Belief Quotes
My confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as in science so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation.
If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview.
My overriding belief is that it is always possible for criminals to improve and that by its very finality, the death penalty contradicts this.
If some people have the belief or view that the Dalai Lama has some miracle power, that's totally nonsense. I am just one human being.
The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organised religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition, exploitation and the preservation of vested interests.
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.
What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.
Whoever feels predestined to see and not to believe will find all believers too noisy and pushy: he guards against them.
When a nation is on the downward path, when it feels its belief in its own future, its hope of freedom slipping from it, when it begins to see submission as a first necessity and the virtues of submission as measures of self-preservation, then it must overhaul its God.
Through searching out origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards, and finally he also believes backwards.
Belief in the truth commences with the doubting of all those truths we once believed.
We have no organ at all for knowledge, for truth: we know (or believe or imagine) precisely as much as may be useful in the interest of the human herd, the species: and even what is here called usefulness is in the end only a belief, something imagined and perhaps precisely that most fatal piece of stupidity by which we shall one day perish.
Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.
The modern scientific counterpart to belief in God is the belief in the universe as an organism: this disgusts me. This is to make what is quite rare and extremely derivative, the organic, which we perceive only on the surface of the earth, into something essential, universal, and eternal! This is still an anthropomorphizing of nature!
Their [Christian scholars] continual cry is: "I am right, for it is written"-and then follows an explanation so shameless and capricious that a philologist, when he hears it, must stand stock-still between anger and laughter, asking himself again and again: Is it possible? Is it honest? Is it even decent?
One sees that science also rests on a belief: there is no science at all without premises.
The question whether truth is necessary, must not merely be affirmed beforehand, but must be affirmed to such an extent that the principle, belief, or conviction finds expression, that there is nothing more necessary than truth, and in comparison with it everything else has only a secondary value.
When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. For the latter is absolutely not self-evident: one must make this point clear again and again, in spite of English shallowpates.
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