Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
Interpretation
Faith involves believing in something that doesn't seem likely to happen.
This quote by H. L. Mencken suggests that faith is characterized by believing in outcomes that are improbable or unlikely to occur, emphasizing a sense of commitment to beliefs that defy logic or rational explanation. It highlights how faith often requires embracing uncertainty and the irrational, making it a fundamentally subjective experience that transcends empirical evidence.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about overcoming fears and embracing uncertainty.
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention—distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence—is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity—a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.
God’s sovereign will is not at the whim and mercy of our person and individual responses to it.
There are in truth three states of the converted: the beginning, the middle, and the perfection. In the beginning they experience the charms of sweetness; in the middle the contests of temptation; and in the end the fullness of perfection.
Great and good are seldom the same man.
All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
Do good to the people for the sake of God or for the peace of your own soul that you may always see what is pure and save your Heart from the darkness of hate
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.