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1 " He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. "
― Gabriel García Márquez , Love in the Time of Cholera
2 " Zsoronga, Sorweel was beginning to realize, possessed the enviable ability to yoke his conviction to his need — to believe, absolutely, whatever his heart required. For Sorweel, belief and want always seemed like ropes too short to bind together, forcing him to play the knot as a result. "
― R. Scott Bakker , The White Luck Warrior (Aspect-Emperor, #2)
3 " The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exist as an independent cause of natural events. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with the natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot. But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress.- Science and Religion (1941) "
― Albert Einstein
4 " I do not believe that any man can preach the gospel who does not preach the Law. Lower the Law and you dim the light by which man perceives his guilt; this is a very serious loss to the sinner rather than a gain; for it lessens the likelihood of his conviction and conversion. I say you have deprived the gospel of its ablest auxiliary [its most powerful weapon] when you have set aside the Law. You have taken away from it the schoolmaster that is to bring men to Christ. they will never accept grace till they tremble before a just and holy Law. Therefore, the Law serves a most necessary purpose, and it must not be removed from its place. The Law cuts into the core of evil, it reveals the seat of the malady and informs us that the leprosy lies deep within. They must be slain by the Law before they can be made alive by the gospel. "
― Charles Haddon Spurgeon
5 " ...he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them them over and over again to give birth to themselves. "
6 " The Incarnation of Christ raised the energy of everything. And when Hopkins placed his conviction of this into poetry, he tended to mention electricity, lightening, fire, flash, flame. He wrote in his late, great poem, " That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and the comfort of the Resurrection" : 'In a flash, at a trumpet crash, / I am all at once what Christ is, / since he was what I am and / This jack, joke, poor potsherd, / patch matchwood, immortal diamond, / Is immortal diamond. "
7 " Annie clouded up. For a second, he thought she was going to erupt, and flinched. She saw that...and got control of herself with an visible effort. She took three deep breaths, each longer than the last, and her features became serene.All at once it seemed totally clear to Mike that she was right and he was nuts - that his ingenius theory was nonsense, childish, fantasty bullshit. His conviction evaporated, and he was ashamed. He felt his cheeks grow hot, groped for words with which to backtrack -" I have to admit I have no better explanation for the the facts," Annie said slowly.Again, Mike did an emotional instant 180. " Holy shit -" She held up a hand. " I am going to think now. Very hard, for a long time. You will be as quiet as possible while I do." She got up from the computer, went to the bed, and lay down. " Think yourself, or read, or play games with the headphones on, or go Topside if you like." She clasped her hands on her belly, closed her eyes and appeared to go to sleep "
8 " . . .and he has nevergiven up his conviction that if you just try all the doors one of them is bound to be the Door intoSummer. You know, I think he is right. "
― Robert A. Heinlein
9 " His baseline attitude toward humans was that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought. This was probably rooted in the belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and there was no point in arguing about anything that would be so observed and so understood. As long as you made a point of hanging out exclusively with people who had the wit to see and understand that objective reality, you didn't have to waste a lot of time talking. When a thunderstorm was headed your way across the prairie, you took the washing down from the line and closed the windows. It wasn't necessary to have a meeting about it. The sales force didn't need to get involved......It was time, in other words, to call out the sales force, take Jones to lunch, begin gardening personal contacts, shape his perception of the competitive landscape. Forge a partnership. Exactly the kind of work from which Richard had always found some way to excuse himself, even when large amounts of money were at stake. Yet now his life was at stake, and no one was around to help him, and he still wasn't doing it. He simply couldn't get past his conviction that Jones could go fuck himself and that he wasn't going to angle and scheme and maneuver for Jones' sake. "
― Neal Stephenson , Reamde