Robert Silverberg Quotes

I never thought of it as God. I didn't know what to call it. I don't believe in devils, but demons I do because everyone at one time or another has some kind of a demon, even if you call it by another name, that drives them.

All our experiences have led us to believe certain things about ourselves. Whether these beliefs are true or not really doesn't matter because if we accept them as true, then they are true for us.

I was trying to come round to the idea that there might be an invisible reality capable of interfering in our lives, but the only reason I did so was because of a love I didn't want to believe I felt but which was continuing to grow in a subtle, devastating way. I was content in my universe and didn't want to change it at all, even though I was being propelled in that direction.

In culture after culture, people believe that the soul lives on after death, that rituals can change the physical world and divine the truth, and that illness and misfortune are caused and alleviated by spirits, ghosts, saints ... and gods.

The afterlife is whatever a soul wishes or believes it to be.

We must never fear robbers or murderers. They are dangers from outside, small dangers. It is ourselves we have to fear. Prejudice is the real robber, vice the real murderer. Why should we be troubled by a threat to our person or our pocket? What we have to beware of is the threat to our souls'.

I really believe that all of us have a lot of darkness in our souls. Anger, rage, fear, sadness. I don't think that's only reserved for people who have horrible upbringings.

I believe that the soul consists of its sufferings. For the soul that cures its own sufferings dies.

Men really need sea-monsters in their personal oceans. An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep.

Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.

So often the monsters that crowd our minds are nothing more than the strange and thoroughly alien progeny of our own fearful fantasies.

My father's politics were old-fashioned in the sense that he used to say, all the time, "You've got to fight the system!" But my spiritual beliefs have led me to believe that the fight is the problem.

I believe there's a killer in all of us. I know there's one inside me. When you know the killer in you and you know also that you do not want to kill, you have to set yourself upon a course of learning. Not to kill that killer then, but to control it.

If it is true that if you believe in something, you manifest it, there are many Jesus Christs in the universe, because there are many different cultural interpretations of Jesus.

Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.

I believe it is our own misperceptions of who we really are that leads to every self-created hell you'll find in this world.

"Don't believe me, don't believe yourself, and don't believe anybody else." Don't believe me, because what I say is only truth for me. Don't believe yourself, because most of the time what you tell yourself is only truth for you - especially when you tell yourself that you're not good enough, you're not intelligent enough, you're not beautiful enough - when you reject yourself before anybody else can reject you. And don't believe anybody else, because what they say is only truth for them.

I commend my soul to any god that can find it.

My soul is not a palace of the past.

It isn't the things that are happening to us that cause us to suffer, it's what we say to ourselves about the things that are happening. The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.

So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.

All of us... when we think we are talking most intimately to someone else, are actually addressing an image we have of the person to whom we believe we speak.

Our soul is governed by four invisible forces: love, death, power and time.

To me, there are so many different things to believe in, but I think ultimately we're all energy and that energy keeps changing.

People and things do not upset us. Rather, we upset ourselves by believing that they can upset us.