Deities Quotes - Page 8

• I never thought of myself as a king. People really want you to be their deity. They forget the fact that you are a person who has feelings and doubts.

  John Gutfreund

  Kings, People, Feelings

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• I want some fact-based evidence about where we came from. Things we consider mysterious need not be attributed to a deity.

  Greg Graffin

  Needs, Want, Facts

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• By virtue of the Deity thought renews itself inexhaustibly every day and the thing whereon it shines, though it were dust and sand, is a new subject with countless relations.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Dust, Shining, Sand

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1848). “Essays, Orations and Lectures”

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• It was the fashion of the times to attribute every remarkable event to the particular will of the Deity; the alterations of nature were connected, by an invisible chain, with the moral and metaphysical opinions of the human mind; and the most sagacious divines could distinguish, according to the colour of their respective prejudices, that the establishment of heresy tended to produce an earthquake, or that a deluge was the inevitable consequence of the progress of sin and error.

  Edward Gibbon

  Fashion, Earthquakes, Errors

  Edward Gibbon (2016). “THE HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE (All 6 Volumes): From the Height of the Roman Empire, the Age of Trajan and the Antonines - to the Fall of Byzantium; Including a Review of the Crusades, and the State of Rome during the Middle Ages”, p.1209, e-artnow

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• If a god showed up every time you put a quarter in the prayer slot it wouldn't be God, it would be a puppet that you could control by doing that...that would make the deity subservient to you. So it wouldn't be a deity would it?

  Margaret Atwood

  Prayer, Would Be, Puppets

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• Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.

  John Shelby Spong

  Prayer, Religion, Atheism

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• The first thing Islam does is to destroy the self image of the believers. It convinces them that without Islam they are worthless creatures only fit for hellfire. It tells them that their culture is jahelyyah (ignorance) and their ancestral religion was taaghoti (satanic). They are made to despise their identity and selfhood and seek their glory in their submission to Islam and slavery to its deity who was Muhammad's own alter ego.

  Ali Sina

  Ignorance, Self, Ego

  Source: myislam.dk

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• Barbarity, caprice; these qualities, however nominally disguised, we may universally observe from the ruling character of the deity in all regular religions.

  David Hume

  Religious, Character, Evil

  David Hume (1793). “An inquiry concerning human understanding. A dissertation on the passions. An inquiry concerning the principles of morals. The natural history of religion”, p.467

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• The misfortunes which God is represented in the book of Job as allowing Satan to inflict on Job, merely to test his faith, are indications, if not of positive malevolence, at least of a suspicious and ruthless insecurity, which is characteristic more of a tyrant than of a wholly powerful and benevolent deity.

  A.J. Ayer

  God, Religious, Jobs

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• My god has always been a laissez-faire deity, giving you the initial goods and sending you on to make your way.

  Jane Hamilton

  Giving, Way, Laissez Faire

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• Armstrong lives as he rides - surrounded by a cocoon of aides and helpers, his gimlet eyes focused on victory.... The self-described atheist has become a deity... but the inquiry's findings may cause the Armstrong faithful to ask, Was the miracle a mirage?

  Selena Roberts

  Atheist, Eye, Self

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• Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning.

  Herman Melville

  Brother, Crazy, Boys

  Herman Melville (1892). “Moby Dick”, p.9

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• If time is treated in modern physics as a dimension on a par with the dimensions of space, why should we a priori exclude the possibility that we are pulled as well as pushed along its axis? The future has, after all, as much or as little reality as the past, and there is nothing logically inconceivable in introducing, as a working hypothesis, an element of finality, supplementary to the element of causality, into our equations. It betrays a great lack of imagination to believe that the concept of "purpose" must necessarily be associated with some anthropomorphic deity.

  Arthur Koestler

  Believe, Reality, Past

  "The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe". Book by Arthur Koestler, 1959.

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• A Deity believed, is joy begun; A Deity adored, is joy advanced; A Deity beloved, is joy matured. Each branch of piety delight inspires.

