Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

Back of every creation supporting it like an arch is faith. Enthusiasm is nothing: it comes and goes. But if one believes then miracles occur.

Never fret for an only son the idea of failure will never occur to him.

The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses.

Something happens to us all when we experience something as a unit that doesn't occur when we're on our couches or holding our little portable DVD players.

As far as I was concerned the Depression was an ill wind that blew some good. If it hadn't occurred my parents would have given me my college education. As it was I had to scrabble for it.

Reforming public education cutting property taxes fixing adult and child protective services and funding our budget can all occur when Democrats and Republicans engage in consensus and cooperation - not cynicism and combat.

Freedom can occur only through education.

Gradually it occurred to me that we spend a great deal of life asleep and that dreams are little narratives little stories. I thought 'Who's choreographing this stuff?'

It never occurred to me that I'd be on a television show or in feature films but when those came into play my dreams changed along the way.

I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams... Man... is above all the plaything of his memory.

The materialistic paradigm of Western science has been a major obstacle for any objective evaluation of the data describing the events occurring at the time of death.

Everything one does in life even love occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.

The message that President Obama delivered in his speech at Notre Dame was: morality is immoral. Pro-life is the extremist position not a moral position. Yet we should compromise and work to reduce abortions. Where's the compromise between life and death - and why work to reduce the number of them occurring if there's nothing wrong with them?

My dad and mom divorced when I was around ten and I didn't live with him after that though he was close by and we saw each other weekly. I wasn't really aware that he was a writer I didn't start reading his writing until I was about fifteen. It occurred to me then that my dad was kind of special he's still one of my favorite writers.

Remember in 1973 the same science chatter said that the coming Ice Age is going to occur we're going to lose millions of people. And the politicians knew how to solve it they just didn't have the courage to solve it they were going to put coal dust on the Arctic.

For this equilibrium now in sight let us trust that mankind as it has occurred in the greatest periods of its past will find for itself a new code of ethics common to all made of tolerance of courage and of faith in the Spirit of men.

The thing I've come to learn is that what's great about small independent films is the intimacy and the communication that occurs when you're making them.

Someday perhaps change will occur when times are ready for it instead of always when it is too late. Someday change will be accepted as life itself.

When you are young and healthy it never occurs to you that in a single second your whole life could change.

Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction.

Men make history and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.

Change occurs in direct proportion to dissatisfaction but dissatisfaction never changes.