Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.

- Martha Graham

While your life is the true expression of your faith, whom can you fear?

- Julia Ward Howe

Have you not observed that faith is generally strongest in those whose character may be called the weakest?

- Madame de Stael

The discrepancy between American ideals and American practice creates a dry rot which eats away at the foundations of our democratic faith.

- Helen Gahagan Douglas

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.

- Frank Lloyd Wright

A belief is not true because it is useful.

- Henri-Frederic Amiel

Patience and diligence, like faith, remove mountains.

- William Penn

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.

- Helen Keller

Optimist: Person who travels on nothing from nowhere to happiness.

- Mark Twain

I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

- Thomas Paine

Society lives by faith, and develops by science.

- Henri-Frederic Amiel

Faith enables many of us to endure life's difficulties with an equanimity that would be scarcely conceivable in a world lit only by reason.

- Sam Harris

A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

Humanism is the creed of those who believe that in the circle of enwrapping mystery, men's fates are in their own hands, a faith that for modern man is becoming the only possible faith.

- John Galsworthy

As men's habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another to scoff, I conclude ... that everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its fruits.

- Baruch Spinoza



Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.

- Lillian Hellman



Lord, make me an instrument of your peace; where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy

- Francis of Assisi



The old faiths light their candles all about, but burly truth comes by and blows them out.

- Lizette W. Reese



Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

- Mark Twain



Faith is a passionate intuition.

- William Wordsworth



It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.

- Sam Harris



To sit patiently with a yearning that has not yet been fulfilled, and to trust that, that fulfillment will come, is quite possibly one of the most powerful "magic skills" that human beings are capable of. It has been noted by almost every ancient wisdom tradition.

- Elizabeth Gilbert



The faith of a church or of a nation is an adequate faith only when it inspires and enables people to give of their time and energy to shape the various institutions -- social, economic, and political -- of the common life.

- James Luther Adams



Democracy is itself, a religious faith. For some it comes close to being the only formal religion they have.

- E. B. White



To choose what is difficult all one's days, as if it were easy, that is faith.

- W. H. Auden



Faith as ultimate concern is an act of the total personality. It happens in the center of the personal life and includes all its elements. Faith is the most centered act of the human mind. It is not a movement of a special section or a special function of (our) total being. They all are united in the act of faith.

- Paul Tillich



The only angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed, and faith, which is surely the devil's masterpiece.

- Sam Harris



Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them.

- Blaise Pascal



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

- Oliver Wendell Holmes



Faith is not contrary to the usual ideas, something that turns out to be right or wrong, like a gambler's bet: it's an act, an intention, a project, something that makes you, in leaping into the future, go so far, far, far ahead that you shoot clean out of time and right into Eternity, which is not theend of time or a whole lot of time or unending time, but timelessness, the old Eternal Now.

- Joanna Russ



We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession.

- George Bernard Shaw



Unthinking faith is a curious offering to be made to the creator of the human mind.

- John A. Hutchinson



There are no creeds in mathematics.

- Peter F. Drucker



When men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place.

- Pearl S. Buck



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.

- Pearl S. Buck



Disillusion comes only to the illusioned. One cannot be disillusioned of what one never put faith in.

- Dorothy Thompson



The only force that can overcome an idea and a faith is another and better idea and faith, positively and fearlessly upheld.

- Dorothy Thompson



My faith has been the driving thing of my life. I think it is important that people who are perceived as liberals not be afraid of talking about moral and community values.

- Marian Wright Edelman



We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.

- Marian Wright Edelman



The Gods we worship write their names on our faces; be sure of that. A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson



Faith is not belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active.

- Edith Hamilton



When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

- Anais Nin



Without faith, nothing is possible. With it, nothing is impossible.

- Mary McLeod Bethune



Scientists were rated as great heretics by the church, but they were truly religious men because of their faith in the orderliness of the universe.

- Albert Einstein