Quotes About Gods

Sadly enough, my young friends, it is a characteristic of our age that if people want any gods at all, they want them to be gods who do not demand much, comfortable gods, smooth gods who not only don't rock the boat but don't even row it, gods who pat us on the head, make us giggle, then tell us to run along and pick marigolds.

Could God exist if nobody else did? No. That’s why gods are very avid for worshipers. If there is nobody to worship them, there are no gods. There are as many gods as there are people thinking about God. In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours. The god you worship is the god you deserve.

The ancients could communicate with the gods in two ways. First, it was (and is) possible to go into a trance and visit the gods in their celestial retreats, as the great shamans have always done. More easily, and less dangerously, they could let the gods speak through code, that is, divination, using dice, entrails, bird patterns, yarrow sticks, cards.

Well, I think the Yoruba gods are truthful. Truthful in the sense that i consider religion and the construct of deities simply an extension of human qualities taken, if you like, to the nth degree. i mistrust gods who become so separated from humanity that enormous crimes can be committed in their names. i prefer gods who can be brought down to earth and judged, if you like.

Whether the gods are inside or outside makes very little difference to whether there are gods.

The chief difficulty is that God demands of us that we live by faith: faith in God, God's sovereignty over the future, God's sufficiency for the present; while, on the other hand, the various other gods whom we can serve appeal to us in terms of the things which we can see and the forces which we can calculate. The choice between the life of faith and the life of sight is a choice between a God whom only faith can apprehend and gods whom one has only to see to understand.

In the beginning, the head of the Gods called a council of the Gods; and they came together and concocted a plan to create the world and people it.

Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude.

Night is falling. The gods have left us for those who please them better. Our time in the world is passed, and we are as wasted as the wind against the mountains. Shadows are falling, the gods have left us.

It is expedient that there should be gods, and, since it is expedient, let us believe that gods exist.

Faith, faith, faith in ourselves, faith, faith in God, this is the secret of greatness.If you have faith in all the three hundred and thirty millions of your mythological Gods, and in all the Gods which foreigners have now and again introduced into your midst, and still have no faith in yourselves, there is no salvation for you.

The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.

I don't believe in God. I believe gods and devils are within us. It's our own battle. Our life's battle is to appeal to the gods within us, and to fight the devils within us.

For we must not build temples according to the same rules to all gods alike, since the performance of the sacred rites varies with the various gods.

The lover is a monotheist who knows that other people worship different gods but cannot himself imagine that there could be other gods.

One thing that I get from a lot of people with American Gods is people saying that they would love some kind of glossary with a list of all the Gods and who they are, so that they can look them up.

What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man's imagination?

When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.

The Laughing Heart your life is your life don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. be on the watch. there are ways out. there is a light somewhere. it may not be much light but it beats the darkness. be on the watch. the gods will offer you chances. know them. take them. you can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. your life is your life. know it while you have it. you are marvelous the gods wait to delight in you.

An old art spreading rumours about / Paradise, it begs outside the gates / Of the gods: the active gods come out.

The Greeks, it will be recalled, regarded Eros, the god of love, as the eldest of the gods; but also as the youngest, born fresh and dewy-eyed in every living heart.

Can you stand? (Aimee) I’m not helpless. (Fang) Oh, look! Mr. Macho is back in all his glory. Hello, Mr. Macho, it’s so not good to see you again. But you know, Mr. Macho, that you’ve been bedridden to the point that your legs aren’t used to carrying your weight and you’re not really human. So if you want to get up and fall, gods forbid I do anything to stop it. After all, I live for America’s Funniest Home Videos. Should I fetch a camcorder now? (Aimee)

I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

He whom the Gods love dies young.

The comedy gods are smiling on me tonight, because I have been saying, for the longest time, that president Bush must set a timetable for removing his head from his ass...and, by god, today they went in and looked for it... They didn't find it. So now we don't know where it is, but at least for once in my life, I get to see the words "Bush", "operation", and "success" in the same sentence.

