Quotes About Gods

Who, except the gods, can live time through forever without any pain?

It is great good health to believe, as the Hindus do, that there are 33 million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to want to understand one's dreams. It is great good health to desire the ambiguous and paradoxical.

Just now, Christianity is in the ascendant. Buddhism and Taoism are decadent; their influence cannot long hold its own. Buddhism has long since passed its meridian; Taoism has only demons, not gods.

Why, given their advanced mathematical ideas, did the Arabs not proceed to probability theory and risk management? The answer, I believe, has to do with their view of life. Who determines our future: the fates, the gods, or ourselves? The idea of risk management emerges only when people believe that they are to some degree free agents. Like the Greeks and the early Christians, the fatalistic Muslims were not yet ready to take the leap.

Look! Life is only comprehensible through a thousand local gods.

There's a sea—a great sea—I love . . . It's where the Gods go to bathe.' 'What Gods?' 'The old ones. Before they died.' 'Gods don't die.' 'Yes, they do.

I was left with a sensation of having encountered a monster, in the ancient sense of the original Latin word, "monstrum": "an omen or warning of the will of the gods."4

They're not gods," Brüks reminded him softly. "Not yet." "Not ever." "That's denial." "Better than genuflection.

Consider the joke about the miserly farmer who fed his longsuffering cow less and less each day; but just when he thought that he had weaned the cow from eating altogether, the unfortunate animal died . . . showing that we do not need as many gods as early man believed does not show that we need no gods at all; that must be argued on its own merits.57

Um novo Deus chegou a Vakhar. A morte expulsou os deuses menores e ocupou todos os espaços vazios de seus templos. Os hinos viraram gritos. A música, tiroteio. As preces, gargantas sufocando, cheias de sangue. Eu e o Balcã somos missionários. Nossas oferendas transbordam.

Thales was the first thinker to try to account for the nature of the world without appealing to the wills and whims of anthropomorphic, Homerian gods. Rather, he sought to explain the many diverse phenomena he observed by appealing to a common, underlying principle, an idea that is still germane to modern scientific method.

On the day the gods chose for his destruction, Peter Hale ate his breakfast on the terrace of his condominium.

Do your duty and leave the rest to the gods.

My first book was an adult novel, 'Down Among the Gods,' published by Virago, and I've written poems as well, a slim volume of poetry.

All men," Homer wrote, "have need of the gods," and the secular wish to banish religion from the public square is perennial but doomed—one might as well try to eliminate economics, geography, or partisanship as forces that shape our politics. The more productive task is to manage and marshal the effects of religious feeling on the broader republic.

En aventuras de ésas, he prodigado y consumido mis años. No me parece inverosímil que en algún anaquel del universo haya un libro total; ruego a los dioses ignorados -¡uno solo, aunque sea, hace miles de años!- lo haya examinado y leído. Si el honor y la sabiduría y la felicidad no son para mí, que sean para otros. Que el cielo exista, aunque mi lugar sea el infierno.

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

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted.

In the older view the goddess Universe was alive, herself organically the Earth, the horizon, and the heavens. Now she is dead, and the universe is not an organism, but a building, with gods at rest in it in luxury: not as personifications of the energies in their manners of operation, but as luxury tenants, requiring service. And Man, accordingly, is not as a child born to flower in the knowledge of his own eternal portion but as a robot fashioned to serve.

Mythologies are in fact the public dreams that move and shape societies, and conversely one's own dreams are the little myths of the private gods, antigods, and guardian powers that are moving and shaping oneself: revelations of the actual fears, desires, aims, and values by which one's life is subliminally ordered.

I am Shiva – this is the great meditation of the yogis in the Himalayas . . . Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us . . . all the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us.

Gods are metaphors transparent to transcendence. And my understanding of the mythological mode is that deities and even people are to be understood in this sense, as metaphors. It's a poetic understanding. It is to be understood in the same sense as Goethe's words at the end of Faust: "Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis" ("Everything transitory is but a reference").

The goddess is the field that produces forms. She is time and space itself, and the mystery beyond her is beyond all pairs of opposites. So it isn't male and female. Everything is within her, so that the gods are her children.