tells of autumn's death is, in a subtler sense, a prophecy of spring.

I still believe in Hope - mostly because there's no such place as Fingers Crossed, Arkansas.

Help us to be always the hopeful gardeners of the spirit
who know that without darkness
nothing comes to birth
as without light nothing flowers.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.

Hope is that thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops… at all.

Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.

The drive to be useful is encoded in our genes. But when we gather in very large numbers, as in the modern nation-state, we seem capable of levels of folly and self-destruction to be found nowhere else in all of nature. But if we keep at it and keep alive, we are in for one surprise after another. We can build structures for human society never seen before, thoughts never heard before, music never heard before.

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.

No matter how piercing and appalling his insights, the desolation creeping over his outer world, the lurid lights and shadows of his inner world, the writer must live with hope, work in faith.

Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.

All ancient books which have once been called sacred by man, will have their lasting place in the history of mankind, and those who possess the courage, the perseverance, and the self-denial of the true miner, and of the true scholar, will find even in the darkest and dustiest shafts what they are seeking for,--real nuggets of thought, and precious jewels of faith and hope.

Pray as if everything depended upon God; work as if everything depended upon you.

Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance.

Come, Whoever you are! Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving, Come. Ours is not a caravan of despair. It doesn’t matter if you’ve broken your vow a thousand times, Still come. And yet again, come!

While scholars are comparing and contrasting theories, debating intellectual questions, and dividing humankind into categories, the world is changed by persons with faith, spirit, emotion, compassion, intuition, and irrational thinking.

No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.

What is faith worth if it is not translated into action?  

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

I believe in humanity. We are an incredible species. We're still just a child creature, we're still being nasty to each other. And all children go through those phases. We're growing up, we're moving into adolescence now. When we grow up - man, we're going to be something!

Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.

In actual life every great enterprise begins with and takes its first forward step in faith.

A faith to live by, a self to live with, and a purpose to live for.

It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes life worth living.

The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.

Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking.

You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.

There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.

Patience in the present, faith in the future, and joy in the doing.

There is no great future for any people whose faith has burned out.

Society lives by faith, and develops by science.

Hope is the parent of faith.

Faith lives in honest doubt.

Faith is love taking the form of aspiration.

Life is doubt, and faith without doubt is nothing but death.

To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer. As soon as they consent to live, the unbeliever and the man of faith are fundamentally the same, since both have made the only decision that defines a being.

All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light, but though I seem to be driven out of my country as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.

Freedom is not the right to do what we want, but what we ought. Let us have faith that right makes might and in that faith let us; to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.

I am prejudiced in favor of him who, without impudence, can ask boldly. He has faith in humanity, and faith in himself. No one who is not accustomed to giving grandly can ask nobly and with boldness.

There are similarities between absolute power and absolute faith: a demand for absolute obedience, a readiness to attempt the impossible, a bias for simple solutions to cut the knot rather than unravel it, the viewing of compromise as surrender. Both absolute power and absolute faith are instruments of dehumanization. Hence, absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

Faith is not without worry or care; faith is fear that has said a prayer.

Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.

The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before.

Not only is another world possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

Choose to be optimistic; it feels better.