  Edward Young

  God, Joy, Inspire

  Edward Young, John Doran, James Nichols (1854). “The Complete Works, Poetry and Prose of the Rev. Edward Young, LL.D.: Revised and Collated with the Earliest Editions. To which is Prefixed A Life of the Author”, p.168

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• A purpose derived from a false premise - that a deity has ordained submission to his will - cannot merit respect. The pursuit of Enlightenment-era goals - solving our world's problems through rational discourse, rather than through religion and tradition - provides ample grounds for a purposive existence. It is not for nothing that the Enlightenment, when atheism truly began to take hold, was also known as the Age of Reason.

  Jeffrey Tayler

  Our World, Goal, Atheism

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• If by believing you mean praying to an anthropomorphic deity who created the world and half controls it and half observes it, then I am probably not a believer. But if you mean that it is not all accidental, that there is a mystery to existence, a deeper meaning, that I do believe in.

  Vaclav Havel

  Believe, Mean, Half

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• A prevalent fallacy is the assumption that a proof of an afterlife would also be a proof of the existence of a deity. This is far from being the case. If, as I hold, there is no good reason to believe that a god either created or presides over this world, there is equally no good reason to believe that a god created or presides over the next world, on the unlikely supposition that such a thing exists.

  A.J. Ayer

  Believe, Afterlife, World

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• One can't found a novel theology on Nothing, and nothing is so secure a foundation as a contradiction. Look at the great successes of the past--they say their deities are the masters of all the universes, and yet that they require grandmothers to defend them, as if they were children frightened by poultry. Or that the authority that punishes no one while there exists a chance for reformation will punish everyone when there is no possibility anyone will become the better for it.

  Gene Wolfe

  Children, Grandmother, Past

  Gene Wolfe (1994). “Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun'”, p.57, Macmillan

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• Secular humanism does not have the essential attributes of a religion: belief in a deity, the wish for some sort of afterlife, sacred dogma or texts, or an absolutist moral creed. Instead, it expresses a philosophical and ethical point of view, and it draws upon the scientific method in formulationg its naturalistic view of the nature.

  Paul Kurtz

  Philosophical, Views, Afterlife

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• It is more reverent to believe in the works of the Deity than to comprehend them.

  Tacitus

  Believe

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• The awful atrocities of religion happened when people assume that God shares your likes and dislikes. The Crusaders when into battle to kill Muslims and Jews and cried, "God will's it." That was their battle cry. Obviously God willed no such thing. The Crusaders were simply projecting onto a deity they'd created on their own image and likeness, all their hatred and loathing of these faiths and made it endorse some of their most awful prejudices and lethal prejudices.

  Karen Armstrong

  Likes And Dislikes, People, Hatred

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 16, 2009.

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• How happy he whose toil Has o'er his languid pow'rless limbs diffus'd A pleasing lassitude; he not in vain Invokes the gentle Deity of dreams. His pow'rs the most voluptuously dissolve In soft repose; on him the balmy dews Of Sleep with double nutriment descend.

  John Armstrong

  Dream, Sleep, Toil

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• In one breath, I can say that we are God, but in another I have to say that we aren't deities.

  Alanis Morissette

  Breaths, I Can

  "New Again: Alanis Morissette". Interview with Elizabeth Weitzman, www.interviewmagazine.com. October 15, 2015.

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• There will always be in society certain persons who are mercuries of its approbation, and whose glance will at any time determinefor the curious their standing in the world. These are the chamberlains of the lesser gods. Accept their coldness as an omen of grace with the loftier deities, and allow them all their privilege.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Grace, World, Mercury

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2015). “Emerson's Essays: Top Essays”, p.86, 谷月社

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• One of the greatest gifts science has brought to the world is continuing elimination of the supernatural, and it was a lesson that my father passed on to me, that knowledge liberates mankind from superstition. We can live our lives without the constant fear that we have offended this or that deity who must be placated by incantation or sacrifice, or that we are at the mercy of devils or the Fates. With increasing knowledge, the intellectual darkness that surrounds us is illuminated and we learn more of the beauty and wonder of the natural world.

  James D. Watson

  Father, Sacrifice, Fate

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