conviction

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Why do you fret for tomorrow? Why are you heavy with care Wrapping your heart in sorrow, A garment too somber to wear? Faith has a brighter color Home has a rainbow hue And trust links them both together In a background of heavenly blue. You can weave these lovely colors Into a garment so light It will penetrate every shadow And shine through the darkest night. God will take care of tomorrow With him each tomorrow must rest - And we hold this a sure conviction When we give each today our best!

Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.

It is my conviction, and in this I think I concur with both James and Whitehead, that we participate in this Creative Passage as bodily event at a depth and fullness not manageable at the cognitive level. . . . In all of [life] there are depths of awareness accompanying the bodily event of living and experience that yield conditions of knowing which language may not convey, or, for that matter, cannot convey. Whitehead expressed this point in those memorable words, "Mothers can ponder many things in their hearts which their lips cannot express." [Cf. Luke 2:51.] Meland continues this passage by speaking of ways in which men, children, and adolescents, also, ponder experiences which they cannot express verbally.

I have brought myself by long meditation to the conviction that a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it, and that nothing can resist a will which will stake even existence upon its fulfillment.

Romanticism may not inaccurately be described as a conviction that the world is an Englischer Garten on a grand scale. The God of the seventeenth century, like its gardeners, always geometrized; the God of Romanticism was one in whose universe things grew wild and without trimming and in all the rich diversity of their natural shapes. The preference for irregularity, the aversion from that which is wholly intellectualized . . . which were eventually to invade the intellectual life of Europe at all points, made their first modern appearance on a grand scale in the eighteenth century in the form of the new fashion in pleasure gardens.

Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination.

PRESBYTERIAN, n. One who holds the conviction that the government authorities of the Church should be called presbyters.

INSURANCE, n. An ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.

INDIGESTION, n. A disease which the patient and his friends frequently mistake for deep religious conviction and concern for the salvation of mankind.