Best 533 quotes in «gods quotes» category

Shrines! Shrines! Surely you don't believe in the gods. What's your argument? Where's your proof?

Sind Götter! Wundersam eigen, Die sich immerfort selbst erzeugen, Und niemals wissen was sie sind.

So, in other words, we tore our world apart to get rid of these gods. And they were very bad gods, right?' I say, just to be clear. 'Not just messing around and having funsies with their adoring followers but truly wicked and vile?

Some people have exercised their right to create their own God.

Souls are simply aspects of ego splintered off from Mae and Jin, the two original gods. They began with no ego at all, you know. But as they gained awareness of themselves, each affirmation of something they were created a denial of something they weren’t. This created a polarity, a split between themselves and something that became a new ‘soul’—an un-being that gave that shadow voice. One god, declaring himself to be good and denying that he was evil, split into two parts—one good and one evil—because each god is both good and evil. Each part, as it gained awareness of itself and declared itself this or that but denied that it was the shadow of each new identification, split into more and more pieces—creating an exponential birth of new souls.

So the gods must mean something else,” said Jix. “God, not gods!” insisted Johnnie. Nick threw up his hands. “God, gods, or whatever,” said Nick. “Right now, it doesn’t matter whether it’s Jesus, or Kukulcan, or a dancing bear at the end of the tunnel. What matters is that we have a clue, and we have to figure it out.” “Why?” Johnnie asked again. “Why does God – excuse me, I mean ‘the Light of Universal Whatever’- why does it just give us a freakin’ impossible clue? Why can’t it just tell us what we’re supposed to do?” “Because,” said Mikey. “the Dancing Bear wants us to suffer.

So there was love, once. More than love. And now there is more than hate. Mortals have no words for what we gods feel. Gods have no words for such things. But love like that doesn't just disappear, does it? No matter how powerful the hate, there is always love left, underneath. Horrible, isn't it?

So they watch over us like gods of old. Our patron sinners.

So the gods,” Moash said, nursing his own drink, “were pleased that you solved problems on your own . . . by going to other gods and begging them for help instead?” “Hush,” Rock said. “Is good story.

Storm’s coming, boys. Doesn’t bode well, not with the moonrise tonight.

Suppose that members of a religious movement, such as Christianity, maintain that the existence of some powerful god and its goals or laws can be known through their scriptures, their prophets, or some special revelation. Suppose further that the evidence that is available to support the reliability of those scriptures, prophets, or special revelations is weaker than that God is hypothetically capable of producing. That is, suppose that Christians maintain that Jesus was resurrected on the basis of the Gospels, or that God’s existence can be known through the Bible, or Muslims insist on the historical authenticity of the Koran. Could God, the almighty creator of the universe, have brought it about so that the evidence in favor of the resurrection, the Bible, or the Koran was better than we currently find it? I take it that the answer is obviously yes. Even if you think there is evidence that is sufficient to prove the resurrection, a reasonable person must also acknowledge that it could have been better. And there’s the problem. If the capacity of that god is greater than the effectiveness or quality of those scriptures, prophets, or special revelations, then the story they are telling contradicts itself. 'We know our god is real on the basis of evidence that is inadequate for our god.' Or, 'The grounds that lead us to believe in our god are inconsistent with the god we accept; nevertheless, we believe in this god that would have given us greater evidence if it had wished for us to believe in it.' Given the disparity between the gods that these religious movements portend and the grounds offered to justify them, the atheist is warranted in dismissing such claims. If the sort of divine being that they promote were real and if he had sought our believe on the basis of the evidence, the evidential situation would not resemble the one we are in. The story doesn’t make internal sense. A far better explanation is that their enthusiasm for believing in a god has led them to overstate what the evidence shows. And that same enthusiasm has made it difficult for them to see that an all powerful God would have the power to make his existence utterly obvious and undeniable. Since it’s not, the non-believer can’t possibly be faulted for failing to believe.

[Technology] has taught us how to become gods before we have learned to be men.

-’Tell me’, he said, ‘who gives better offerings, a miserable man or a happy one’? -’A happy one, of course.’ -’Wrong. A happy man is too occupied with his life. He thinks he is beholden to no one. But make him shiver, kill his wife, cripple his child, then you will hear from him. He will starve his family for a month to buy yo a pure-white yearling calf. If he can afford it, he will buy you a hundred’. -’But surely, I said, you have to reward him eventually. Otherwise he will stop offering’. -’Oh, you would be surprised how long he will go on. But yes, in the end, it’s best to give him something. Then he will be happy again. And you can start over.