Nature made us - nature did it all - not the gods of the religions.

We have complicated every simple gift of the gods.

We have two useless gods who never leave our island, but like to dwell in it constantly, Poverty and Helplessness.

We enjoy telling ourselves that we will soon be gods, masters of the planet, manipulating the genes of living creatures and rebuilding the world at a nano-level as we lie back in our hammocks, attended by our robot servants. I don't believe a word of it, and I'm not sure many of us do.

Yesterday, two firefighters with the Florida Division of Forestry were killed while working on the Blue Ribbon Fire in Florida. On behalf of the 3,500 firefighters on the Wallow Fire and all of us in the firefighting community, our heartfelt condolences go out to their families and their co-workers. “If Prometheus was worthy of the wrath of heaven for kindling the first fire upon earth, how ought all the gods honor those who make it their professional business to put it out?

Beauty- it was a favor bestowed by the gods.

The Gods and Goddesses of myth, legend and fairy tale represent archetypes, real potencies and potentialities deep within the psyche, which, when allowed to flower permit us to be more fully human.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

People are always the start for meanimals. When I can get into their heads, gods, supernatural beings,immortals, the deadthese are all people to me.

You said your mom is the goddess of balance," I reminded him. "The minor gods deserve better, Ethan, but total destruction isn't balance. Kronos doesn't build. He only destroys.

Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew - not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew. ... What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man - and turns them into commodities. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.

When we stop believing in gods we can start believing in their stories, I retort. There are of course no such things as miracles, but if there were and so tomorrow we woke up to find no more believers on earth, no more devout Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, why then, sure the beauty of the stories would be a thing we could focus on because they wouldn't be dangerous any more, they would become capable of compelling the only belief that leads to truth, that is, the willing, disbelieving of the reader in a well-told tale.

The gods offer no rewards for intellect. There was never one yet that showed any interest in it.

When science drove the gods out of nature, they took refuge in poetry and the porticos of civic buildings.

Only a teenage boy would agree to this: deceiving both our parents while repairing dangerous vehicles using money meant for my college education. He didn't see anything wrong with that picture. Jacob was a gift from the gods.

I feel like a goddess, jailed in her Olympus. Little wonder how the gods toyed with humans. Toyed with women, to watch them squirm, pollinate the seeds of despair; toyed with men, to satiate their Seven Deadly Sins.

Now when the ancient Egyptians, awestruck and wondering, turned their eyes to the heavens, they concluded that two gods, the sun and the moon, were primeval and eternal; and they called the former Osiris, the latter Isis.

If you are going to try, go all the way or don't even start. If you follow it you will be alive with the gods. It is the only good fight there is.

It was not to save a nation that Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac, nor to appease angry gods... Then why does Abraham do it? For God's sake... He does it for the sake of God because God demands proof of his faith... He was not justified by being virtuous, but by being an individual submitted to God in faith.

After men have got their exaltations and their crowns--have become Gods, even the sons of God--are made Kings of kings and Lords of lords, they have the power then of propagating their species in spirit; and that is the first of their operations with regard to organizing a world. Power is then given to them to organize the elements, and then commence the organization of tabernacles.

What they do not comprehend is man's helplessness. I am weak, small, of no consequence to the universe. It does not notice me; I live on unseen. But why is that bad? Isn't it that way? Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small... and you will escape the jealousy of the great.

And when it is suggested that the inward feelings of power or inward monitions or losses of judgement are the germs out of which the divine machinery developed, I return that truth is just the reverse, that the presence of voices which had to be obeyed were the absolute prerequisite to the conscious stage of mind in which it is the self that is responsible and can debate within itself, can order and direct, and that the creation of such a self is the product of culture. In a sense, we have become our own gods.

Let it crumble! Let the rocks revile me and flowers wilt at my coming. Your whole universe is not enough to prove me wrong. You are the king of gods, king of stones and stars, king of the waves of the sea. But you are not the king of man.