"Genuine faith is something far more profound and mysterious, and it certainly doesn't depend on how reality appears to one at a given moment. For this reason, too, only someone with faith in the deeper sense of the word will be able to see things as they really are (or rather be open to reality, i.e., to phenomena), and not distort them in one way or another, since he has no personal, emotive reasons for so doing. This, of course, is not true of the man who lacks faith: he has no reason whatever to try to get to the bottom of reality, for such an effort - perhaps more than any other - requires faith, and is unthinkable without it. The faithless man simply tries to survive with the least possible pain and discomfort and is indifferent to everything else. Any claims he makes about reality will usually, in one way or another, serve his "conception" of life - in other words, again, merely what suits him. He is not open without prejudice to all the dimensions of reality."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
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