Stars flicker, flash, and fade like we do. They are born and torn apart by entropy, yet we once called them gods. Foolish is it not? Without knowing, we had called the most permanent concept of a being—stars.

That’s the funny thing about love,” he said. “It doesn’t wait for perfection – the heart loves who it loves, exactly as they are, faults and all.

That's very noble of you, cautionary tales of hubris notwithstanding.' 'Hah! Please. Find me a more universally REWARDED quality than hubris. Go on, I'll wait. The word is just ancient Greek for "uppity," as far as I'm concerned. Hubris isn't something that destroys you, it's something you are PUNISHED for. By the GODS. Well, I've never met a god, just powerful human beings with a lot to gain by keeping people scared. So fuck hubris! Punch the sun, baby!

Step into the darkness with me, child... I will make of you a God.

The battle with the gods thus hinges on our own mortality! Creativity is a yearning for immortality.

That was the message. For me, alone among mortals, the gods send their messenger to tell me to stop whining. That’ll teach me to go hide in a temple.

The Creator is Sovereign Lord. We are Sovereign being.

The death of one god is the death of all.

That the writers of the Bible recognized a plurality of gods -- were polytheists -- is proved by the following 'And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us' (Gen. iii, 22). 'Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the gods?' (Ex. xv, 11.) 'Among the gods, there is none like unto thee, O Lord' (Ps. Ixxxvi, 8). 'The Lord is a great God, and a great king above all gods' (Ps. xcv, 3). 'Thou shalt not revile the gods' (Ex. xxii, 28). Monotheism, the doctrine of one god, is not merely the worship of one god, but the belief in the existence of one god only. Many were monotheistic in worship -- worshiped one god, their national deity -- while at the same time they were polytheistic in belief -- believed in the existence of many gods. The Jews who worshiped Jehovah have been called monotheists. And yet, for a thousand years, they believed in the existence of Kemosh, Baal, Moloch, Tammuz, and other deities. They believed that Jehovah was their national god and that they owed allegiance to him; just as the subjects of an earthly king profess their loyalty to him without denying the existence of other kings.

The black, the white, the brown, the red, the yellow, the hetero, the homo, the trans, the poor, the rich, the literate, the illiterate, the weak, the strong – all are my sisters and brothers. My life is their life. And till the last breath in my body, I shall be serving you all with all the power in my veins. And beyond death, my ideas shall be serving you for eternity.

The borders of man, defined by politics, war, and faith - all three manifestations of delusion - meant even more to gods.

The dead are omniabsent.

[The Edfu Building Texts in Egypt] take us back to a very remote period called the 'Early Primeval Age of the Gods'--and these gods, it transpires, were not originally Egyptian, but lived on a sacred island, the 'Homeland of the Primeval Ones,' and in the midst of a great ocean. Then, at some unspecified time in the past, an immense cataclysm shook the earth and a flood poured over this island, where 'the earliest mansions of the gods' had been founded, destroying it utterly, submerging all its holy places, and killing most of its divine inhabitants. Some survived, however, and we are told that this remnant set sail in their ships (for the texts leave us in no doubt that these 'gods' of the early primeval age were navigators) to 'wander' the world. Their purpose in doing so was nothing less than to re-create and revive the essence of their lost homeland, to bring about, in short: 'The resurrection of the former world of the gods ... The re-creation of a destroyed world.' [...] The takeaway is that the texts invite us to consider the possibility that the survivors of a lost civilization, thought of as 'gods' but manifestly human, set about 'wandering' the world in the aftermath of an extinction-level global cataclysm. By happenstance it was primarily hunter-gatherer populations, the peoples of the mountains, jungles, and deserts--'the unlettered and the uncultured,' as Plato so eloquently put it in his account of the end of Atlantis--who had been 'spared the scourge of the deluge.' Settling among them, the wanderers entertained the desperate hope that their high civilization could be restarted, or that at least something of its knowledge, wisdom, and spiritual ideas could be passed on so that mankind in the post-cataclysmic world would not be compelled to 'begin again like children, in complete ignorance of what happened in early times.

The gods are for whatever we wish. That is the point of gods. The gods will carry me onwards, and that is all that matters.

