Isaac Asimov's remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: 'Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold. ' It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that 'X is comforting' does not imply 'X is true'.
It's just very homey in Ireland. It's very comforting and comfortable. There's lots of fireplaces with fires. It's just really cozy.
I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; rather, it was an active, palpable agent in the world.
Questioning our own motives, and our own process, is critical to a skeptical and scientific outlook. We must realize that the default mode of human psychology is to grab onto comforting beliefs for purely emotional reasons, and then justify those beliefs to ourselves with post-hoc rationalizations.
One reason we love fiction is because stories have a comforting shape. They provide a resolution that's lacking in our regular lives.
Bakers get excited over aprons. I love the soft cotton ones with pockets like my gramma and mom wore. They always kept a hankie tucked in one pocket, which wasn't sanitary, but was comforting to the child who needed a tear or nose wiped.
Perhaps the one comforting thought I got out of this whole disgusting affair was that over the years when the government was tapping my telephone, it must certainly have heard some home truths from me about themselves, often couched in good Anglo-Saxon terms.
I used to like to break into other people's houses and sit in their rooms. I found it very comforting to be in someone's empty house.
My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.
It is one of the few elements in the process that a director really, really can't control: an actor's performance. If you have a director that understands that, it's comforting to an actor. You're starting the relationship more as a collaborator, rather than as an employee or some kind of a soldier trying to execute something you don't organically feel.
It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical.
Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments.
It's strange, isn't it, how the idea of belonging to someone can sound so great? It can be comforting, the way it makes things decided. We like the thought of being held, until it's too tight. We like that certainty, until it means there's no way out. And we like being his, until we realize we're not ours anymore.
I try to see the dark and light in everything. This is my way of comforting myself when I am dealing with those emotions.
Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.
With the unknown, one is confronted with danger, discomfort, and care; the first instinct is to abolish these painful states. First principle: any explanation is better than none. . . . The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The "why?" shall, if at all possible, not give the cause for its own sake so much as for a particular kind of cause -- a cause that is comforting, liberating, and relieving.
That's the thing about conspiracy theories: in a comforting sort of way, they give rise to the feeling that someone, somewhere, knows what's going on.
It's easy, almost comforting, to dismiss Trumpism as the cry of laid-off men in rust-belt states shaking their wrinkled fists at the juggernaut of modernity.
It isn't enough to just be on the journey; we must be awake to our duty and continue with faith as we draw upon the comforting, strengthening, enabling, and healing power of the Atonement.
Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.
