I desire no honour if I have to conceal my religious beliefs in order to have it.
There is nothing I should care more to do, if it were possible, than to rouse the imagination of men and women to a vision of human claims in those races of their fellow-men who most differ from them in customs and beliefs.
My personal belief is that the only thing keeping you from freedom is all the beliefs you have about what has to happen before you can be there.
While no one can change events that occurred in the past, everyone can change attitudes and beliefs about them.
An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has been formed by the labours and struggles of our forefathers, which enables us to breathe amid the various and complex circumstances of our life.
In certain circumstances where he experiments in new types of conduct by cooperating with his equals, the child is already an adult. There is an adult in every child and a child in every adult. . . . There exist in the child certain attitudes and beliefs which intellectual development will more and more tend to eliminate: there are others which will acquire more and more importance. The later are not derived from the former but are partly antagonistic to them.
How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.
The way you eat is inseparable from your core beliefs about being alive. Your relationship with food is an exact mirror of your feelings about love, fear, anger, meaning and transformation.
It used to be that your rights were infringed upon if the government punished or threatened you for expressing your sincerest beliefs. Now, your rights are infringed upon if you want something but someone refuses to buy it for you.
Far better than a precise plan is a clear sense of direction and compelling beliefs. And that lies within you. The question is, how do you evoke it?
What I am is a humanist before anything - before I'm a Jew, before I'm black, before I'm a woman. And my beliefs are for the human race - they don't exclude anyone.
Examine what you believe to be impossible, and then change your beliefs.
The more we can get together and talk about various perspectives, feelings, beliefs, the better.
Science has been effective at furthering our understanding of nature because the scientific ethos is based on three key principles: (1) follow the evidence wherever it leads; (2) if one has a theory, one needs to be willing to try to prove it wrong as much as one tries to prove that it is right; (3) the ultimate arbiter of truth is experiment, not the comfort one derives from one's a priori beliefs, nor the beauty or elegance one ascribes to one's theoretical models.
When we're believing, we're not really thinking, because the belief has walls: "This is what I believe. " So what I believe is like a box, and we're taking the energy of our thinking and putting into a box of beliefs, pretending that we're thinking. But we're really stifling our own energy. We create these mental stresses and frustrations, because we're blocking our spirit, so to speak.
People will always prefer black-and-white over shades of grey, and so there will always be the temptation to hold overly-simplified beliefs and to hold them with excessive confidence
One reason why I recommend the abandonment of religious beliefs is because I think those beliefs are wrong. There is no evidence that our world was created by divine intention, that a god intercedes in human affairs, or that there is life after death. Religion is a hangover from humankind's timorous infancy; it's time for us to walk upright and unafraid, and to take charge of our own lives.
Our differences in beliefs do not truly separate us, or elevate us over others. Rather, they highlight the rich tapestry that is humanity.
The recurring theme of all religions is a sympathy, empathy, connection, capacity between the human and the divine - that we were made for union with one another. They might express this through different rituals, doctrines, dogmas, or beliefs, but at the higher levels they're talking about the same goal. And the goal is always union with the divine.
I'm boring. My beliefs are neither here nor there.