(The false god punishes, the true god slays.)

The fear of God is one of the most extreme expressions of cowardice.

The gods hate those who plan badly, and help those with good friends, good swords, and good sense.

The gods we ourselves have created ruled us for centuries! What a great comedy! And what a great tragedy!

The gods speak to us, and irony is their language.

The gods were there to do the duties of a megaphone, because who else would people listen to?

the gods are created by poets" --Ovid

The gods cared nothing for the fate of mortals, and those who prayed to them for benediction were no less fools than those who railed against them when the winds of fortune turned contrary. The truth was, people believed in divine stewardship because they wanted to believe the gods would protect them. Because it was safer to have faith in some higher order than it was to acknowledge the precariousness of their lives.

The gods are nothing more than the creations of humans needing something to blame for their problems.

The gods cared nothing for those they touched. Especially war gods.

The gods give, like twin flowers, power and ruin, memory and oblivion.

The gods in Lankhmar (that is, the gods and candidates for divinity who dwell or camp, it may be said, in the Imperishable City, not the gods of Lankhmar—a very different and most secret and dire matter)… the gods in Lankhmar sometimes seem as if they must be as numberless as the grains of sand in the Great Eastern Desert. The vast majority of them began as men, or more strictly the memories of men who led ascetic, vision-haunted lives and died painful, messy deaths. One gets the impression that since the beginning of time an unending horde of their priests and apostles (or even the gods themselves, it makes little difference) have been crippling across that same desert, the Sinking Land, and the Great Salt Marsh to converge on Lankhmar's low, heavy-arched Marsh Gate—meanwhile suffering by the way various inevitable tortures, castrations, bindings and stonings, impalements, crucifixions, quarterings and so forth at the hands of eastern brigands and Mingol unbelievers who, one is tempted to think, were created solely for the purpose of seeing to the running of that cruel gauntlet.

The gods may have spoken, but Nature only bends to a goddess.

The gods preferring their libations diluted with rainwater and mixed with freshly cut grass.

The Greeks used to say that gods and animals were born whole. It is only humans who need to develop, that they become complete only with the help of a community. It’s the state of that community that can turn a human into a god or a beast.” She dropped the bee into the terrarium and returned it slowly to the table. “Maybe that’s bullshit. I happen to like the beasts.

The Greeks were more preoccupied with, where these ousted gods resided. That is: The fallen son's of God could go where humans were, but humans could not go where they were. According to Greek mythology, Tartarus was an imposed condition for bad gods--not bad humans. (page 10)

The heroes cleansed our world of chthonic terrors -- earthborn monsters that endangered mankind and threatened to choke the rise of civilisation. So long as dragons, giants, centaurs and mutant beasts infested the air, earth and seas we could never spread out with confidence and transform the wild world into a place of safety for humanity. In time, even the benevolent minor deities would find themselves elbowed out by the burgeoning and newly confident human race. The nymphs, dryads, fauns, satyrs and sprites of the mountains, streams, meadows and oceans could not compete with our need and greed for land to quarry, farm and build upon. The rise of a spirit of rational enquiry and scientific understanding pushed the immortals further from us. The world was being reshaped as a home fit for mortal beings only. Today, of course, some of the rarer and more vulnerable mortal creatures that have shared the world with us are undergoing the same threats to their natural territories that cuased the end of the nymphs and woodland spirits. Habitat loss and species extinction have all happened before. The days of the gods themselves were numbered too. Prometheus's gift of fire, as Zeus had feared, would one day allow us to do even without the Olympians.

The heavenly father knows the future.

The gods do not care. It is not them, after all, that will pay the cost.

The gods grant nothing more than life, So let us reject whatever lifts us To unbreathable heights, Eternal but flowerless.

The gods," he said. "Imprisoned in a thought. And perhaps they were never more than a dream.

The gods were great, but what good was greatness if you didn't love?

The hour was late, the beauty around him barbarous. The many scents brought by the air were toxic or sweet, depending on which way the gentle breeze blew. Sometimes the scents made his nostrils smart. He allowed them to embrace him. Joys of a wonderful nature arose in his heart. He loved his horse, its easy amble, the seductive night and the prying moon. God created the world, the wild, the horse, the breeze, man, birds and - love, and His consort at times agreed and at others did not. Gods played games. Even Gods played games. They fought too. Name a game that does not involve discord. He smiled at the thought.