Quotes About Gods

Happy, happy earth! Fit habitation for gods, which, so short a time before, was bleak, damp, and unwholesome. My spirits were elevated by the enchanting appearance of nature; the past was blotted from my memory, the present was tranquil, and the future gilded by bright rays of hope and anticipations of joy.

We have lived under the edge of doom, and feel ourselves now facing the long-threatened fate. But hear this Emrys: fate is made by men, not gods.

It is one thing to have the gift of seeing the spirits and hearing the Gods who move about us as we come and go; but it is a gift of darkness as well as light.

a dream half-waking, broken and uneasy, of the small gods of small places; gods of hills and woods and streams and crossways; the gods who still haunt their broken shrines, waiting in the dusk beyond the lights of the busy Christian churches, and the dogged rituals of the greater gods of Rome.

The Romans gave them Roman names, and let them be; but the Christians refuse to believe in them, and their priests berate the poorer folk for clinging to the old ways—and no doubt for wasting offerings which would do better at some hermit's cell than at some ancient holy place in the forest. But still the simple folk creep out to leave their offerings, and when these vanish by morning, who is to say that a god has not taken them? This

Not as others had wanted to learn, for power or excitement, or for the prosecution of some enmity or private greed; but because he had seen, darkly with a child's eyes, how the gods move with the winds and speak with the sea and sleep in the gentle herbs; and how God himself is in the sum of all that is on the face of the lovely earth.

Happy, happy earth! Fit habitation for gods, which, so short a time before, was bleak, damp, and unwholesome. My spirits were elevated by the enchanting appearance of nature. The past quil and the future gilded by bright rays of hope and anticipations of you.

Further evidence for the man-made nature of gods comes from their evolutionary history. It is a little-known fact, but gods evolve.

Such terrifying powers we possess, but what a sorry lot of gods some men are. And the worst of it is not the cruelty but the arrogance, the sheer hubris of those who bring only violence and fear into the animal world, as if it needed any more of either.

Aren't you capable of a sublime gesture on occasion? They all work so hard and struggle and suffer, trying to achieve beauty, trying to surpass one another in beauty. Let's surpass them all! Let's throw their sweat in their face. Let's destroy them at one stroke. Let's be gods. Let's be ugly.

The gods you do not pay are the ones that can curse you best.

Immortality is only for the gods," he whispered. "I wonder how they can stand it.

I remember sitting in this cabin in Alaska one evening reading over the notes of all these encounters, and recalling Joseph Campbell, who wrote in the conclusion to 'Primitive Mythology' that men do not discover their gods, they create them. So do they also, I thought, looking at the notes before me, create their animals.

Henotheism is the view that there are other gods, but there is only one God who is to be worshipped. The Ten Commandments express a henotheistic view, as does the majority of the Hebrew Bible. The book of Isaiah, with its insistence that "I alone am God, there is no other," is monotheistic. It represents the minority view in the Hebrew Bible.

One of the greatest Roman poets was Ovid, an older contemporary of Jesus (his dates: 43 BCE–17 CE). His most famous work is his fifteen-volume Metamorphoses, which celebrates changes or transformations described in ancient mythology. Sometimes these changes involve gods who take on human form in order to interact, for a time, with mortals.

Pagans never had to affirm anything. As odd as this seems, pagans were not required to believe truths about the gods. Paganism was instead about performing the proper, traditional cultic acts.

humans sometimes could be elevated to the ranks of those gods.

in the Roman world it was widely thought that gods could take on human guise, such that some of the people one might meet on occasion may well indeed be divine

I have been referring to a man named Apollonius, who came from the town of Tyana. He was a pagan—that is, a polytheistic worshiper of the many Roman gods—and a renowned philosopher of his day. His followers thought he was immortal. We have a book written about him by his later devotee Philostratus.

Conversion was not a widely known phenomenon in antiquity. Pagan religions had almost nothing like it. They were polytheistic, and anyone who decided, as a pagan, to worship a new or different god was never required to relinquish any former gods or their previous patterns of worship. Pagan religions were additive, not restrictive.

the worship that is due only to the gods.

Proceed from earth! Proceed to heaven! Proceed!" Apollonius was being told, in other words, to ascend to the realm of the gods.

Some scholars have argued that ancient religion was principally concerned with averting the gods' anger. But this divine anger was aroused almost always because of neglect. he gods—or at least one ofthem—had not been respected and worshiped properly or sufficiently. That was the main logic behind Roman persecution of the Christians. Because this group of miscreants refused to worship the gods, there was hell to pay.

When things did not go well, when there were threats of war, or drought, or famine, or disease, this could be taken as a sign that the gods were not satisfied with how they were being honored. At such times, who would be blamed for this failure to honor the gods? Obviously, those who refused to worship them. Enter the Christians.