Quotes about Conviction

Wilberforce is having thoughts now that seem utterly strange and foreign.

Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people, that those liberties are the gift of God? That they are violated but with his wrath? I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that His justice cannot sleep for ever.

Anyone on the side of truth, wherever it led, was a compatriot to be lauded.

Perhaps even more important in the Bonhoeffer family was acting upon what one said one believed. One must not only think clearly but must prove one's thoughts in action. If one was unprepared to live out what one claimed to believe, perhaps one didn't believe what one claimed after all!

Some wondered whether he was just kicking against the goads, but when someone asked Bonhoeffer whether he shouldn't join the German Christians in order to work against them from within, he answered that he couldn't. 'If you board the wrong train,' he said, 'it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction.

Describing Bonhoeffer's demeanor on returning to danger in Germany rather than safety in America, with "with a strong and joyful firmness such as only arises out of realized freedom.

Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will.

I'm an independent conservative. And what I mean by that - when I think we're right, I'm with us all the way, and I am a conservative. And I think my record reflects that.

I have my relationship with God and myself, and that's what matters to me. I really don't care what most people think.

Doubt is the heart of the matter. Abolish all doubt, and what's left is not faith, but absolute, heartless conviction. You're certain that you possess the Truth -- inevitably offered with an implied uppercase T -- and this certainty quickly devolves into dogmatism and righteousness, by which I mean a demonstrative, overweening pride in being so very right, in short, the arrogance of fundamentalism.

The believer will fight another believer over a shade of difference; the doubter fights only with himself.

It's my conviction that we are made to perpetually share in a life in which we are perfectly and unconditionally loved, in which we experientially know we could not matter more to God than we already do, and in which we feel absolutely secure in this love and worth, for we know that nothing—including the loss of our biological life—could cause us to lose this life.